Marketing MBA

I attended a party with a coworker who works in the Career Planning Office. He stated that there are over 100 employment opportunities, both internships and permanent positions, that were yet unfilled. I was taken aback. I said, "None of those positions are in accounting, are they?" To which he smiled and said, "Oh, no. With the accounting students, all I had to do was sit back and watch."

Am I proud of the accounting students? You bet! The MSA and MST students hear it from the beginning at orientation—go to the Meet the Accounting Recruiter event. Meet with your professors. Stay involved.  Why? Competition. With over 400 accounting students on this campus alone, you have to distinguish yourself. And how can you do that? Instead of staying in for a 5 year undergraduate degree, pursue your master degree in either accounting or taxation. You should be taking the courses that will help you not only pass the CPA exam, but also help you not only secure a job, but help you in your chosen career path.

The MSA and MST programs feature classes that are only offered at the graduate level. In addition, you will have some access to classes offered through the MBA program and the law school. Employers are becoming more discerning. Some recruiters will even review your transcripts, looking for specific classes. 

Interested in tax? Both the MSA and the MST program offer classes in S-Corp Taxation, Partnership Taxation and fiduciary taxation. Is auditing a better fit? We offer classes in Corporate Financial Reporting and Financial Statement Analysis. 

The job market seems to be improving. That means even more competition for coveted positions at prestigious firms. Now is the time to go the extra mile and get your graduate accounting degree! 

After a 17 hour flight to South Africa, I was happy to get off of the plane. I smiled to myself. I was finally in South Africa. I took a deep breath and tried to take in all the around me. The weather was beautiful and so was the scenery. I would be joining my other 7 classmates and Professor Lyles for 10 days in the country of South Africa. After months of reading, discussing, and researching the country, I was finally there. I could not wait to experience all the country had to offer.

Before I give you my experiences in South Africa, please allow me to introduce why I'm here. My name is Yvonne Gilbert and I am a current Evening MBA at the Kelley School of Business. I have a concentration of Marketing and Supply Chain Management. This is my last semester at Kelley because I will be graduating in May. When I first started at Kelley I only knew that I wanted to hone my marketing skills. Since then I have gained so much valuable experience from Kelley through different enterprises and consulting projects. These experiences will make me more valuables as a potential job candidate and stand above other applicants. I currently have my sights set on international experience, which brings me to the reason for this blog.

In the spring, I started taking the Emerging Economy class taught by Professor Marjorie Lyles. This semester the class focuses on South Africa. As the name implies, the course focuses on the emerging economies around the world. Previous classes have focused on Russia and Brazil. The first half of the class consists of studying the emerging economy of a country. We read different books and articles, watch documentaries, and produce papers about the economy. To supplement our learning, we have different speakers to talk to us on different aspects of the emerging economy. The second half of the class consists of seeing the country first hand. We will be visiting various businesses and government offices in the country to see how they operate in the country. The culmination of the class is a group paper centered on a specific issue relevant to the country.

I chose to take this class for various reasons. Here are a few:

• Companies are looking outside of the US for growth opportunities. Most of these opportunities come from emerging markets. Learning about different aspects of the emerging economy will allow you to be more marketable a potential employee.
• Getting international experience. We are able to learn about and from several international companies in South Africa. Being able to ask these companies about their strategies in different countries is priceless.
• Learning about different Cultures. I have traveled internationally before and I enjoy learning about other ways of doing things. You can always learn a thing or two from other people.
• Getting to visit South Africa. It's a beautiful country. I jumped at the chance to visit it.

Now that we have gotten all the introductions of myself and the class out of the way, the next blog entry you will see from me will be about my experiences in South Africa. Until next time....

On Friday March 2^nd, Kelley hosted its 66^th Annual Business Conference in downtown Indy. I always look forward to attending this conference as it gives me a chance to take a deep breath and think about something more than what’s going on in my classes. But, this year I was especially excited given the theme of “Incite Innovation”. You know it’s going to be a great day when you start by hearing what John Kao and Ray Kurzweil are thinking (click on their names if you want to see what they are up to). And, they both had some very interesting and futuristic ideas to share. But as a marketer, I really enjoyed the luncheon talk by Don Knauss, Chairman of the Board and CEO of The Clorox Company. He shared several ideas that anyone working on their undergraduate marketing degree or marketing MBA needs to remember:

1. It’s not competition that will kill your business, it’s not paying attention to customers that will kill it. So many companies seem to focus on what others are doing instead of understanding what customers are doing. Customers’ needs change. If you don’t keep up with them, they’ll find their own alternatives and fire you.

