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Is an MBA Really Worth It? · Commander's Intent

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it's a business or life, it can cost you everything.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Commander's intent to inspire you how to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're your host, retired Air Force Colonel, fire pilot, and your leadership mentor, Derek Oak.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Most people assume that if you want to become a better leader in business, one of the logical steps is to get an MBA.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: After all, it promises to teach you strategy, finance, marketing, operations, everything you need to know to run a successful business.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: But here's a question that very few people ask: Can a classroom teach judgment?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because when the pressured on, when the data is incomplete, when your people are looking at you for a decision and you've never been there before, you've never actually felt the weight of that decision, the case study is not going to help you.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: The case study just gives you data.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's about making the right decision or the best decision with the information that you have, because you're never going to have perfect information.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, with that, I don't want to say, I don't want to disparage getting an MBA.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's an incredibly valuable investment, or it can be an incredibly valuable investment.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the finest executives I've worked with, they have one.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I've also met a lot of leaders with impressive credentials who've never worried about payroll.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And these are MBAs.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: They've never worried about payroll, they've never led through a crisis, never made a decision that could cost millions of dollars, and never had to look a team in the eye and say they made a mistake, that they got it wrong.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going to talk about both sides of the equation.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Why would I want an MBA?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Why would I spend that kind of money on a degree versus just going to work and learning how to do things the hard way?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about what an MBA does exceptionally well, where it falls short, and why some of the most effective leaders that I've known, and Rob and I have known, are those whose greatest education has come from not the lecture hall, but from failure, from responsibility, and from what I like to call scar tissue.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's a profound difference between learning how to analyze business and learning how to lead one.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is Commander's Intent, so let's get into it.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, what does an MBA cost?
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you can get an online program with a number of schools for maybe$50,000, but it can also cost you upwards to$300,000, especially when you're looking at tuition, living expenses, and the opportunity costs of not being in the workforce while you get this degree.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: And there are a number of workarounds, like executive MBA programs where you work, where you get your degree while you're working, but that comes with the cost.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I have a master's in business.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Rob has four master's degrees.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: So both of us value schooling.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And with our background in the Air Force, the Air Force valued schooling a lot.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And we went to a lot of year-long plus programs that taught us how to think, that taught us some of the mechanical skills of leadership and operating in the area where we are expected to operate.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Since I got out of the military, I've been involved in a number of small businesses, both as a consultant, as an owner, as a supervisor.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I call that time my scar tissue MBA.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: I've learned the hard way about funding, payroll, due diligence, market viability, and so much more.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And because I learned the hard way, those lessons have really stuck a whole lot more than any case studies that I may have learned in a classroom.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Knowledge is critical.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Knowledge is, it helps us all very much so.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: It improves decisions or it can improve decisions, but responsibility is what really creates judgment.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And judgment is what allows us to make the best decisions.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to ask a question.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to turn it over to Rob.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a good argument for staying away from an MBA graduate?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: I will answer it quickly by saying yes, depending on the role and depending on the graduate.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I know this topic has really grown out of discussions you and I have had about a lot of things.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: Now I want to lay some out there to begin with.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: Number one, yes, I have four master's degrees.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: No, none of them are MBA.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: But I do have an undergraduate degree in economics, and I'm a data geek.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like I love to look at data and numbers and spreadsheets and I build databases on my spare time.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: So I think I'm pretty well versed with most of the topics that we're going to talk about.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: One of my master's degrees that I got was from the Air Force Strategy School.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: So I do have a master's degree in strategy.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I did spend time working at the White House working on national strategy for different pieces of the government.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: So I think I have a good background to be able to talk about this topic.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: But really, like I said, this topic has grown out of conversations you and I have had where I have made the emphatic statement that if I were running a business, I would never, ever, ever hire an MBA.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I have some very strong feelings about why that is.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think to begin with, for me, what I have seen, the MBA graduates, those with an MBA that I've worked for in the civilian world, they concentrate primarily on the wrong things.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Their education has led them to look at everything as data and numbers and things that can be funneled down into particular metrics or frameworks.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: And all of these things have led them to a number of shortfalls that I find that graduates from the MBA get themselves stuck in particular pieces.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so we can tick them off.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's three or four that are probably buckets that we can put them in.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: The first one is analysis paralysis.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: I find that a lot of guys that went to MBA, they always are asking for more data.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: Let's do another study on that.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: Let's take a look at the data on that.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: What model works best here?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: But what's our benchmarks?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: All of these things that they ask instead of asking, hey, what are we trying to do here?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: What is the strategy?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: What is the commander's intent?
