MBA Reflections: Ep. 12

One thing about this program is that you can be assured it is going to stretch the limits of whatever preconceived notions you hold prior. As a business person and entrepreneur for a long time now, my knowledge of things and concepts always gets challenged. The practical ways I am used to are getting investigated and interrogated at every inch of this program. As much as I would claim I do not relish in the spirit of needless dogma, I am pushed to want to defend my old stances in the face of new compelling arguments for more standard practices. This is a huge dilemma and I wasn’t ready for the huge challenge this comes with. In recent accounting classes, I have had to engage new concepts in financial reporting and statement documentation. This includes reporting things like equity and other aspects of financial reporting that might be alien to a small to medium business owner. One thing is distinctively obvious, that what differentiates big businesses and small ones are the levels of professionalism, execution and attention to details that big businesses give to numbers. This is a huge lesson. For small businesses to thrive and also rise to becoming top guns in their industries, they cannot only leverage talent and service, they also have to pay attention to the old school ways of financial reporting that can be duly seen and interrogated upon perusal.

One thing that cannot be left out of this discourse is the huge disparity in the class knowledge base. While this accounts for very good diversity and inclusion, it also speaks to the fact that people tend to over concentrate on their station in life than look at other aspects of human endeavor that are also very important to how societies progress. We have astute accountants, money managers and consultants who see all of these exercises as business as usual because they are used to analyzing these numbers as work. On the flip side, we have a cohort of lawyers, media practitioners, business people, and other non-financial works of life who are getting revealed into a world that feels like quantum physics. It is like an intellectual rebirth and all their notions are getting questioned and tightly scrutinized. The shift is very interesting because it speaks to the fact that human knowledge is expansive and infinite. Scholarship really does start where you think it ends.

Ultimately, this refined knowledge of accounting will be very crucial to how we see ourselves as emerging managers. In a conversation with some industry expert, he said that the point of this program is to introduce you to concepts and spur your interest in them and not necessarily get you grounded in them. What is fascinating it that, for me, a student of the humanities, I believe if this is the tip of the iceberg and not the entire iceberg, then this must be my own introduction to real quantum physics. Jokes asides, it has been an interesting and eye-opening encounter and definitely shaping me into becoming a better human.