2. In order to innovate, you have to start with what problem customers are trying to solve. Then, apply advanced technologies to help them solve that existing problem. My favorite example was how Clorox has improved Glad Bags. People want to send less plastic to landfills. But, trash bags that rip are a nightmare. So, Clorox borrowed collaborated with P&G to bring diaper technology to create a stretchy, thinner trash bag.

3. Be careful when you are trying to understand what customers want. Often, they aren’t great at figuring out what they really want or need. But, they are great at complaining. So, figure out what problems are causing them to complain. We used to call this Problem Detection research. It’s still a great idea for existing products and services. Sometimes now, we refer to this as focusing on the Customer Experience.

4. Let’s not forget the macroenvironmental trends. Since innovations are only good when people want to buy them, it helps to look forward at trends that might be impacting your customers. Clorox apparently looked at future trends and identified four that they think will affect their products: 1) Increasing concern for health and being healthy, 2) Making sure that what we are doing leads to a sustainable future, 3) Keeping products and services affordable (a nice way to say we are more price-sensitive), and 4) An increasingly multicultural US consumer. As they choose between innovations to move forward, they compare them to this set of trends and tweak their improvements or prioritize them against future potential.

Thanks, Don. It was great to be reminded about how to understand customers and innovate solutions to keep them happy and productive using our products. So marketers, let's create the innovations that add value and excite our customers to support our brands!

Alexander the Great. Plato. Martin Luther King Jr. Mahatma Gandhi. Obi Wan Kenobi. Can you tell me what all these individuals have in common? A mentor.

As a young professional, I am constantly having a inner debate about what I actually want to do with my career. What am I really passionate about in business? Should I go back to the Kelley School and get a entrepreneurship MBA or a marketing degree?  How is my graduate experience going to translate into future professional opportunities? Should I wear the blue or red tie?

While I'm sure I will always have some form of these debates, its good to know that we were given two ears and one mouth. What do I mean? Its quite simple and yet complex at the same time: you were meant to listen more than speak.

Listening and mentorship go hand in hand like, "peanut butter and ladies" says Ricky Bobby. Faculty insights, professional wisdom, and past experiences of a mentor can help answer those tough questions about where you wind up in the future. Human beings are social creatures, we were not made to go through life alone. Picking an mentor that is invested in your success can make all the difference in your personal and professional life.

For me, I tend to have different mentors for different areas of my life. Dave Ramsey and more recently, Pete the Planner, generally have a stronghold on how I behave financially. Kris Gethin, trainer and nutritional expert, controls my eating and exercising habits. Ed Foreman, Jim Rohn, and Napoleon Hill have a fairly tight grip on my mental health and well-being. While this approach works for me, maybe you know someone you respect personally and professional who you feel would be a great mentor. If you don't, make it a mission to find someone. As a matter of fact, I know several Kelley School of Business professors who would serve as excellent mentors.

Alexander the Great had Aristotle. Plato had Socrates. Gandhi had Dadabhai Naoroji. Obi Wan Kenobi had Yoda. Who have you sought out to help you get to where you want to be?

-Nate 

@NCanadaWeTrust

@PetethePlanner

@KelleyIndy

One of the key ideas I share in my marketing MBA and undergrad courses is that marketing is much broader than advertising. Yes, we use a lot of examples of advertising to help key concepts come alive. And yes, there are a lot of marketers who basically spend their days creating advertising or marketing communications of some sort. And, probably if you ask a bunch of salespeople what marketers do, they’d say, “create ads.” But, I do like to stress that “Promotions” is just one of the aspects of marketing.