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: They worry too much about the analysis rather than the overall product line or operations or what we're trying to get out of it.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I think this is the number one bucket of why an MBA is dangerous for me to have in operations.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: And particularly I've seen it in aviation, so that's where I've been.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: But I see it in a lot of other areas as I read the news and watch companies making decisions that don't seem to make a lot of sense from them unless you're looking at them purely from a statistical, financial, some kind of narrow focus line.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: So you have anything on that analysis piece that you've seen?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: So kind of tangential to that.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: When I was an evaluator pilot in the Air Force, I would give check flights to other pilots.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And when we were doing in the simulator and I could fail things, I would often fail multiple systems that created a conflict where, you know, you lose an engine, so you're supposed to do X, Y, and Z.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now you have a fire in the fuselage.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: So now I'm not supposed to turn the APU on in case I've got, or if I've got a fuel lake, I'm not supposed to turn the APU on because I don't want the aircraft burning underneath me, underneath the pilot.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I would create conflicts for them where there is no simple cookie-cutter answer that forced them to develop judgment, forced them to go, okay, in this simple solution, this is the answer.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: In this other simple solution, this is the answer.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: But when I've combined them, now I have to weigh the best answer.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to look at the entire environment for that.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes you just give them situations where you couldn't get all the information, where you knew there was a threat out there, you knew there was a situation out there, but they just had to learn how to make a decision without knowing exactly what was out there.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a key, key piece of any kind of decision making, especially the environments that you're talking about there, that you and I are both most experienced, but is in the aviation world where those decisions have to be made in a matter of minutes or seconds, not so much necessarily when you're sitting in the boardroom.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why I think this is particularly keen to you and I, because we're used to trying to make those decisions rather quickly with you know limited information, but using our judgment and our experience as aviators to be able to get to the right answer.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of one of those pieces, and this is probably bucket number two, but it's really I put it on its own.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: MBA graduates particularly seem to be gravitate towards these giant frameworks that they were taught in how to analyze the situation.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: Don't get me wrong, frameworks are not bad.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: I don't hate all frameworks.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: I use quite a few in my own personal life and my own dealings.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: Being dependent and stuck in a framework to use as your analysis sometimes limits your options and limits your ability to look at the problem and to really understand what the bedrock foundational problems are that you're trying to deal with.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: And you forget sometimes in our framework, you forget what the end state is supposed to look like, which is, I think, is rather important for us to keep looking at these.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: So although I'm not totally against frameworks, I think that MBAs, generally speaking, forget that they are a tool to help them analyze the situation and get to the right answer rather than the end of the problem itself.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: I completely agree.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you ever watched it, the series The Last Ship.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: I stumbled across about a 10-year-old series.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: I never watched it when it was out.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I love how over and over Captain Chandler is faced with a situation where there is no rule book, there is no real good analysis.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes, here's the key thing: sometimes the analysis is going to point you down the wrong path.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And as a leader, you have to say, okay, I got all the data.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: I see where the data is pointing me, but my gut or my whatever it is tells me to go a different direction.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And when you are dependent on frameworks and you're dependent on that analysis, you're really hesitant to do something like that.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like I could lose my job, I could get fired, and I could be banished from the business world because I went against the data to make a decision when in reality it was the right decision.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of people won't go down that route.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I actually have a story about that from flying days.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: I was flying with a young co-pilot when I was a squadron commander, and we're flying into Canon Air Force Base, and the winds at Canon Air Force Base were usually very, very strong.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: And you always had to pay attention to which direction they were coming out of because they were so strong.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: And as we're coming into land on the runway, I had gotten the winds from the tower, and I, you know, we're landing on the primary railway.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's supposed to be 30 or 40 knot winds right down the runway.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: And as we get down lower, I look at the windsock, and the windsock is 90 degrees off.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: I've got a full 30-knot crosswind off my right-hand side.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I direct the copilot to go around to not land out of that because it was not safe.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I actually told tower I wanted to go to the crossing runway that would put that right in my face.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_02: So I had headwinded that, and we landed out of that.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_02: It was great.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: But the copilot turned to me and, like, sir, why did you do that?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: That was not the right runway to land on.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: You just landed us with a crosswind.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: I said, No, did you actually look at the windstock?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: You listened to what the tower said, but you didn't ever look at what was going on outside the aircraft.