A micro rundown of everything I learned in business school.

First year

  1. Managing groups and teams
    • Feeling powerful fundamentally changes the brain, creating a feelings of aggression, competition, and self-interest. Feeling unpowerful creates the opposite: a sense of apathy and community orientation.
    • Tasks are better accomplished by hierarchical groups when the planning group communicates intent early and often.
    • Being influential in a group is distinct from and possibly anticorrelated with being knowledgeable / correct on a topic that group is engaging with.
  2. Basics of Accounting
    • Useful to practice reading 10Ks. Don’t want to be an accountant.
  3. Probability and Statistics
    • Always nice to revisit statistics. I gained some additional comfort with basic topics in probability and with the normal distribution.
    • Learned some Stata, don’t feel like I need to learn more.
  4. Microeconomics
    • Really liked, refresher on using calculus to solve basic optimization problems.
    • Most problems can be solved with an intuition of what will happen in equilibrium and some geometry.
    • Got to tutor this subject in second year, which was fun (my students had almost no trouble with the material so it was easy).
  5. Competitor
    • I read Michael Porter’s Competitive Stategy in college, and this didn’t build much past that, but did provide some practice thinking through a few situations. In general I’m pretty skeptical on high strategy as a concept; As they say: “Execution eats strategy for breakfast”.
    • Competition classification system was useful and interesting: Cournot competition, Hotelling line, Bertrand. Maybe a bloggy post on these would be good.
  6. Modeling Managerial Decisions
    • I was so hopeful for this class, but it covered basic pop psychology you might find in Thinking Fast and Slow or anything by Cass Sunstein, and some pretty basic excel modeling and probability. I did get to learn about linear programming and Solver, which were new to me, so I’m glad to have those in the tool bag.
    • I created an interactive LP problem solver using Observable (just a side project).
    • Excel’s Solver is excellent, and actually better than most open source optimizers in python.
  7. Customer
    • Basically marketing class. There were a few interesting frameworks, like needs-benefits analysis.
  8. Investor
    • I didn’t have much exposure to finance so this class was interesting for me. Bond math, options pricing, discussions of market efficiency. Set the stage for second year finance classes.
  9. Power & Politics
    • A class ostensibly on learning about interpersonal dynamics and how they play out in a corporate setting, but I struggled to get anything out of this class. I dig in further second year with Interpersonal Dynamics.
  10. Sourcing and Managing Funds
    • A financial modeling class focused on forecasting out cashflows and finding valuations for companies based on their balance sheet. This is another area where I hoped there was deep insight but found rote calculations instead.
    • Credibly modeling out a business opportunity is a weak area for me and I’d like to find more opportunities to learn and practice. I’m just so skeptical of the point estimates being assigned to these values without concern for variability or measurement error.
  11. Intro to Negotiation
    • Negotiation doesn’t have to be a zero sum game! Since participants can value the same inputs differently, an efficient distribution can create value. The necessity is therefore information sharing in order to find those opportunities.
  12. International Experience: New Zealand
    • I went to New Zealand. It was boss. I mentioned Fonterra before, which was fascinating. I wrote a whole separate post on this.
  13. Global Virtual teams
    • There can be challenges working across time zones and teams. Which I think I knew. I got the lowest possible grade in this class without failing.
  14. Workforce
    • Frustratingly information sparse exploration of human capital problems in the workforce.
  15. Global Macroeconomy
    • Fascinating and challenging. Full derivation of the IS-LM macroeconomics model and how to use it to evaluate potential policy changes or exogenous shocks. Really strained my brain’s ability to think in six dimensions.
  16. Executive perspective
    • Completely checked out of this.
  17. State & Society
    • Really interesting discussion of the intersection of society and business. We covered how business interests can push forward on social problems (e.g. mining executives had a lot to do with ending apartheid in South Africa). Few actionable takeaways but a lot of exposure to different kinds of issues via cases.
    • A K-group is necessary for business to take a stand: a small group of large businesses for whom it is worth solving a problem even though others will freeride on their solution.
    • Talked about democracy, which was fascinating. Need to read Stigler, Peltzman and Pigou.
  18. Causal Inference
    • An extensive discussion of omitted variables bias and reverse causation.
    • A few new techniques: regression discontinuity designs; matching estimators; instrumental variables; synthetic controls; event studies; difference-in-differences;
  19. Financing Green Technologies
    • Ponderous exploration of renewable energy policy and how renewable energy project finance works.
  20. Simulation Modeling
    • Subject near and dear to my heart, which it was basically impossible to do justice to in the context of an MBA class.
  21. Advanced Negotiations
    • Some mathy explorations of how to assign value in a given complex situation (e.g. how to split a cab fare fairly)

Second year

  1. Interpersonal Dynamics
    • What Stanford calls “Touchy Feely”– a very in depth practice based exploration of giving and receiving powerful feedback. Should blog on this, have read a lot on the subject now (most recently “Crucial Conversations”).
  2. Speculation and Hedging in Financial Markets
    • How to price derivatives and create hedged positions. Should blog on this so I don’t forget.
  3. Applied Quantitative Finance
    • Best class I’ve taken. Ground up exploration of quantitative finance based on a survey of the most important papers. Heavy coding and math. Should blog on this too.
  4. Central Banking
    • Slow but interesting discussion of the role central banking plays in the economy taught by a former Federal Reserve Board member. So slow I ended up dropping it.