Okay, I realize that some people will disagree with me right from the start when I tell students there are 4Ps in Marketing – Promotions, Product, Price and Place (Distribution). Of course, I also tell them (although I might not repeat it enough to really stick) that not everyone agrees about the 4Ps. Actually, what I say is that one way to think about Marketing is via the 4Ps. We can argue whether there are 4, 5, 6, 7 or an infinite number of Ps. But, really what I want them to realize is that there are multiple dimensions to marketing that should work together to accomplish a brand’s positioning and market goals. I suspect they kind of feel beat over the head with this idea based on an email I received last week:

I was reading this article this morning and noticed that a PROFESSOR at George Washington said the goal of marketing is to create some sort of buzz, create memorable campaigns, something edgy. But I associated these comments more with advertising than marketing. I know advertising is a part of marketing, but I thought it was interesting that the quote sounded like she was substituting advertising for marketing.
http://news.yahoo.com/nd-tourism-director-ad-wasnt-meant-racy-000559311.html

Right away, I was proud of this student for asking a great question. But being curious like I am, I went ahead and clicked the link to see what had caused this brouhaha for a Kelley student. That’s when a bolt of lightning struck me – in some markets, maybe the domain of marketing is mostly that promotions “P”. The quote above was about a campaign for tourism to North Dakota that was quite controversial. Well, let’s put on our North Dakota Tourism Marketer’s hat: you have no control over Product (ND either has fun places to visit or not, you don’t create fun places), or Price (individual locations set their prices), and very little over Place (actually, New Zealand has done an awesome job of helping people buy their NZ destinations online). So, what the marketer really controls is how it is promoted. To this marketer, it is possible that marketing=advertising.

I contrast to one of our Kelley supporters up the road in Carmel, IN – Delta Faucet (click if you want to check them out). The marketing group at Delta Faucet not only recognizes the importance of all 4Ps, but product development and R&D report into the marketing function. Great, innovative products are a key component of their brand strategy. So, it makes sense that product development should be tightly aligned with the rest of the marketing team.

So, I guess my new advice to our students seeking marketing degrees is to understand what the real domain of marketing should be in your product category. If it really is primarily advertising, then do it really, really well. But, if there is any way to see marketing more broadly, try to manage that too. So, what’s the domain of marketing in your product/service category?

This is always one of my favorite times in the semester—when the DIVE project teams meet with their ventures to kick off projects. What is DIVE? DIVE is an acronym for the Discovery, Innovation, and Ventures Enterprise. It is made up of students in our Evening MBA program with an interest in venturing in some way —which might include starting their own company, joining a high-growth venture, or working with investors and entrepreneurs as a service provider (e.g., attorney, banking, consulting, etc.). The Evening MBA program of the IU Kelley School also has enterprises in supply chain management (gSCIE) and finance (FIND). The enterprises are key components of our graduate experience. Projects typically run from January through May/June.

As Director of DIVE (though I prefer “DIVE Master”) I accept about 20 folks each year who have gotten through most of the core classes—strategy, accounting, finance, economics, marketing, and operations—and are prepared to lend their expertise and training to a venture. DIVErs get real-world exposure to venture challenges such as funding, market focus, and operations with lean resources. It is a big step from the classroom to the venture world. Through the DIVE experience, these folks learn a lot more about the world of venturing, and if they really want to join that world! Of course, our DIVErs are the best of our top MBA students—which is saying a lot. DIVE is also a key differentiator in our entrepreneurship program.

What do the ventures get out of it? Well, these founders typically have limited managerial “bench strength” and face a variety of barriers to launch and/or growth. Our DIVE students not only have strong training in core functional areas, but also great experience in industry—including current active connections and a network. That is one advantage of the Kelley School locating its Evening MBA program in Indy—great access to the business and venture community and associated network.

We have connected with DeveloperTown this year for a number of DIVE projects. DeveloperTown (DT) is a really cool IT and software development company based in Broad Ripple. By partnering with clients, often young high potential start-ups, DT helps develop a robust technology infrastructure necessary for growth—but takes an equity position so it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. DT also has a unique and really interesting structure. Each Developer has his or her own “house” in DeveloperTown to decorate and call home. When projects require collaboration, the developers can literally roll their houses together. Of course, having our DIVErs work with serial entrepreneurs like Michael Cloran and John Wechsler (partners at DT) is a big bonus.