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: And we had this four or five minute discussion about how I made that decision.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: And he says, Well, I just think it would have been wrong.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_02: What if the wing commander was out there and he was listening to the radio and he saw that?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: I said, I can explain that all day to the wing commander because I used my eyeballs and my judgment to recognize that the landing that the tower was directing me towards would have been unsafe.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: And so I saw that where there's a young guy that's got all the knowledge of being a pirate, and he wasn't wrong necessarily.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_02: He just didn't have the judgment experience to look outside his framework of listening to what the tower told him and just look at what the actual wind's doing to him.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of a quick and dirty story about being kind of dependent on that framework that they had kind of built up.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: That highlights another thing.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: You knew where to look for the wind sock, or you knew to look for the wind sock.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: You don't get that in the classroom necessarily.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: That may have come up going through pilot training, and at some point it's going to, but just practice and practice and recognize that the tower isn't lying to you, but the tower is not always right with the winds, especially if you have gusty winds, shifting winds, they're not always going to be right.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the tower controller is not sitting in your airplane.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: His pink body is not at risk.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yours is.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the same goes with making decisions in a business.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: When you feel the responsibility, that decision, you're grasping for information and you're clawing for information.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've done it a while, you're going to know where to look for that information instead of just what the book says.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: Which kind of brings me to my pet peeve.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's number three in my bucket list, but it's really pet peeve number one for me of MBAs.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: I see this all the time.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen it in companies I've worked in.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: I see it in the news all the time as companies make decisions.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: And this one is a short-term financial bias.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_02: I understand the way our market works.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like I said, I have an economics degree from the Air Force Academy.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: I understand how markets work.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: I understand how financial reporting works.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: I've been an investor since I was 20 years old.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I can read financial reports.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: My problem is a lot of what we're driving towards when you're talking about publicly traded companies, they're so worried about their quarterly reports that they make decisions that are really stupid for the long-term health of the business.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: They are so focused on worrying about what the financials look like, the shareholder return, the efficiencies, all of these problems that they worry about because, oh, if we show this loss for some future strategic effort, then our stock price will go down.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_02: Well, at the end of the day, really, if you as a business person are worried about shareholder price, you probably shouldn't be in that business.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I understand why a lot of them are worried about shareholder price.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: Some of it has to do with the ability to get credit on open markets, some of it has to do with their own compensation packages being stock options and all these other things.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: But the reality is if you're only worried about the next quarter, the next quarter, the next quarter, you are losing the big picture.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: You are losing commanders and tent.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: You are not focused on creating the best product or the best operations that you can.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: You are more worried about the money, and that will show up.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think you and I have said this before on this show.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: If you find yourself in a business focusing on the money, you will go bankrupt.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: If you find yourself in a business focusing on the product or the service or the operations, the money will come.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree with that.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I've seen that over and over.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Milton Friedman, he is one of my economist heroes in a lot of ways, but I think people took his words about, you know, the shareholder and how the shareholder has primacy, and they've twisted his words to focus on the wrong things.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think Milton Friedman ever intended that we throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to quarterly earnings.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And there are a lot of unintended consequences that came out of some of the things he said, but also some government rules on accountability, all with that were done with the right ideas in mind, but have taken us down the wrong path.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's unfortunate.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you have employees that lose their job because they're seen as an asset on the balance sheet.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then that same company is out hiring those exact same positions three months later because they actually needed them instead of keeping them around even during those thin times.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not telling a business to go bankrupt keeping people on the payroll, but so many decisions are made specifically for that earnings per share.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I think me personally, this is my own personal thoughts.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: So if somebody out there has different knowledge, whatever, go ahead.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you can start to flame me or whatever.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: But that to me is one of the main reasons why I do not want an MBA on my payroll, is because I think that their focus, they have been taught and trained through their education, their curriculum, to focus on the numbers and the quarterly and the financials and what makes the most financial sense.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: And as an economist, what I learned, economists don't necessarily make the decision that an accountant would when it comes to dollars and cents.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: Economists worry about more than dollars and cents.