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JULY 2001 MBA JOURNAL: B-SCHOOL REVIEW Bob Morse: Reflections on the Overall MBA Experience "The other gift the GSB gave me was the chance to spend two years with my classmates. The friendships I've made are real, strong, and give real meaning to my life." Today I handed in my last final. I am done with the academic course of study at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Graduation is in ten days. This last time is precious, and a time of high emotion for me and my class. I am overwhelmed with happiness by the depth and number of relationships I have made over the past two years. And yet, I feel the melancholy that accompanies good-byes, as my class prepares to scatters around the world. I know that my relationships will continue long after graduation, and hope many of the friendships will be life-long. As one of many staying in the Bay Area, it will be even easier to stay connected. However, I will miss hanging around the Birds at 11:50, talking, laughing, and waiting to head to lunch with whoever happens to gather. I will miss heading to the golf course on no notice to walk an evening nine with buddies. I will miss the luxury of the time we had together. It is not the end, but it is the end of this. It is hard now, in the last moments, to give a cool accounting of the costs and benefits, the relative strengths and areas for improvement. That will come with time, I am sure. And in prior entries I have given plenty of this kind of analysis. For me, these two years were transformational. I have learned a tremendous amount from the organized course of study -- I continue to believe anyone who takes 100 credits with benefit of the classmates and professors here at Stanford and claims not to have learned anything -- well, that just can't be true. But I have learned equally much in informal interactions, from admiring my classmates' leadership in the community to talking about things that matter over chicken satay at Thai Café. However, describing these two years only in terms of what I learned somehow falls short of complete description. The other gift the GSB gave me was the chance to spend two years with my classmates. The friendships I've made are real, strong, and give real meaning to my life. It's been an amazing two years to live in Silicon Valley. I clearly remember a dinner with a friend of a friend who had recently left a large "old-economy" company to join a new dot-com start-up. She gave a high-and-mighty lecture to me, encouraging me to drop out now and get in on the opportunity before it disappeared. Now, her company is trading at $0.29 per share, and other people are telling me how savvy I am to have been in school during the crash. Both attributions -- that I was doing either the dumb thing or the smart thing -- are baseless. The truth is that I made my decision to return to business school three years ago during a backpacking trip on Mount Katahdin in Maine, and since then I have quite simply been living out that goal. I wanted to do the work, to live the experience, and my two years at the GSB have far exceeded my already-high expectations. I practiced my skills in a public speaking course taught in the Engineering School. Professor Jack McDonald brought a preeminent slate of investors and managers to talk about fundaments-based investing and entrepreneurial finance, and gave the Investment Seminar's class of 42 students a chance for direct discussions in small groups. Incentives and Productivity gave an economics-based approach to understanding big-ticket human resources problems. One course deserves a few words of special description, because it's emphasis on experiential learning is so different in structure than other course I took here or in college. "Touchy-Feely" (formally known as Interpersonal Dynamics) was, for me, a fitting capstone to the GSB experience. As a classmate pointed out yesterday, most schools and institutions provide excellent training in the analytical and even practical skills of problem-solving and leadership. However, something quite different is needed to understand and benefit from emotions. Moving the heart can sometimes be more important to teamwork than moving the head (much as my engineering training rebels at the limits of rationality, I feel that to ignore the importance of emotions is to deny an underlying truth). This course was a rare chance to explore directly how interpersonal communication works. Thus the course's common name -- "Touchy-Feely." We met in small groups of 12, plus a facilitator or two, for about five hours a week. Members learned to give honest feedback about how the actions or communication style of others was affecting them. The confidentiality of the group provided a safe environment for sharing the kind of reactions -- both negative and positive -- which are seldom voiced in polite conversation. The course was a chance to examine first impressions, to dial into unexamined feelings, to display a wider range of my personality, and to learn about the impression I make on others. In all, it was an excellent experience that overcame my initial skepticism. This is my last journal entry for BusinessWeek Online's MBA Journals. Writing these journals has forced me to be explicit in reflecting on my experience, and has also been an exercise in disclosure, this being my first writing for such a widely-read publication. My goal has been to share a true and specific account of my experience at business school, from start to finish. To the extent I have succeeded, these entries will help prospective MBAs reach a better decision. Only you can make that judgment. But, here we part ways -- I carrying the meaning of these past two years along my path, and you to pursue your own adventure. Adventure on.  | | [an error occurred while processing this directive] Learn about your online education options |
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