As usual, we have a great range of projects and ventures to work with this year. We have some pre-revenue true start-ups like:

•  Musical DNA, who is developing a new approach combining 3D graphics and gaming elements for music education
• uFlavor, a customized beverage company
• TransitionU, a venture helping students bridge the transition from high school to college successfully
• FAST Biotech, taking a revolutionary technology for assessing kidney function real-time to market.

In coming weeks I hope to share more about each of these projects—in the meantime, I love hearing about the cool things going on in our local venture community, and learning more about our DIVErs and how they plan to help these ventures. These companies will do great things, and we hope DIVE can play a part. So DIVErs down—and game on!

Of course, the answer is that you should not. The purpose of qualitative research is to explore issues, identify language, see how people think and feel, and generate hypotheses. On the other hand, quantitative marketing research attempts to accurately count perceptions and behaviors, size a phenomenon and diagnose how important an issue is. So, the decisions a marketer or business manager should make with these two kinds of data should be very different.

And in reality, the process to collect each of these types of data is very different.

But in my experience, too often marketers do just that - they try to quantify when they are exploring. The lure to cross-over comes from the following thought process:

• We are already talking to these people, so why can't we just add a survey to the focus group or one-on-ones? (because that wasn't the purpose of this research)

• After all, someone is going to ask me, "how many people thought that?" (great, so use words like some, many, few, a majority, etc. This research is meant to be directional, so you can suggest some directions)

• And, we've talked to enough people that isn't this now quantitative? (aggregating several small groups doesn't actually mean you have a larger sample; you still have a bunch of small groups)

 

This week in my evening MBA marketing course, we discussed the idea of customer-perceived value. I always start this discussion by suggesting that people are value maximizers - that is, when they make a choice, it’s the one they think will maximize the value of what they are spending. I say this knowing that someone in the class will object (because someone always does, and they should). After all, there is an entire field of study called behavioral economics based on the premise that people are inherently irrational actors – click here to see some of their findings. Still, I remind them that we are talking about customer-perceived value. This is not an objective exercise. Instead, our job in data-driven marketing is to figure out why they perceive the choice to be value maximizing. If Value = Benefits/Costs, that means we have to understand all the benefits vs. all of the costs that they see.  Here are a couple of examples I’ve seen lately that have me scratching my head:

·         AdAge.com suggested that parents are saving $ by changing disposable diapers less frequently, only to spend more on diaper rash cream. Disposable diaper sales have decreased 9% and cream sales are up 2.8%, despite a reduction in the number of babies by 3%. Others have been quick to point out that this conclusion makes no sense – surely the reduction in cost from fewer diaper changes isn’t worth the increased cost of unhappy babies. Instead, Brad Tuttle at Time suggests there are other reasons that fit better with a value maximizing perspective – Diaper rash cream manufacturers may have better products they’ve been more aggressively promoting thus improving benefit perceptions. Or, parents are increasingly finding that non-disposable diapers offer them a better value and are switching.

·         We recently went to a mini-family reunion at Disney World. I was amazed at the sheer volume of families with strollers. Honestly, I kept asking myself, “how can the benefits of a family vacation at the Magic Kingdom be worth the cost of loading and unloading the stroller, negotiating it around lots of obstructions, parking, finding it in the sea of parked strollers, and repeating at the next attraction?” I was only thinking about the costs. Then, I looked around and felt the magic. Sharing magic with your whole family is a pretty compelling benefit. Not to mention the lifetime of memories the photos will capture.

·         Still at Disney World, I also noticed how many people in these typical families had visible tattoos. Now, I have to admit I have a tattoo. I had a medical problem a few years ago and getting a tattoo allowed me to manage some debilitating pain. Even so, throughout the 20-minute tattoo process I rethought the value proposition – it was really that painful. So, I was amazed at how many adults felt the benefit of expressing their uniqueness was worth the pain of the process.

So, the next time you see someone making a choice that makes no sense to you, dig deeper – what do they perceive the benefits to be vs. the costs? Looking at choices through this lens can lead to some surprises. Remember - it's good to balance quantitative marketing with qualitative insights.

The results of this month's Indiana Business Council survey were released Friday. They showed that business confidence has again declined this month from a high of 67% in February to an all-time low of 62%. (The survey just began in December 2010.) The index is a "measure of the overall confidence that Indiana business leaders and employees have in their company's opportunity for growth and success in the coming 12 months."

