Three Things I Wish I Did at Business School

I graduated from business school almost 6 years ago and finally feel like I have the time to reflect on the experience. Overall, I have fond memories and I am satisfied with my career trajectory since, but I can't help thinking that I made the journey during and after tougher than it needed to be. 

At the time, I was funding things myself and really enjoyed my job, so the part-time MBA option suited me perfectly. It meant I could keep my job but would require sacrificing my personal life for a while, but I knew that coming in, so I felt prepared for this.

The course itself was challenging, but the work was highly engaging and relevant—it never really felt like a chore to go to class or complete assignments. The challenge for me was time management and the internal pressure I placed on myself for my career to skyrocket after graduating. The challenge of time management will be saved for another day.

This article focuses on the three things I wish I could go back and tell myself at business school. 

1. Be More Patient

I can distinctly remember the mix of thoughts and emotions I went through during crunch weeks of MBA. Taking the course part-time meant that I would head to class on Friday evenings and be back at Campus on Saturdays and studying on Sundays. It was during those weekend study sessions that I motivated myself with the fantasies of life after MBA. These images were spurred on by the classic MBA marketing campaigns boasting statistics such as 87% of students switch roles or industries after MBA.

This fed into an unrealistic expectation that the moment I graduated, I would be flooded with interview requests or have a brilliant entrepreneurial idea that would be easily funded. The excitement of this prospective new life encouraged me to launch a craft burger eatery in the final six months of classes along with some of my classmates. We came up with a solid plan, great logos, brand collateral, and eventually found a location in a hipster area in Cape Town. Perfect. Despite a great brand and some initial success, we ended up selling the business after two years of hard slogging. 

On paper, this was a good idea. and I am grateful for the experience, but starting a side hustle while working full time and studying part time was not my brightest idea. I can’t help thinking that we could have made a better success of it if we just waited till after we graduated and took some time to plan things better. I was caught up in that feeling of getting to market quickly and rushing out our concept before it was too late and the moment was gone.

My guidance would be to tone down the expectation for the life-changing event the moment you graduate, and to rather see it as a slow burn. There is compounding value of the course material, class learning, and people you meet on the journey. Thinking of the classic snowball effect, I would say that entering the course is the phase of compressing snow into the shape of a ball.

2. Be More Pragmatic

Being patient does not mean that you should coast through and expect things to fall into place. There was a lot going on in life during this time, but I should have put more time aside for thinking medium term or the second step after MBA. 

In the short term, my focus should have been on making a success of the course and soaking up all the peripheral value around me, but quite often, I was thinking about my next move. 

My medium-term thinking should have been on what excited me beyond my current role and how I could stack the deck in my favour to get there. In my consulting days, we would call this a capability driven strategy, and it was a key concept when deriving growth strategies for clients. In short, it means building from where you have strengths, experience, and natural advantages. Starting something from scratch at this point in your career will require outstanding effort and risk (my burger example). To vastly increase the likelihood of success, I should have focused on what unique capabilities / advantages I already had and built towards my goals from this. (side note - capabilities can be very wide-ranging from specific knowledge, skills, people you know, location etc). 

I burned a lot of energy during the course on thinking about the next steps in my career, but it took a few months after graduating for me to actually make some pragmatic career changes. The company I was working for had a large operating model review facilitated by an external consulting company. Instead of pushing for a change in job to another company / industry, I pushed for a role on the project. I stacked the deck in my favour by highlighting that I had years of experience in various departments with the company and recently graduated with my MBA, suggesting I could bring much to the project. I landed the role on the project team for 18 months, and this move changed the trajectory of my career, leading to a stint as a management consultant with a global firm. 

3. Be More Proactive

Having made peace with the fact that the MBA benefits will come in time (Being patient) and you have reflected on your unique capabilities (Being proactive), it's time to take action. This is where that compounding effect really starts. Here is where the snowball slowly starts rolling and picking up mass and speed. During the course, I was surrounded by interesting people (students, lecturers, and guest speakers) with vastly different life experiences and world views than myself. The course placed me in a unique position to explore different careers and jobs without necessarily taking the risk myself. Furthermore, I could use the studies as leverage for meeting people within my company that I would not usually run into at my current role. For example, if I was in commercial management with limited marketing exposure but could have requested time with a marketing leader to discuss recently-learned gamification strategies to boost online engagement. In my experience since the course, I have seen these requests very seldomly turned down, and they always lead to interesting conversations, idea generation, and relationships. 

In summary, I would tell myself to relax and take it all in. Think about what career steps would excite me in the future and what unique capabilities I had / needed to get you there in a reasonable amount of time. If I could do it again, I would probably do it all the same except maybe start the burger bar a bit later. I would still do it though. 

1. https://poetsandquants.com/2016/10/26/mbas-changing-functions-industries-massive-rates/

2. https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/gx/en/unique-solutions/capabilities-driven-strategy.html