An MBA is a great way to fast-track business learning and to build lifelong friendships.
My MBA, too, gave me more than what I ever expected from it. It took me several rungs higher in my thought process and helped me focus on what to look for in businesses in which I wanted to invest -- market cycles, business models, competitive forces, financial models and so on.
The one aspect of evaluating companies that I was left to figure out on my own was how to judge the people that ran them. This sense comes from lots of practice, and because human nature is so diverse, it is hard to put down as a structured course.
Many successful entrepreneurs who did not go to B-school are sharpest in their assessment of people, easily differentiating between those who tell time and clockmakers.
In my business of venture capital, companies are built from outside. Spotting clockmakers is a little easier because we need to look only for leaders. Leaders come in several forms and each form has a role to play at different phases of the business.
In turn, some leaders display amazing capability to scale with their business. Because people are more important than business models or market cycles, I needed a method to sort this.
I now assess executive leadership on five attributes:
- Result orientation;
- Team leadership;
- Collaboration and influence;
- Strategic orientation, and
- Values.
My MBA programme also handicapped me to an extent -- it made me complacent about how I communicate. With the entire class going through the same course material, we never had to try very hard to get our thoughts across.
In the real world, I learnt that every business person I came across had a slightly different understanding of a problem and hence a different viewpoint. This means I can neither assume that I am understood, nor assume that what I understood is what is being communicated. This needs constant effort.
Another practical discipline learnt at work is a healthy disrespect for data -- the business world generates too much data for its own good. All good B-schools instil deference to data by teaching countless techniques to splice, dice and mince terabytes of data. But data is an aid that loses its relevance as soon as it is generated.
Last, I piled up some very complicated facts during my MBA programme. Life, post-MBA has been an exercise in learning how to simplify. The $70,000 tuition fee notwithstanding .
Rahul Chandra graduated from Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, in 2005.
