FirstDay, Page 1 of 3
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First Day
Question: Why are you taking this course?
a)It looked like a fun and really interesting elective
b)It is required.
Answer:I suspect most of you answered “b.” That raises another question, though:
Q: Why is this course required?
a)It is a form of welfare, to give professors like me a job.
b)The ECU Business Advisory Council really likes the course.
A:This time, I know the answer is “b” (though it is possible that “a” is also true). That really isn’t the point I want to make.
Q: Why are you getting an MBA?
A:If you are honest, you will answer, “To make more money.”
Q: Why should they pay you more money?
A:Well, hopefully you have received better, more detailed training.
Q: Training to do what?
A:To make decisions.
Discussion:That is really the point of all this. You are going to be paid to make decisions. That is what will separate you from your subordinates – you will have greater authority (and responsibility) for making decisions. Literally, that is what your entire career will be based on, all your evaluations, raises, promotions and bonuses. This brings up the first “trick” question of the class:
Q:True or false: decision making affects only the future?
A:True
D:You might think the answer is false, because decision making can also affect the present (hopefully all of you know that decisions can’t change the past). The present, however, is an infinitesimally small and continually moving point in time. By the time you make a decision and go to implement it (whether by acting or communicating it to someone else) that “present” has already moved into the past and you have moved into the future. So it may be the immediate future or longer term, but decision can affect only the future (they are always made in the present).
This should frighten you, because your whole career is based on something that only occurs in the future and you don’t know what is going to happen in the future. This means that decisions are always made with incomplete information, and seemingly random events can make a decision turn out badly. So here’s another question:
Q:Decisions can be classified as “good” or “bad.” Is it the same thing to classify them as “right” or “wrong?”
A:No
D:The distinction between good/bad and right/wrong is a question of timing. Good/Bad is a judgment about how you made the decision. Specifically, did you use all the information available to you and did you use it correctly? Right/Wrong is a judgment about how the decision’s outcome. Here, you ask whether the results were beneficial to the company.
This class is about learning to make good decisions. We will cover a number of computer-based models that will help you organize data and understand what the data means. Being computer models, they are inherently mathematical in nature, so I am assuming you are well grounded in algebra and statistics. The math isn’t hard, but it can be tedious and you must understand what the models are trying to do, as well as the limitations of the models, if you want to understand the output of the models. I will admit, right now, that it is possible that you will do well in your career and never use a single one of the models we will cover (that is not to say that they wouldn’t have helped you, only that you can get by without using them).
Q:Why, then, are we teaching you these computer-based models?
A:You will use a computer in your career. It is the tool of the professional business person.
D:Have you ever seen a professional at work? Don’t they make it look easy? Let’s use an example that many of you can relate to, albeit with somewhat painful memories. Consider a professional carpenter. How many blows of a hammer does it take a professional carpenter to drive in a nail? Only one. I saw a guy do this one time and I just sat there watching him. He had a bunch of nails in his left hand, the hammer in his right hand and he was nailing a board onto a frame. His left hand held the nail in place, his right hand swung the hammer forward, and just before the hammer hit he pulled his left hand out of the way. As the hammer in his right hand drove in the first nail, his left hand was positioning the second nail. He moved across the board and drove in ten nails in less time than it has taken you to read this description. You see, he was a professional and one of the tools of his trade was that hammer.
Compare that to my own feeble efforts. If I want to hammer in a nail, I need to start with about three or four, because the first few are going to get bent. At some point, I am going to hit my hand (this is the painful part of the memory) instead of the nail. Now that I have kids, I can no longer express myself as fluently as I did in times past. Even when I get a nail started, I usually bash at it six or eight times before it is buried in the wood. The good news is that I am not required to be a professional with a hammer, and I am sure that most of you are thankful that that is not a requirement for you either. The bad news is that you are expected to be a professional with a computer, which means that you have to be as good with a computer as that carpenter was with a hammer.
Half of this class, then, is about learning to be a professional with a computer. Unfortunately, I can’t predict exactly what software, or computer models, you will be asked to use. What I do instead is expose you to a variety of rather basic models. If you can grasp these models, then with a little bit of application you can understand and learn whatever models your company runs. After all, part of being a computer professional is the ability to learn new software on your own.
That’s only half the class, though, and honestly it’s the easier half. The business world is not only about making decisions; you must also communicate those decisions to other people. This is particularly true when you are just graduated and starting a new job – because then your decision making authority will be very limited. In essence, you are a trainee and your job is to analyze information for other people; you make recommendations, they make the decisions. So let’s think about this process called “analysis.”
Q:How much of your professional career will be spent solving equations (i.e., 3X = 12) for someone else?
A:About zero.
D:The point here is that the business world runs on word problems (remember algebra class and how much you loved word problems?). An analysis will be assigned to you when a file about an inch thick is dropped on your desk. You will be told to read it, pull out the important numbers, run them through the computer, write up a report and have it ready…
Q:How long (on average) will you have to work on an analysis?
A:My experience, backed up by informal comments from others, says about two weeks. Sure, as you gain experience, they will give you some of the rush jobs, but even then two weeks for an analysis was more typical. Keep in mind that you will be working on more than one job at a time. Also keep in mind all you have to do: digest the information, sort it, do background work, get the computer runs completed, study the outputs, reach a decision and write up a report. You’ve probably seen some version of this list in a class where that teacher called it the something like “the problem solving process.” Don’t worry, I’ll never ask you to list these steps out. Instead, I’m going to ask you to do it, over and over. The interesting part of that list, though, is the last step: write a report.
Q:How long do you think your boss will have to read your report?
A:About 15 minutes.
D:Yes, after all those hours you spend composing your deathless prose, you boss has only minutes to read it. This requires that you condense two weeks of work into something that can be grasped in only 15 minutes. Analysis-writing is, for most of you, an entirely new form of writing. It will require that you throw out all those beautiful big words that fill your paragraphs and obscure your meaning. You will have to look at every sentence and ask yourself whether it is needed. Toss away all the lovely, multi-colored graphs and replace them with simple tables that clearly show the relationships within the data. Anything that can go into a table should, leaving the words to highlight the relationships and draw out the connections found in the data. You must identify all of the risks and rewards of each alternative, and then compare those risks and rewards to find the most acceptable alternative. This is the second part of the course and is the harder part of what I will ask you to do.
Oddly enough, I usually don’t have a problem getting my students to make decisions. I do have a problem getting them to use all of the available information, and I have a terrible time getting them to write down the analysis process. It is not enough to reach a recommendation and tell your boss what it is. Your boss needs enough information to make his/her own decision and the only source of that information is your report. There is no backup any more, no answer key that your boss can look at to check your work and no time to have someone else repeat the work you should have done. If you leave something out, then it is most likely gone forever (unless someone embarrasses you by bringing it up, leaving you looking like an idiot in front of your boss).
So, that is why this course is a favorite with our Business Advisory Council. In here, if you do the work, you will learn things that I can guarantee you need to know: how to use computer models to understand all the information related to a decision, and how to communicate everything you learn to another person. That’s a lot for one semester, so get going.
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