Come mid-Fall quarter and you see 2 things at Kellogg. There’s the wonderful fall of the leaves as they go from green to red to yellow and eventually glide their way to the ground beneath. And you see another kind of Fall, the one that involves 1st year students! You see them move from the glowing color of triumph and a yearning to learn about every business case out there to one that is more sullen, unshaved, barely awake and just skimming through the headlines of only the most mandatory of cases. Having been there and done that, I often get asked what are the shortcuts to reading these cases. Are those supplementary readings worth it? If I’m going to have a career in Finance, does it make sense to spend my time pouring over books on Social graphs and Personality Types?
I hear you. You see, more often than not, these cases are about some business that perhaps was an interesting problem a few decades ago. And more often than not, its about an industry that is likely obsolete or has been shipped overseas. So at a cursory level, and definitely by only skimming through the summaries of these cases, I always felt that this was a waste of time.
But I think the 2nd year for an MBA is for a reason. Strangely enough, after a year of cases and an internship, one can, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, “see and connect the dots”. You begin to realize that the case on some Gillette razor that added another blade was never really about whether adding another blade made a better business case. Far from it! It really was about the lessons you can draw from it; timeless lessons that can be applied in very different settings. Marketing yourself on just a few lines (Facebook status message), creating a need in consumers for something they were doing without (iPad), the psychology of consumers towards deals (Groupon), etc have something to draw from this age-old case. And therein lies my point. It’s not about the cases. It’s about the dots that you can draw from there to issues that abound today.
This reminds me of Moksh. He’s 22 months now and in that phase where he’s still blabbering baby talk but does use some words every now and then that we understand. What’s surprising is that even he, in his own little way, connects words he picks up from different sources. Whenever Megha is having coffee, she reminds him that its is not for his consumption. In his own toddler-like way, he calls Megha as "Menga" and Coffee as "Koshi". We had some guests the other day and opened some beer. When we told Moksh that it was not for him, he pointed to the beer and exclaimed... "Menga Koshi!" :) . Through the little cases of his life, my little boy was also connecting the dots!
So, yes, my MBA 1st year friends, please read as many cases as you can. But don’t just stop there. Go ahead and connect the dots. For as any child who has done the puzzles on connecting the dots will know, the more dots you can have to draw from, the faster you can converge on the complete picture!
God Speed!