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: Economists worry about the whole person concept.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: They worry about what people think and feel.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's a probably a better way for long-term running of a business.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: So that's just kind of my deal with my own personal burr under my saddle that bothers me so much about that.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you see, that really brings out what I always say about economists versus accountants.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Economists are accountants with a personality or accountants with emotion.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Accountants, and I've got a lot of good friends who are accountants.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not disparaging them, but when you just focus on the numbers, you're missing a lot of the key elements.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of those key elements you don't get in the classroom.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: You get by that tangible, tacky interaction with your team, understanding how the team works, understanding the real needs of the market instead of the textbook needs of the market.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, dude, you've hit the nail on the head there.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that is the most important piece.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: It actually segues perfectly into my fourth bucket.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: My fourth bucket for MBA, you know, negatives is that they are overconfident in their ability to lead things because they've never actually had to lead anything.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's all been case studies and it's all been analyzing business failures and analyzing these cases.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: And they might have done some different types of scenarios in their MBA program.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I saw the same thing in military schools and some of the master's programs I went through, where we did a lot of case studies on military failures and other things, but it didn't make me an expert.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: It didn't make me able to go out and lead a large organization because I didn't have this guard tissue.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't have that weight and responsibility we're talking about.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think this is one of the big glaring oversights that MBA graduates probably have is that they have a ton of tools in their kit bag, but they're way more overconfident because they believe their ability to lead and manage far outstrips their abilities.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it really comes from some blind spots of leadership instruction in an MBA program.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: And we can go through those a little bit more, but what are your thoughts on the idea of leadership in an MBA program?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: I love that exact line.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Overconfidence without scar tissue.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: I learned this in my textbook.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: I learned this in my classroom.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: I debated it with my professor who has a PhD in business, so he must know what he's talking about.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: I got an A in the class, so I know what I'm talking about now, but you haven't really actually flown the mission.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: You haven't actually had to deal with leading a team.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't, you know, it's just like you said earlier on about a second lieutenant comes into an organization, and yes, he has the four-year degree, and he technically outranks that master sergeant who has 15 years of experience in the Air Force, but it would do him well to keep his mouth shut a little bit and go to that master sergeant and say, Hey, Sergeant, what should I do here?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: How would you handle this?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: How have you seen previous bosses handle this?
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like you and I were talking beforehand.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: When you're a copilot in a big aircraft, like copilot in a C-130, you've got a Sage, former aircraft mechanic, flight engineer sitting between you and the pilot.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a kind of a copilot abuse program where they would harass the co-pilots, but they were also the best teachers because they were the guys to turn to when you had questions about how the aircraft functioned.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: You created questions about the systems, questions about things that weren't in the book.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: That flight engineer was who you wanted to go to.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of times that co-pilot MBA shows up in a business and says, Well, I'm the second ranking individual on this crew, so you guys shut up and color and do what I tell you to.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, all right, but I'm not going to do that when my life is on the line.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to crash this.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of one of the great lines that I remember from all of my military studies.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it was Von Mulkey that said, No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: I heard it from Mike Tyson that no plan survives first contact with the enemy's fist or with my opponent's fist.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of people.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: Right, tell you punch in the face.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: This is what I kind of see as MBA graduates in the leadership perspective.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: Because you can have all the great ideas in the world, you're gonna have all these wonderful things, but until you've actually been there, done that, had to do it in an environment that's chaotic, and I'm not saying that your employees are the enemy, but holy cow, the entire system creates a lot of chaos that you just don't get in an MBA.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I'll take out some of my reasons why I think that leadership, leadership studies and development in MBA programs have some blind spots.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: Number one, that leadership in those curriculums is a subject.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: It's not a responsibility.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_02: You're not leading your other peers in an MBA program.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: You're not in charge of the guy sitting next to you or the gal sitting to your left.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: You're not in charge of those people.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: You have no responsibility whatsoever.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: And everything is all on paper.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yeah, it's great.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: I watch people who play first-person shooter games, you know, like Call of Duty or Battlefield or whatever.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: And they do things that I would never see on the battlefield in real life because their lives don't really matter.