In this chapter, we will explore the skills that everyone studying business should acquire and develop, starting by defining the major categories of business skills: Quantitative and Financial Analysis, Management and Leadership, Big-Picture Thinking, Communication-Storytelling, and Technology. Then, we will explore five specific skills in depth:
Financial Modeling (Quantitative and Financial Analysis)
Negotiation (Management and Leadership)
Project Management (Management and Leadership/Technology)
Business Process Analysis (Quantitative and Financial Analysis/Management and Leadership)
New Product Development (Big-Picture Thinking)
Note: I have reserved exercises for communication and storytelling for Chapter 6, where you will learn how to craft your personal communication plan.
Think Skills, Not Seat Time
While you can rely on MOOCs for both your foundational and advanced business education, you should think beyond the virtual classroom. What will you do with your education? Or, to put it another way, what skills will you learn and how will you use them to forward your career? Just sitting in a classroom or clicking your way through an online course won’t land you a job or win you a promotion or attract investors to your new business idea, unless you can put your education to work in the real world. An education is not the sum total of hours spent in the classroom or a gilt-edged degree hanging on your wall; it’s a key to solving problems and performing tasks that employers and investors value. Money chases value, not vice versa.
The most progressive voices in higher education have been advocating for “competency-based education,” meaning that degrees should go to students according to how they demonstrate mastery by applying what they’ve learned, not the number of hours they have spent racking up credits in the classroom. Ryan Craig, author of the book College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education, champions the competency-based model.1 As he and colleague Daniel Pianko explained in Inside Higher Ed, “A bachelor’s degree merely indicates that a student sat (or slept in a drunken stupor) through at least 120 credit hours of C-graded ‘college-level’ work.”2 A better model, they say, would allow employers to see concrete evidence of the work a student did to earn a degree. Many of those observers of the changes sweeping through higher education, including Craig, believe that MOOCs and other forms of online learning work best when they result in demonstrable mastery of a topic. Michelle Weise, senior research fellow in higher education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruption, took the argument a step further when she explained in the Harvard Business Review that students should strive for “mastery of a subject regardless of the time it takes to get there.” She concluded that “learning is fixed, and time is variable.”3
In the world of MOOCs, time is your ally. Kristof, the banker you met in Chapter 1, found introductory finance and accounting courses a breeze. He skipped through many of the introductory modules of such courses so that he could plunge right into the more advanced techniques he needed to advance his career. Other students (myself included) may need to go more slowly, dusting off their high school math skills before even attempting a finance course. Your self-directed business education program allows you to take the time you need to learn essential skills, which may mean skipping over what you already know or taking an occasional detour into some prerequisite material.
Focusing on competencies rather than on completing a certain number of required courses will also help you weather the rapid changes in the world of MOOCs and online learning. Case in point: When MOOCs first appeared, they cost nothing, even for a certificate of completion. Then, Coursera and edX introduced “verified” certificates for a fee. That soon became the rule, rather than the exception. Most recently, Coursera has placed the graded elements of many of its courses (quizzes, tests, and assignments) behind pay walls. If you view your education as a laboratory for acquiring and testing skills, you will not necessarily need a verified certificate. For example, Vijay needed to know how to manage a virtual team for the tech company he had just set up. Halfway through his first course on project management, he had already picked up many of the skills he needed to manage his team more effectively. He may never need a certificate at all.
The only sure thing in life is change. The world of MOOCs will undergo changes even the experts cannot predict. But I will bet my uncle Dave’s farm on this: Providers will make more and more university-level learning materials and professional-caliber training modules available to the public, not just through MOOCs, but also through recorded talks, iTunes U, and even universities’ own websites. This supports the argument that you should think in terms of skills, not when, where, and how you obtain those skills.
Gain Some Broad-Based Business Skills
As we did with the language of business, we will start with three major categories of broad-based skills: Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Management and Leadership, and Big-Picture Thinking. To this business skills framework (see Figure 4-1), we will add two other universally useful skills: Communication-Storytelling and Technology.
Financial and Quantitative Analysis
Business professionals work with numbers every day. To join their ranks you must understand the key concepts and language of finance. You should feel comfortable reading and interpreting financial statements, building simple financial models, making investment recommendations, and including quantitative analysis when making decisions where “the numbers” will strongly influence an outcome.
