Shanghai is in the rearview mirror and London is our next pit stop in the grand prix circuit which is the Duke Cross Continent MBA which I’m proud to be a part of.

I’ve always internally debated the managerial value of an MBA, with my cynical side chirping in my ear that the program is a formality and it’s all about getting in, networking, getting the pedigree and climbing back onto the hamster wheel of capitalism to turn and churn. 

So much to my delight, considering what a significant investment this education is, I found myself striking the ball 3 times in my first week back from my first residence period. Part of our first term is a subject called Managerial Effectiveness or ME (inverted in the blog title for poetic effect!). Initially my impression of this subject was that it was a time filler selected to uninhibitedly accompany the meat and potatoes module of Financial Accounting which was the elephant in the room this term.

This opinion was the first of many to be hind & quartered in our quest to become global leaders of consequence. In my first week I directly applied 3 lessons learned in the course, 1 to my personal life and 2 to my professional life. Let me give a brief synopsis of the events.

My first ME intervention took place in a performance review I was having with my boss, he gave me general feedback which required elucidation, so I cracked open my ME arsenal and commented that performance is a factor of 3 variables, motivation, ability and environment, and as it turned out in my case each factor had either a good, bad or average result which allowed us to target the bad and average areas and to celebrate the good-strike one.

My second intervention took place with a priority decision as to where to spend my scarce free hours this weekend, and as un-luck would have it there were 3 conflicting options, an almost compulsory family event, my best friend visiting from out of town and spending time with the kids who haven’t seen me for 3 weeks. With my ME toolkit readily available my wife and I used the decision making tool of ranking options based on pros and cons rather than selecting outright and we managed to come to a pretty accommodating compromise-strike 2.

Strike 3 came when I was debating a strategic management issue at work regarding motivating and incentivizing employees and I was gob smacked by the accuracy of one of our classical readings “ The folly of rewarding A while hoping for B” where Prof Kerr gives an example of this phenomenon whereby we hope for employee involvement and empowerment but we reward technical achievements and accomplishments. This rude awakening highlighted where we are going wrong in managing our staff.

I must admit that I’m quite relieved that my perception about management education has been tossed out the window and shattered and that the content which I’m imbibing via a fire hose is for the large part eminently practical.I’m still struggling to see where journal entries for conversion of long term debt are going to come in handy but for the time being I’m trusting the process, looking forward and moving upward.