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: They run out and they get cut down in a hail of gunfire in the simulation.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, they get regenerated, and three minutes later they're back at that same position.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that doesn't happen in real life.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: When your fleshy pink body is on the line, you don't take the risks that you do in a simulation.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think that when you treat leadership as a subject and you try to handle it as a subject, you lose something in the translation.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have the visceral effect that the weight of responsibility does for those that have actually led an organization that lead and challenging in trying.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Completely agree with you.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's kind of what we've been talking about all along.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's that it's not a textbook, it's not a sterile situation.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: It is a situation with real responsibility, with real emotions, with real challenges, with real unknowns.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And unless you understand that, you're gonna get yourself into trouble.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: Very, very, very quickly.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: That leads quickly into blind spot number two.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Which is, and I know they try to simulate this in a lot of the case studies and a lot of the simulations that they do, but trying to make decisions in an area of unknowns or uncertainty can be very, very challenging for new managers.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: They don't want to make a mistake, especially when it starts to become real.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: When you put them in this situation, they become so gun shy, so conservative because they don't want to step in front of themselves.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: They don't want to get ahead of their analysis.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: It kind of goes back to analysis paralysis.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_02: They don't want to get ahead of that so much that they are frightened and paralyzed about making a decision because they just don't know.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: And sometimes they wait way too long to make a decision when the right decision could have been made much earlier with and trying to have contingency plans for the potential uncertainties that they're dealing with.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: When you come from an academic environment where your goal is a 4.0 or 3.8 or whatever, you become very risk averse and you become very failure-verse.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: You see a B as a failure.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: Then you get into the workplace and you have to make a decision.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you don't have that clean-cut decision where there's even an opportunity for an A.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the question is, how do I get a B out of this?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: How do I get a B instead of a D or an F?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really how you have to approach that decision making because you're going to have incomplete data.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to have a no-win situation.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to have two individuals fighting in your office where they're both wrong, and yet you need both of them on your team, or where one of them is incredibly wrong and the other one is not.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: And yet you still need the bully as part of your team.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: How do you do that?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: What does that decision look like?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a clean-cut thing.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have to make that decision.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And yet we become so afraid of a failure, so afraid of making the wrong decision that I'm going to be judged against, instead of saying, if I'm wrong, I'll deal with it later on.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: But right now, this is what I see as the right decision, and I'm going to make it the right decision by acting on it, by deciding and acting on it.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a key element of being a leader that you don't learn in the classroom.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know that you can learn that stuff in a classroom.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I would argue, Derek, that you and I received a grade A leadership education in our undergraduate school, because most of our listeners and watchers may not understand.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_02: I know my kids didn't, and when I explained this to them, they were very taken aback.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: But the Air Force Academy isn't just a college.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: You don't go there, and people probably know this on the surface, but you don't just go there and go to class, go back to your dorm and study in whatever else.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: It is truly a leadership laboratory where the entire academy is run from the top 10 by cadets.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: Now there are officers that are in the mix that oversee the operations, but the day-to-day decisions that are made in squadrons and the way things are run.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'll give you an example that I gave my kids.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: As a senior at the academy, I was one of the lowest ranking academy cadets.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: I was an athletic officer, which I think at the time was cadet first lieutenant, which means I really had not much.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: But my responsibility, the ones that I come back to, it was my responsibility to weigh my peers in my squadron quarterly to make sure that they were within the Air Force's weight standards.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: And if they did not meet the Air Force's weight standards, I, me personally, was responsible for maintaining a record of what they were doing to get their weight back into standards.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: And ultimately, if someone in my unit, even potentially my next door neighbor that was the peer of mine, they could have gotten kicked out of the Air Force based on my recommendations, my analysis as an athletic officer.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'll tell you what, that's a lot of weight to put on a 21-year-old, you know, senior in college.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: I try to explain this to my kids about how when I was in college, I didn't just have my own self to worry about.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_02: I had a program.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_02: And like I said, I was the lowest of the low first lieutenant, cadet, first lieutenant.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I had a cadet squadron commander whose entire job was to make sure that all of us in the squadron, freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, were all doing everything we were supposed to do.