Management and Leadership
Even if you only report to yourself, you will need the management and leadership skills that help build solid relationships with others. Craig Hickman’s classic book Mind of a Manager, Soul of a Leader described the difference. Managers, he argued, use their heads to guide their interactions with people; leaders follow their hearts. Managers are craftsmen; leaders are artists.4 The most successful businesspeople know when and how to make the logical case for getting results and then inspire people to achieve those results. In a corporate setting you must know how to organize a team to produce a deliverable; delegate, supervise, and evaluate the work of others; and contribute to a team’s performance. In a startup situation, you must know how to manage relationships with investors, suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders.
Figure 4-1. Business Skills Framework
Big-Picture Thinking
Success depends on such sweeping skills as creating a vision of the future, thinking strategically, harnessing innovation, and controlling “big picture” variables that can make or break a business. You must know how to analyze the strategic position of an organization, understand market opportunities, and assess the potential of a new product or service. Such high-level analysis often combines concepts from many disciplines, including leadership, finance, entrepreneurship, and marketing. However, even the biggest ideas will die stillborn if you cannot communicate them effectively to others.
Communication and Storytelling
To navigate successfully through many conversations that occur during a typical workday, you need to employ a broad array of communications skills. In addition to a strong grasp of business language, you must know how to write and speak clearly, concisely, and compellingly, not only with words, but also with a variety of communications media. And you must know how to listen just as carefully as you speak. Effective communicators tell great stories. As Ed Sabol, founder of NFL Films and winner of over forty Emmy awards famously put it, “Tell me a fact, and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth, and I’ll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever.”5
Technology
While you do not need to become a computer programmer to succeed in business, you must know how use the latest organization, communication, and productivity technologies. These include email, shared calendars, videoconferencing, messaging (e.g., Slack), file sharing, project management software, and such standard software solutions as spreadsheets, word processing, and
slide presentations. You must keep your eyes open for the next technology or risk losing an important competitive edge.
At this point you should take a long, hard look at your current level of business skills.
Figure 4-2
ADVISER’S CHALLENGE
RATE YOUR CURRENT BUSINESS SKILLS
Use the Business Skills Framework in Figure 4-1 to complete this exercise. For each bulleted skill, rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is rank beginner and 5 is true expert. If you score a 1 on a subject, you need to start with a beginner’s course. A score of 2 or 3 indicates that you might take more challenging courses focused on practical application, while a 4 means that you should try to apply your skill more fully on the job. Of course, if you score a 5, you can move onto a subject where you racked up a lower score.
1 = First Year MBA Student: I’m not sure I even know the terminology used to describe this skill.
2 = Intern: I understand the basic concept but have never actually performed this skill.
3 = Junior Analyst: I have performed this skill a few times but do not yet feel perfectly comfortable with it.
4 = Manager: I frequently use this skill but know I could develop it more fully.
5 = Executive: I know how to use this skill and could even teach it to others.
This exercise should have helped sharpened your focus on which skills to emphasize in your self-directed MBA curriculum.
Set Up Your Learning Laboratories
Ellen began her career with a narrow focus, enrolling in a performing arts conservatory where she studied vocal performance. She would often spend up to six hours per day singing in classes, rehearsals, and independent practice. Every waking moment took her one step closer to becoming a professional musician and landing a role as a principal performer in an opera company. Music was her life.
When she moved to New York City after graduation, however, she found it a lot harder than she had imagined to secure one of those coveted spots with an opera company. Dozens of auditions did land her a couple of small parts for the summer opera season, but she ended up waitressing to make ends meet. Three years of that precarious existence pushed her no nearer to her dream. “I can’t keep racing down this dead-end street,” she decided. “I’ve got to make a change.” Then, as so often happens in life, she got a lucky break, just not the one she imagined. A regional opera company offered her a behind-the-scenes job as a junior member of its management team. Why not take it, she thought; it might eventually lead to a performing role.
To her surprise, Ellen loved her new job and became quite good at it. It wasn’t the uncreative drudgery she had imagined. No matter how talented the performers, the show could not go on without the management work that supported it. When her hard work made that happen, she felt as important as the lead singer in La Bohème. While Ellen continued to perform from time to time, she came to appreciate the security (and the reliable paycheck) that came with a management job. As she rose in the ranks, she soon found herself managing a small staff and a hefty budget. That role tested the limit of her management skills.
With a full-time job, Ellen could not go back to school to acquire the skills she needed. MOOCs offered the perfect solution. She took a few courses in business basics, then began tailoring her studies to important tasks at work. A course on financial management and decision making helped her handle her budgeting responsibilities. Then a course in human resources management taught her what she needed to know to recruit and manage a top-notch team. Course by course, she worked toward the completion of her MBA equivalent.
