Earlier this week I stood in front of the Georgia Tech Executive MBA Class of 2023—it was their very first day of the program—and shared a tiny slice of what it’s like to be a student again after fifteen years out of the classroom. I couldn’t even process that it had been a year since I had started. Three whole semesters down! And only one to go. Classes from the fall of 2021 feel like they happened in the distant past.
Much of my writing in this newsletter has been inspired by the program or what I’ve learned in class. An executive MBA is sort of weird in that it’s a concentrated program that you complete while working a full time job. You don’t have time to become a master of any individual topic and you’re forced to become an expert at “good enough” on your class assignments. But when you consider you already have a career, it’s an effective recipe for learning.
This post will be a collection of the posts and learnings (so far) that I’ve produced over the past year that were influenced or related to my MBA. Subscribe to get new posts delivered to your inbox.
Before the start
Scheller MBA Bound and Applying to Business School - These posts discuss my experience applying for an MBA program and ultimately deciding on Georgia Tech.
In Process Analysis, I reflect on a Manufacturing & Services Management class I visited in the summer semester and try to connect what I learned with systems thinking.
Fall Semester I
Inviting Questions shares insights from what I learned in Joey Asher’s public speaking course during immersion week.
The Team's Why came about after reflecting on my Leadership & Organizational Behavior class and applying it to a team-building exercise we had done.
Intangible Assets came from reflections via my Accounting textbook, which surprised me. This was probably one of the more significant insights from the entire MBA program.
Four Markets was another insight from accounting that got me to think about markets beyond just the output market (customers).
Fundamentals reflected about the relative drunkenness of the stock market in the fall of 2021 while taking a Financial Management class.
I don’t think Brand, NPS Surveys and Apple Does Games were directly inspired by a class I took in the fall, but the topics are apropos for business school.
The Learning Team - I’m really proud of this one. My finance class helped me connect how learning in an organization has long term value that doesn’t necessarily show up directly in a company’s financial statements.
Increasing cost awareness was written in the context of my role as a Technical Program Manager at FullStory, but was influenced by my learnings in Accounting.
Ted Lasso, Lovable Fool? was directly inspired by my Leadership & Organizational Behavior class and my unashamed love of Ted Lasso.
⭐️⭐️⭐️Getting Started Solving Problems⭐️⭐️⭐️ If you’re a first year MBA student and you don’t read any other post, you should read this one. I’ll put stars around it so it gets your attention.
Building a Sustainable Moat reflects on how a sustainability strategy can be strategic.
Physical to Digital is another post that I’m not sure was directly inspired by the MBA program, but it fits.
Spring Semester
Writing The Purpose of a Business in an odd way demonstrated part of the value of an MBA program. Although I had quoted Drucker over and over—“The true purpose of a business, Peter Drucker said, is to create and keep customers.”—I had never studied the origins of that quote in an academic setting. An MBA will expose you to source material that you’re not going to get from blogs and newsletters.
The Myth of the Perfect Product and Unmet Needs were both inspired by my Marketing class.
Relative was a huge moment for me from my strategy class. Competitive advantage is relative and doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Breaking the Loyalty Loop, via my Marketing class, was something I intuitively knew, but it was helpful to see in an academic setting.
A Tale of Two Brands recalls one of my favorite cases from the entire program, which surfaced during my marketing class.
Startup Reflections 1 was a class assignment for my Management of Technology (MoT) capstone project class that I turned into a newsletter post.
Customer as… was another reflection from the MoT class.
Tesla’s Chasm - I wrote this after the spring semester had concluded, which was based on a presentation my team gave in our Strategy class.
I didn’t write anything from my Ethics class, but if I had, it would have been about virtue.
International Trip
Learning Exchange and Travel were both from my classes international trip to Portugal and Spain.
Summer Semester
General Magic was a reflection for my MoT capstone class and tells the story of Silicon Valley’s biggest failure.
Health Bottleneck isn’t directly about the MBA program, but it is about finding balance and taking care of yourself, which is crucial for any MBA student.
During my Manufacturing and Operations Management class, we read a paper called Breaking the Trade-Off Between Efficiency and Service. I wrote a series of posts reflecting on this paper:
Fall Semester II
With classes starting Friday, I suppose this is the first post of my final semester at Georgia Tech. Subscribe to learn along with me.