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: This leadership laboratory, I can't tell you how many things I learned, both from my own experiences trying to lead, manage, organize, and put things together as an 18 to 22 year old.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: I learned a lot from that, but I learned even more from some of the experiences I had, both good and bad, from leaders, you know, in my time at the academy.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: And so the Air Force Academy is set up to build leaders in the Air Force.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's positioned to do so in a good way, not just from classroom leadership experience.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, that's there, and it's good to be able to talk about those frameworks and the analysis and all that other.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: But leading real people, looking your classmate in the eye and telling them they do not meet standards is a very hard thing to do for anybody, much less a 21-year-old peer.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: When I was a first year, a senior, I sat on an honor board and we kicked out a guy two months before graduation.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Two months before graduation, and I remember thinking, how can I do that?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: That was a lot of responsibility to put on young, I guess, 23, 24-year-old Derek and my peers.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think as a board of four or five of us, I can't remember how exactly it worked, but that was a lot of responsibility because it wasn't decided by the officers.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was decided by us.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think back to my years of leadership learning as a four degree, as a freshman, as a class leader, and then as a training non-commissioned officer, as a sophomore junior, senior, all those jobs that I had, running basic training for new kids right off the street.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I made a lot of mistakes.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: There are probably some cadets now, you know, former cadets who hate Derek Oaks because I was a terrible leader.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't doubt that, but I'm so grateful for the opportunity that I got to practice on them.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sorry that they had to deal with me.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: But I think of had I been thrown in a leadership position without that training and just become a second lieutenant without all that training, my chances of being a good leader would have been significantly less.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: I needed that practice.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I agree.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: That practice and the examples that were given to me by others that I was around was invaluable to me as a commander and as a leader later on in my career.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that I noticed later in my career, I actually didn't see this so much in my time at the academy because the academy, you know, everybody's 18 to 23, 24 years old were very, very similar.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: But later on in my career as a commander, I noticed that the big thing, and this is another kind of blind spot from an NBA program, is the real solid, good working organization and the really awesome places that I was at all had one thing in common.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: And that is that a culture that helped us to thrive.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't about rules and processes and procedures, it wasn't about statistics, it wasn't about metrics, it wasn't about any of that.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_02: It was about a culture that we built with trust and standards and examples and consistency and just wanting to be there that we bought into the culture, that we actually everyone considered themselves professionals and wanted to make the unit better and to carry out the commander's vision, the commander's intent, and to get us where we were supposed to be doing.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a piece that I think you can talk about in a classroom, but until you've seen it and been part of that winning culture, you see it in sports all the time, but you see it in very, very profitable and very successful businesses.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: People talk about it.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's the intangible.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: The intangible piece of leadership is the person that can actually help create that culture and mold it and make it for what they want it to be.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a culture does not a spreadsheet make.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: And don't get me wrong, you can study, you can do case studies of other leaders.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I look behind you, you've got a ton of books, you look behind me, both of us, and I would say the majority of my books are leadership books of some sort or another, leadership history books where I study history to ask myself, why did they do it the way they did?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: And why did they make the decisions that they made and how did they treat other people?
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And were they successful?
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And if not, why?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: All those things matter, but ultimately I have to get away from applying pen to paper and interact with other people.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think, Derek, what you're really talking about there is as a leader, when you talk about making those hard decisions, when you talk about trying to work your way through those difficult conundrums that you're going to come up with as a leader, you know, you're really talking about somebody that has moral courage.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: You don't get moral courage off a spreadsheet either.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that can give you the underprinting to help you take the decision to your boss.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember doing that a few times as a major and lieutenant colonel, having to take really, really hard decisions up to my bosses.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I always have the data to back myself up.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: But I also know a lot of others that wouldn't have made the same decision because they're afraid of what it would do for their career.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: And this is where you start to see politics get involved in a lot of areas.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: It's almost every business and job I've ever seen, even in the military, right?
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_02: There are politics that get involved because people want to protect themselves.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_02: And instead of having the courage to do maybe the right thing for their team, which is going to help build that culture.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: Some people fall down on that.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I will say that that's a piece that I don't think can be taught in a classroom.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think moral courage can be taught in a classroom.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: You can debate it, you can talk about it until you're blue in the face.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's not the same of having to put your life your, you know, your employment life on the line for a decision you're going to make.