While the index is measured every month, the survey also asks other questions. This month, the thrust of the questions was about employee loyalty. In this time of few job opportunities, many people who otherwise would have looking for other employment have been stuck in jobs. A major concern of employers is how much talent they're going to lose once the jobs start coming back and people have the freedom to seek other employment.

On average, almost two-thirds of people are loyal to their company, meaning that they're happy with their employer and not planning to leave even when the job market opens up. However, when you split out the numbers according to level in the company, you see a much different story.

While executive-level employees are feeling overwhelmingly loyal to their employers, more than half of the staff-level employees are either unhappy with their employers or looking for a way out.

As Steve Walker points out in his analysis of the results, such a low percentage of truly loyal staff-level employees is a real problem for businesses, as these are the people who are most likely to be talking to your customers. As we learned in the MBA program, if you take care of your people, they'll take care of your customers, who will take care of  your bottom line. If you aren't taking care of your people, then what?

This should be a wake-up call for local business owners: now is the time to find ways to make your top talent happy to work with you, or you're going to be replacing a lot employees (and a lot of customers!) in the near future.

Earlier in August, I wrote about being excited to start thinking about classes again. Well, it's the first week of classes and it's even better than I anticipated. So, here's what I like about being in the classroom:

• Seeing and feeling the enthusiasm of the students. Simply put, we have the best MBA students and best undergraduate business students. Standing at the front of the room, I can see and feel their enthusiasm (of course, it's all fresh and new this week - by week 8 or so, some of that newness has worn off - but, I'll take what I can get for now). They might not realize what we profs see in their eyes. Some faces smile. Some are expectant. Some even look like they are ready to burst at the seams. Who wouldn't get jazzed up to see all that variety, right in front of you?

• Talking about the possibilities of what they might learn. I warn the students that I believe in quantitative marketing. At this point, they are not exactly sure what that is. So, they nod their heads anyway. But I know that over the semester, they will get to actually play with data themselves and see what it feels like to make data-driven decisions. And if you don't have data, figure out how to get or make a decision anyway. Time keeps moving.  

• Setting the tone for the experiential education they will encounter. This last one is more true in my undergraduate marketing class. This semester, they are organizing and implementing the annual fund-raising walk for Homeward Bound, an initiative to generate $ for homeless agencies, right around Christmas. We've got a lot of work ahead of us. But so far, the creative ideas are just spilling out of them. They seem excited. I am really excited. It's great to see what kind of an impact their marketing efforts can have in the community. So many possibilities.

So many of us today are experimenting with the various social media networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now Google+. As any quantitative marketer would, I too have been experimenting. Like many others, I’ve found that each network has its own purposes and benefits. Likewise, each network has its own culture. For me, the hard one to wrap my hands around was Twitter. 140-characters? Seems like either more than I want to say or not enough. After watching Twitter feeds for a few weeks, I was sure I should do it but didn’t know where to start. So, I created my profile. And, that was it…for 4 months. I still couldn’t quite figure out where to start. So, I want to say a quick thanks to local marketing consultant Doug Karr at Marketing Tech Blog for this “How to Twitter Infographic”.

Unlike my passion for movies, I've never really enjoyed watching television.  To me, recent reality shows have been only mildly entertaining with an obvious tone of tackiness.  However, this summer I have been fortunate enough to discover a few television shows that are not only tasteful but educational as well.  River Monsters and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman are both quality shows that (conveniently for me) usually air in the middle of the night.  Perhaps I'll write more on these two shows in the future, but for now I'd like to focus on my personal favorite: The Apprentice.

A couple weeks ago, I found season one of The Apprentice on clearance at a local bookstore and couldn't pass up the opportunity to watch this NBC hit from 2004.  The Apprentice is a reality show hosted by Donald Trump in which 16 candidates work in teams to prove themselves worthy of working as Trump's apprentice.  Out of over 200,000 job applicants, these 16 young men and women from different backgrounds lived together at Trump Tower and competed in a variety of business tasks.

Whereas I would normally scoff at such a reality show, I found myself at the edge of my seat in utter admiration for the ingenious idea behind this show.  What's more, I felt an intimate connection to the people and situations in every episode.  Although I have never leased a penthouse or developed a marketing campaign for a large company, I could relate to the decisions that needed to be made and the team dynamics behind them.

