What seems important after 15 years?
Harvard MBA Case Studies.
I recall the first class where we were assigned a Harvard Business School Case Study - of which there are many hundreds, all unique in detail but generally about ten pages long, describing a business, some of its market forces or problems, and providing tables and graphics of information in an appendix. You read the case studies, and they are usually discussed Socratically in class.
I remember a defining moment in realizing there was no right answer, and that even the definition of the problem could be undertaken in radically different ways, and that "The Management" (whose views were captured in the case study) might have had no clue as to what was really going on. This is an important lesson in my strategy consulting work today - we might have no idea what is really going on...yet.
Teamwork.
We did a lot of team work projects, and since we were all working full time and taking night school, these often meant Saturday and Sunday afternoon sessions. To several, I brought along a six month old, hoping she'd sleep or be content with a bottle. As students, we had completely different backgrounds - accounting, sales, engineering, and so forth - and were often confronted with problems none of us were familiar with. Everyone had their voice and their unique contribution. While medical care is also team work - say, a surgeon, an anesthesiologist, residents, nurses, hospital pharmacist and so on - the team projects in MBA school drove home how different people can collaborate suddenly and smoothly to cope with the unknown.
There was one project was doing a business analysis of Krispy Kreme with five or ten year financials in a complex Excel spreadsheet and a written assessment of what the share price should be based on a long term pro forma. There was no "right' answer - it was an exercise in thinking through future events, quantitating risks, benefits, and scenarios, and showing your work was rationale. We were learning-by-doing, and we were learning the toolbox that we used for "Krispy Kreme" is used when a venture capital firm invests $10M in a Series B round of a 2016 digital health startup, for 10% equity, thus valuing the company at $100M. The investment doesn't make the valuation; they've worked backward from an abstract, complex and futuristic valuation to determine that a new investment with $10M of real money is worth exactly 10% of the company's real stock, today.
Innovation.
My couple years in MBA school encompassed the height of the first Internet Bubble and its early collapse, when predictions of "Dow 25,000" became a reality of "Dow 6,000." This was good preparation for the global real estate and financial collapse of 2008.
Strategy Consulting Interview Questions.
I got interested in strategy consulting, the field where I still work. There are two types. One type is closed end but requires quick creative thinking - for example, how many basketballs will fit in a 747. The point in answering these is to show you can think quickly, and not how accurate your answer is. See [*]. The other type of interview question presents an open-ended business problem. "You are the third leading US cellphone carrier, and you want to expand your business to Canada. In five minutes, explain to me the major issues you'd be thinking about and how to approach them."
Here's my point. We had xeroxed training examples of these short, random business scenarios and quizzed each other on them with a five minute timer running. The crucial learning for me was this: Despite having an MD/PhD and two years of business school, I was initially terrible at these. With time and diligent practice, I improved enormously. I had the wherewithal in my brain to answer these, but not the integration to actually do it. But that skill, abstract as it seemed, was learnable. I still use the same toolbox of mental gears today, as my current strategy consulting work for a wide range of healthcare companies still, and suddenly, confronts me with unrelated brand new problems on a day to day basis.
Footnotes:
How I got to MBA School in the First Place, and What Happened Next.
How I got to MBA School in the First Place.
In 1997, I arrived at Northwestern Medical School as a \a new assistant professor at Northwestern University School of Medicine. In 1998, my wife was looking at both MBA and MSC (master's of science in communications) programs and I attended some open houses for both.
I'd developed a bit of interest in management when I worked at Bellevue City Hospital in New York 1994-1997, right after residency, and even took a night school management class at New York City College. My first year at Northwestern, there was a discussion whether an outside corporation ("Dynacare") might take over the hospital laboratories (on which my pathology department depended), and the chairman delegated discussion to one professor among our thirty faculty "who knew something about business." So I thought taking a few accounting and finance classes in night school (aka the MBA program) might help my career at some future point.
But picking up a book in the university bookstore also had a pivotal influence. This was David Friedman's "Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life." Early in the book he talked about why the British wore red coats in 1776: it was felt by the King's generals that the heightened risk of being shot to death (you are wearing a red coat) was outweighed by the difficulty of escaping by fleeing the scene of battle (you are wearing a red coat) or being shot by your own kind. The idea that this sort of thing was related to economics and management - a sort of "hidden order" that few viewing a painting of a Revolutionary War battlefield would guess - might be discussed in MBA school seemed pretty interesting. In short, that page in that paperback skimmed in 1999 was the butterfly's wing that pushed me into an entirely different career path in the next couple decades.
In the spring of 2001, I interviewed with consulting companies - Ernst & Young, McKinsey, Bain, and Accenture. I was hired by Accenture, got a signing bonus about half as big as my assistant professor salary (recall it was the internet bubble) and starting the day before Tuesday, 9/11. My first engagement was at Celera Genomics in Bethesda, and I would work for the BCBS Association, Florida Blue Cross, Wellpoint, Genentech, AstraZeneca, and Bristol Myers Squibb from 2001-2004. This was obviously a colossal jump in nationwide business experience from my prior niche as a med school pathologist.
I then joined a different consulting company - EDS (now HP Consulting), but in a non-consulting role, as the contractor medical director for Medicare Part B in California. I stepped down from this in early 2008 to become a Senior Policy Advisor - essentially, a one man strategy consulting operation - embedded in the Medicare policy group of Foley Hoag LLP, a Boston- and Washington-based law firm. I moved to my fourth post-MBA job in 2015, joining the 40 person Washington-based FaegreBD Consulting group, as part of its health policy/lobbying team. Faegre Baker Daniels is a 750-attorney firm with circa $450M in annual revenue (Wiki here.) Across all the post MBA jobs - Accenture, EDS, Foley Hoag, and Faegre - I've lived with home and household in Los Angeles.
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[*] The point is to show the interviewer that your "brain is in gear" and you are thinking and talking, rather than helpless. So here's one answer. Let's say a 747 body is about as wide as four people wide laying down head-to-foot - call that 20 feet - and about 50 rows deep (I've been in row 45 but never in row 85), and each row is about 3 feet apart, so that's 150 feet long. The length of a cylinder would be Pi x R^2, or 3 x 10^2 or 300. The volume of a cylinder is area (300) times length (150), and 300 x 100 is 30000 so times 150 it's 45,000 cubic feet. Let's say a basketball is one cubic foot. So a 747 could hold something like 45,000 basketballs. Back in my day, 30 page dog eared xeroxes of such potential questions circulated. See also, "Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google" (here) or a trade journal article (here).
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http://tinyurl.com/BQ15YearMBA