• 31:39
  unknown: Yeah.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the vice musters that you're talking about, they're all tied, but I really think that culture creation and moral courage are inextricably linked.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: That you don't create the right culture if you don't have moral courage.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if you don't exemplify that, if you don't learn it, if you don't observe it through the people that you're working with, it's going to be really tough to create that culture where people thrive and people accelerate your business.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, absolutely.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that's such a it's amazing how big of a multiplier that having a boss that has moral courage and is tied into the same culture as the rest of the team makes a huge, huge difference.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: And that brings us to the last piece that I think is the human side.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_02: We've touched on this many, many times already over in this podcast.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_02: Spreadsheets don't tell the story of people.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: Spreadsheets don't tell the story of what motivates individuals, what makes them come to work, even why some people want to do this job.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't talk about a spreadsheet won't point out to you that somebody's staying up late because they have a new baby.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like those are all the things that come from being a manager of people and of having the experience and the judgment.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: I've been watching a TV show recently, because I remember when we were young, at least when we went to the academy, it seemed like to me the model of leadership and management they always talk to us about was the Picard and the Kirk, right?
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: The Star Trek analogy, leaders, managers.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: But I've found a new TV show where I've found a guy, a character that I love because the way he handles his situation, both up and down.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it's the pit.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you've seen have you seen the TV show, The Pit.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_02: So it's got Noah Wiley.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_02: Noah Wiley plays the head of an emergency room department, emergency department in a hospital in Pittsburgh.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: There's really almost no story.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's just these doctors as they go through their emergency in day.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_02: But Noah Wiley's character and the way he reacts to others around him and under him.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I just watched the way he does things.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: It had there is such a human component to his leadership that I think he's a really great example of a good leader.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: He has his flaw, just like every other leader.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: But it's interesting to watch him as he deals with grieving, you know, patients who have passed away and they're grieving loved ones, doctors who are struggling with things.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_02: This to me shows how important it is to have that empathy and that ability to deal with the human side of things.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_02: He's an expert in his field and it comes across constantly.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: He knows what he's doing, he knows how to make the right calls, and all these things he talked about, decision-making under uncertainty, and the responsibility that comes with leadership and the culture creation and all these things, he embodied all.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_02: So I'd encourage you to take a look at that.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's a great show, but I just think from a leadership perspective, that looking at the way he deals with these things is exactly what we're talking about.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that I think an MBA program can't get across to you as a future leader.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: Another way to look at that, a very simple way for anybody who is a parent of more than one child, especially like say you've had two girls, two boys, challenge anybody to tell me that both their daughters are the same, or both their sons are the same, or that your oldest is the same as your youngest.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: You think you've got it figured out by your first, second, maybe even your third kid.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, yeah, parenting's easy.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then the fourth one comes in, I'm like, I have no idea what I'm doing.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the human element.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's the interaction that you only get from doing it, from being with people.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: And we read Dr.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: Spock's books about how to raise kids, and a lot of people would say, Well, Dr.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: Spock didn't meet my fourth kid.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: Spock didn't understand how much of a challenge this one kid would be.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: And every family, if you've got more than a couple of kids, you definitely have something like that three or four or five, maybe fantastic.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: Then you're gonna have one that's fantastic in different ways, and you've got to figure out what that looks like.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: So we've been talking about the pitfalls of and the challenges of an MBA.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: Why would I get an MBA?
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of people that are about to write a big check for tuition for this next year.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: Why would that be a good idea?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, like I said, both you and I have a lot of friends who have an MBA.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: How can an MBA help?
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of things that an MBA program teaches that I really love.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you get an MBA?