Surprisingly enough, I think I learned more important lessons from this show than I have in several of my classes.  Every episode had a theme that was exemplified in part by the task for that week.  To name a few, there were themes like "stand up for yourself," "know what you're up against," "god is in the details," and "think outside the box."  During each episode, Trump explains the importance of these lessons and how he has learned from them in his own career.

Far beyond the axioms and monologues by Donald Trump was a lesson that I learned about myself in the end.  My ultimate goal has always been to develop and own my own businesses, but I always saw that as a destination with a long and difficult road before it.  After watching The Apprentice, I've realized my true passion for entrepreneurship and how nothing is stopping me from starting early.  I still plan to earn my MBA, but my desire to be an entrepreneur in any capacity is stronger now than it ever has been.

- Jim Plew

A common problem with quantitative marketing is squeezing the insights out of your data. To make this easier, most market researchers have a few favorite statistics they look at – averages and top-box % ( you know, % excellent or very good…). But, easier doesn’t always equal better. Let’s look at some examples.

I was reminded about the importance of knowing the distribution of your data recently from the Wall Street Journal article titled, “When Median Doesn’t Mean What it Seems.” It seems some researchers are trying to find a new test for Alzheimer’s - quite a worthy cause. This test includes a brain scan of a radioactive substance to show amyloid buildup which doctors’ subjectively assess on a 0 to 4 scale. In submitting their results to the FDA, the researchers used the median to show that the scans predicted Alzheimer’s. However, it turns out that the range for most scans being evaluated was 0 to 4. So, while the median was diagnostic, in fact the same scan could be interpreted in many different ways. It’s great to be able detect Alzheimer’s, but some people are worried about false positives – telling people they have Alzheimer’s when they don’t. And, rightly so.

I saw how disastrous averages can be when I was a marketer at a major pharmaceutical firm. Pharmaceutical sales are dependent on the use of a salesforce to visit doctors and share information about their brands. At the time, we had research that suggested the average (in this case, it was the mean) sales rep visit with a doctor lasted 5 minutes. So, marketing developed 5-minute messages (imagine a 5-minute TV ad using a brochure) for every brand. Then, we did research by standing in doctors’ offices and timing all sales rep visits. It turns out that about 80% of visits lasted 2 minutes or less, a few were 5 minutes and the rest lasted over 15 minutes. So, the mean was 5 minutes. But, very very few visits actually lasted 5 minutes. Instead, we should have had a 2-minute and a 15-minute message.

Finally, in every class every semester us professors have our students fill out teaching evaluations. Afterwards, we get an exciting report that shows how many people gave us each rating, the mean rating and the median. Generally, I find the median tells the most positive story. So, I like to report that number to my bosses. But, the most insightful way I’ve used this info was to sort the scanned sheets into 2 piles – those that rated me low across most questions vs. those that rated me highly.  Then, I tried to figure out which specific questions were different between the two groups. I discovered that the low raters really rated me low on the fairness of my grading. This analysis is like a scatter plot – put ratings of enthusiasm on the x-axis and grade fairness on the y-axis. Suddenly, the correlation between the two variables leaps right out. My interpretation – they are working hard and feel they aren’t getting credit for their effort. This grade disappointment made them rate me as not a good instructor. It caused me to change the activities that were graded so they better reflected work volume and topics that should be mastered in the course. But more importantly, I focused on being more transparent about how activities would be graded. Next semester, the # of students using the bottom ratings dropped to zero and my overall means went up.

So while averages are easy to use, they under-represent the interesting ideas in the data. A quantitative marketer needs to make sure they understand the real distribution of their data by exploring frequency %, median, mean, and even scatter plots of two variables. Every spring, I get super excited because I get to teach a couple of marketing MBA electives where I help our top MBA students figure out how to squeeze as many insights as possible from data. They are so creative that they frequently find patterns I didn’t even think about looking for! So, I get to learn something new too.

When I finished undergrad, it was fraternity tradition to 'will' things to the guys in the house still plugging away.  This was mostly an opportunity to rehash all the inside jokes and sometimes fairly raunchy things.  My favorite was a bag of air purported to contain someone's soul that got passed down.  But this isn't undergrad, it's graduate business school and the lessons learned are different, plus I couldn't get Professor Lynch to blow up a bag of air for me. 

