Relate one thing to another

They say that one must know how to relate life experiences to what you are learning as a part of your study, job or field of research. And if you can do that, you tend to maximize your learning. Well, I have heard this so many times from so many teachers, professors, mentors and managers. But never did I pay so much attention. So what makes me write this post about something which was a mere hearsay for me ? The answer is - my experience pursuing a MBA !

MBA, to me, is not an academic program. It is not a field of study like technology, where you discover something or write some piece of code in a mysterious language like Java, C#, Python which only the reptiles can understand over coffee if their visibility is blurred (see if you can unearth the attempted humor in this line). MBA is probably the only field among all the other fields whose applications can be explained to and understood by the most illiterate persons on this earth. For e.g.

1) To make money (increase your top line)
2) Sell products and services (marketing)
3) Work in a group (dynamic teams)
4) Lead people (leadership skills)
5) Lower costs (business optimization, efficient supply chain)
6) Goals and Objectives (Vision, Mission, Strategy)
7) Make decisions (Decision Making models)
8) Know thy customer (Analytics, CRM, Business Intelligence)

Probably, this is the exact reason why some people call MBA as a dictionary of jargons. And I don't disagree. The above points are probably an illustration of how business jargons can be applied to day to day terms and make it sound quite sophisticated or esoteric. MBA is also a lot of common sense, exactly what my brother-in-law had to say before I entered the MBA world. Now before I unintentionally continue to downplay the significance of a MBA, let me say what I think makes MBA a very critical element to sharpen one's business acumen. It teaches you to relate the day to day occurrences to business. You learn to 'connect the dots' of how business is so close of life and life close to business.

I am taking up an elective on MIS(Management of Information Systems) while I am on my international immersion at Katz Business School at Pittsburgh. Business Intelligence and Analytics are covered quite comprehensively as a part of this course. The professor has asked us to work on a project on Social Media (Facebook & Twitter)and evaluate how Facebook and Twitter can use Analytics and BI to grow their businesses. Every lecture has a case discussion and before every lecture we are supposed to submit a case analysis of the case to be discussed during that class. I have taken on an average 2 hrs to work on a case and write down my analysis. So that is the amount of time investment I put before every lecture and there are two lectures within a week. Usually what happens is that the professor discusses the case for around 45 mins, discusses the concept and then talks for a few minutes about the project on social media. Today the distribution of time was quite unusual. Today's case was on Toyota Manufacturing Company. The crux of the case was that Toyota had an issue with an alarmingly high rate of defects in the seats - seats that were sourced from a vendor named KFS (Kentucky Framed Seat)for their various Camry models. I spent 2 hours last night for submitting the case and managed to submit it just in time and slept at 2 am ultimately. Now, when the class started, the professor, who has a very impressive style of delivery, spent 10 minutes on the issue in the case. The defect of seats in case of Toyota was due to a problem that could be fixed in less than 30 seconds. Now, anything that stops the assembly line for such a short time and if it can be fixed by the worker alone or along with his supervisor, the problem does not get reported. The run rate(number of cars produced) within a shift, dictates the performance rating of the supervisor and the worker. With these kind of incentives, the supervisor will have the least amount of incentive (or should I say disincentive) to report this problem. So the fact that the line stopped for lets say 20 seconds 20 times a day, is unreported. And that is roughly 7 cars within a day. If you average out the price of the cars at 20000 USD, the amount is 140,000 per day. After explaining this problem, the professor "related" this issue to Facebook and Twitter. How can the search you make in Facebook, but which does not give you the expected search result in the first result, gets tracked and analysed and effectively leads to improvement of the result the next time a user performs a search. The entire discussion from this point onwards related every concept of an assembly line to what kind of issues Facebook, Twitter or Google's may face in the world. How would a manager working at Facebook would like to see the dashboard of Business Intelligence when he gets up in the morning ? And it went on and on. That is when I thought that Americans are probably adept at relating one concept from a particular field to another which falls in a totally different arena..And if you can do that after doing a MBA, you can sell yourself quite well..What do you say ?