The MBA intensive week was truly intense

This was my first intensive week at Lagos Business School and I can really tell you, it was very intense.

In case you are wondering who I am, I will give you a brief introduction. I am Kelvin Omozokpia, a core software engineer trying to bridge the gap between the business world and Information Technology.

After learning a lot of the trendy tech frameworks/concepts and gathering enough technical experiences, I decided to dabble in the business world properly by obtaining a master’s in business administration from the prestigious Lagos Business School doing the modular program that is meant to accommodate future business leaders with active jobs.

As part of our requirements for the program, we have a paradigm called “the Intensive week” which usually happens once every three months and it gives us an avenue to have a physical feel of the program, interact in person with our faculties as well as connect with our fellow course mates.

The name chosen was no joke because it is truly intense, and the learning never stops. It’s a long week where you are expected to consume as much information as possible, reading and analyzing numerous case studies that are either real or near real-life experiences.

Notable events this week include our learnings on Corporate Financial Accounting, we learned that the act of accounting involves identifying, recording, and communicating the economic events of an organization to interested users. These users are made up of both Internal and external users and they use this information to aid decision-making processes.

We took a very deep dive into learning how to prepare financial statements even though it is a known fact that this is usually the work of accountants/book-keepers but as world business leaders and future managers, having an understanding of how these financial statements are prepared better positions us to properly understand, interpret and analyze them.

Financial statements provide information about the nitty-gritty details of the business and for managers, these give us the relevant data that aids proper decision-making. It also gives us a good grasp of the current health of the business in review.

Our faculty never fails to remind us that MBA students are not mere mortals because the world at large holds you in high esteem and expects you to know every detail it takes to decipher business miseries and provide solutions when the need arises.

We further cemented our learnings by going through case studies that featured financial entries of a business, correctly classifying these entries into their various components in the balance sheet, analyzing our end results, determining the health of the company, and predicting future projections.

Analytics of Business Problems shines a light on our shortcomings as individuals if not properly guided would usually tilt to making decisions that are not so optimal, the core aim of the course is to facilitate our abilities to make effective decisions within the context of an organization as well as our personal lives. The main objective is to boost our critical and analytical thinking skills which enable us to make the most optimal decisions. Optimal decisions usually take as many relevant pieces as possible of information into consideration before coming up with a conclusion.

The starting point was to explore how our mind works and processes information knowing full well that information is the raw material for effective decision-making. We will carefully examine a systematic approach to decision-making, these usually involve considering the number of steps involved in making optimal decisions, but it will profit us more when we learn to think in a defined pattern in other to facilitate a more consistent decision-making approach.

In subsequent posts, we will deep dive into the practicalities of applying the lessons learned in Analytics of Business Problems, and how well its principles influence and improve our decision-making process as well as other courses to be learned.