When posting on Facebook that I was in my last class, a mentor that convinced me to go ahead and get started on my MBA sooner rather than later made the comment that half of what I learned was a waste and that I knew how to run a business before I even started.  I quickly responded that MBAs must be like advertising, half of it's a waste but you can never know which half. 

But that of course got me thinking.  What am I really taking away from the Kelley Evening MBA program?  Trying to separate the things directly attributable to Kelley from the 'run rate' of just being three years older and more experienced was difficult.  Then I realized I was thinking like an MBA, trying to separate run rate from incremental gains.  The real gain was learning to think like an MBA. 

I spent a semester in law school before leaving for a gig at Apple, but I was there just long enough to start thinking like a lawyer and become unbelievably long-winded.  My friends that continued on with law school mostly admit that the day to day cases and study didn't really translate to the real world.  Legal education definitely changes the way people think and perceive the world.  Graduate business education does much the same. 

In business school I learned how to mind Ps and Qs and calculate net present values.  It's not likely that I'll use these specific skills that often.  What I will use often is the ability to think in terms of net present value, time value of money, discount rates, interest rate arbitrage.  What I will use is the ability to look at the long term evolution of a product within the market and determine when the right time to strike with an upgrade or larger marketing campaign would be. 

Business school made me a big picture thinker.  Had I not come back for my MBA, I would surely be three years older and wiser today and I may have even still gained a promotion or moved into marketing eventually.  But I almost surely would still be examining things from the viewpoint of my own little kingdom.  Those promotions and career changes would have taken longer. 

Being three years older wouldn't have given me the other major asset I've gained that was lacking when I was 25.  Confidence.  Could I have effectively run a business back then?  Absolutely.  What was missing was the confidence to do so.  There was too much unknown, too many areas that I knew little about.  The concepts were not exceedingly difficult once I grokked the basics from classes, but the all-around education including operations, finance, management, accounting, economics and marketing removed the veil and gave me the confidence to step forward and create my own business (which became profitable this month). 

So what is in my will?Sadly, no souls or raunchy stories but a few pieces of advice and reflection on my journey through Kelley. 

"If you can learn to sell an idea you disagree with as well as you sell your own ideas you can do anything" - advice I got in the FoodCorp simulation that I will carry with me always.

"Big Mahhket, Big Mahhgins" - If there's one class that should be required for all Evening MBAs, it's Lynch's Venture Strategy. 

"Swift, Even Flow" and the cranberries - Everything you need to know for successful operational excellence.  Applying these ideas to even the smallest projects at home and work has made a significant difference in the quantity and quality of my output. 

Listen intently to Rodgers. I tripled my money listening to his investing ideas.

The most fun I had in a class had to be creating a business plan to launch White Castle food trucks in Iraq.  Tracking down an Iraqi distributor, doing the research on the security situation and planning out how to take a business from servicing a foreign army in-country to developing a local market for the goods was insanely interesting.  When a professor like Sacha Fedorikhin gives you a project, challenge yourself to really take on something interesting.  It will be orders of magnitude more work, but it will be so worth it. 

Kim Saxton's Marketing Engineering and Marketing Performance and Productivity Analysis classes were probably the most difficult courses I took, but the difficulty directly correlated to the amount I learned.   Well, at least a .7 correlation, which is really big. 

Tony Cox's Marketing Simulation and Marketing Tests and Experiments classes weren't difficult, but gave me the most immediately-applicable skills that I gained in the program.  I wish I had taken them earlier rather than in my last semester.

My only real regret is yelling 'Knife the Baby'(explanation)in Todd Saxton's strategy class, not realizing that I was the only one in the room that equated that to eliminating a product with strong potential, but that could be eliminated to make gains elsewhere. 

As I look past graduation, I find myself wondering what I'm going to do with myself.  I've become so used to having things to do on the weekends or in the evenings that I know I'll become bored.  I also don't really want to adjust back to just watching TV every night.  Maybe I'll learn a foreign language, rehab a house, teach business classes at Ivy Tech, or become a yoga master.  Yeah..probably not that last one.