Remember the Mastery Pyramid in Chapter 3? Even the best business education does not amount to a pile of sand if you don’t experiment with it in a real-life laboratory. Like Andy and Ellen, you may already be working in a learning lab. But what if your job doesn’t provide any ready opportunities to test your business skills? What if you are unemployed or working in a job that does not lend itself to practicing what you’re learning? Not to worry. You can look for a mentor in a department of your company where you do not currently work, or seek out volunteer positions, internships, self-directed role-playing exercises, or case studies, anywhere you can set up shop and put your new skills under the microscope as you apply them to real or virtual situations. While I was studying accounting and financial management, for example, I took a volunteer job as the treasurer of the employee association at work. It provided a small, safe opportunity for me to practice my new skills without the risk of making a fatal mistake.
Most students can benefit from multiple learning laboratories. The best ones offer opportunities to:
Match work that needs to be done to the skills you are learning.
Do actual work and solve real problems.
Test your skills on your own schedule.
Make mistakes and gain feedback in a safe environment.
Whatever labs you choose, they should, in the long run, help you acquire and sharpen the five most essential business skills.
Master Five Essential Business Skills
Having rated your current level of mastery in the major skill categories, you have identified your strengths and weaknesses and determined where, over time, you may need to take MOOCs to fill the gaps. If you scored all 5s on the Rate Your Current Business Skills test (Figure 4-2), you can comfortably skip the rest of this chapter. But like most of us, you could probably stand to sharpen any or all of these skills, no matter your current level of proficiency. The next Adviser’s Challenge (Figure 4-3) will guide you to learn and practice five essential skills, drawn from across the major skill sets. You will almost surely need them if you pursue a lifelong career as a business professional:
1.Build a financial model (Quantitative and Financial Analysis).
2.Become a stronger negotiator (Management and Leadership).
3.Manage a project team using contemporary project management software (Management and Leadership/Technology).
4.Assess a repeating business process and recommend ways to improve efficiency (Quantitative and Financial Analysis/Management and Leadership).
5.Analyze product-market fit for an entrepreneurial venture (Big-Picture Thinking).
I suggest you quickly scan the whole challenge then select one component of it for your current needs. You need not plow through A-B-C-D-E in order. You may complete one section, pause, then tackle another as needed or when you feel motivated to dive into it and, of course, you can skip any that you cannot imagine using in a million years. Note: As mentioned previously, I have reserved exercises for communication and storytelling for Chapter 6, where you will learn how to craft your personal communication plan.
Figure 4-3
ADVISER’S CHALLENGE
ACQUIRE AND SHARPEN FIVE MAJOR BUSINESS SKILLS
A.Build a financial model. In this exercise you will build a financial model to help you make a smart investment decision.
If you haven’t done so already, take at least one course on finance. Some learners in my community recommend Introduction to Corporate Finance from the Wharton School of Business (Coursera), Introduction to Finance from the University of Michigan (Coursera), and Financial Modeling for the Social Sector from PhilanthropyU (NovoEd).
In one of your learning laboratories or in your personal life, consider a scenario in which you need to make a good decision investing money in an opportunity. Whether you choose a business or personal opportunity, such as buying a new computer system, select one with the potential to either generate an ongoing cash flow over several years or decrease outgoing expenditures over time.
Complement your academic studies in finance by learning to use a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel. Learn more about applying financial modeling and decision making in the real world in a more advance course, such as Intro to Financial Modeling on the Udemy platform, taught by finance professionals Symon He and Brandon Young.
Use what you have learned about finance to build a financial model that compares various scen
arios for the decision in question.
In a real or imagined situation, present your model to the decision maker, highlighting your key conclusions and how you arrived at them.
B.Become a stronger negotiator. Here you will develop your negotiation techniques to produce better outcomes in all kinds of scenarios.
Take a MOOC on negotiation. I strongly recommend Successful Negotiation: Essential Skills and Strategies (Coursera), one of the most popular MOOCs of all time.
Think about the various negotiations you conduct in your daily life. You engage in so many every day, from discussing who will pick up dinner on the way home from work to asking your boss for a raise. Identify strategies you might use to achieve the desired outcome.
Select an upcoming negotiation at home or at work. Prepare for the negotiation using the techniques you have learned. Write down your negotiation plan.
After the negotiation, reflect on what worked and what didn’t.
Record the elements of your personal negotiation style in a document you can consult the next time you enter into a negotiation.
C.Manage a project team using contemporary project management software. Now you will lead a team to produce a high-quality, on-time result using one or more of the many online tools for team collaboration.
Don't Pay for Your MBA: The Faster, Cheaper, Better Way to Get the Business Education You Need Page 6