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a key element of being a business leader if you pair it with experience.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: And even more so, if I have technical experience, like if I am a pilot, an aviation expert at the technical level, and then I get an MBA plus some leadership experience thrown in there, then that MBA fluency, the business fluency, can be very beneficial to me.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: I can be a great CEO in something like that.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm a military officer and I go through all the technical training of being a military officer, and then I get an MBA, I could be a pretty good defense executive.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: Or there are thousands of different examples of I have technical expertise in the field that I'm working in, and then I have some leadership experience, and then I get an MBA, I can actually be a very good leader in that respect because I'm just using that business fluency to make me better, to understand how my business fits together a little bit better.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think of a lot of I say kids, but you know, individuals who get their bachelor's degree in finance or get their bachelor's degree in whatever it is, and then they get an MBA right after that.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: So here they are, 24-year-old MBA.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not that they're worthless, but they lack so much to be able to use that business fluency.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I would almost argue that getting the business fluency, at least to a small degree, will make that MBA that much more effective for you and make that MBA an amplifier instead of just a big financial drain on you because of what you spent going to school.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, dude, I love that.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: I love your idea of the MBA as an amplifier because it's exactly the way I see it as well.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: The MBA provides a tool set, a framework that provides just an academic way of looking at running a business, managing operations, looking at finances.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: I also like that you talked about how an MBA provides you the fluency because there is a particular set of a glossary, a dictionary that you kind of have to be able to use and understand in your day-to-day workings as a leader in any business community, and particularly on the financial side of the house, because that seems to be the piece that a lot of people struggle with understanding, both in their personal lives and in their business side.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: So I agree with you wholeheartedly.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I have stated very stridently in the past on other places that I would never hire an MBA.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna chat again.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: I would hire the right MBA.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_02: And to your point, I think that the person that comes straight out of their undergraduate and goes right in the MBA is missing those important pieces to help them wean out of the program the important pieces.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: The problem they go going into the MBA program right out of undergraduate, you don't have the experience to help you discern what's really important versus what's not.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: And after you've had some experience and you've gone back, whether it's an executive MBA or it's a late-in-life MBA, I think you have a lot more judgment, knowledge, empathy, understanding, leadership to help you really focus on those tools that are going to help you the most in your business dealings and your business efforts.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_02: Because the tools, the frameworks, and this is one of my knocks on the Air Force.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_02: I tried to bring in some of these tools and frameworks to different commanders that I worked with, and they looked at me like I was an alien.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_02: And some of them were like, Where did you get this?
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: This is amazing.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, Well, this is what businesses do every day, you know, Gantt charts and perk charts and you know, all these things, these great frameworks, these great ways to analyze, you know, whatever operations that we're doing.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I love that piece of it.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so what I would encourage is if you're somebody who's an MBA or looking at getting an MBA, really look at those pieces.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: Figure out how to get not just the frameworks, not just the tools, but how to use those in real-world situations and maybe go out and try to run a business so that you can figure out what the most important pieces are and then try to grow your leadership through something else.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: We talked about in the previous podcast.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: We talked about voluntary organizations and associations and the civic culture that still exists in the United States.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's another great place to learn how to lead, is some of these volunteer organizations because volunteers are great, but are really difficult to lead because you can't fire them and they can quit at any time.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so you really want to hone your leadership chops, man, that's a great place to do it.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_02: But I agree with you, Derek.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_02: I think there is a value to an MBA.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_02: The value is as a multiplier, as an amplifier, as a tool set, as a tool belt that you can take with you into all your uh options.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: But I would also say be aware of where your shelf balls are, be aware of what you're missing and plug those holes somewhere else with some other types of experience.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: You can learn the tools, you can learn the vocabulary, but if you don't have that experience, you're missing context and perspective, in which case, you don't really learn it.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: You don't understand the value of it, which means that as you're going through that MBA program, you may not get as much out of it as you otherwise would because you don't know what's important.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know how to really apply it, as opposed to going, I was in a situation just like this, sitting in a classroom going, I was in a situation just like this, and this is how we handled it, or this is how we struggled, or this is how we failed.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: So now all of a sudden, those words and that classroom, that academic rigor actually has some application.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna get more out of it.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: MBA gives leaders tools to evaluate your situation and hopefully make better business decisions.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: That is a given.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Mission command, the ability to lead and make decisions, teaches leaders how to create organizations capable of making better decisions without them.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, my wife's grandparents used to always say, our job is to train our replacements.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: The best way to train your replacements is to create an environment, the culture that you talked about, where your subordinates don't need you for every single decision.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: They don't need you for every single action because you've set up that culture in that environment where they're able to make decisions.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: You've given them the direction, the vision where they're able to do that.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: So you take the learning to give that business fluency, and then you take the leadership experience and the technical experience, and you have the makings or the potential to be a great leader.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: Any parting shots there, Rob, before we close out?
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh man, thanks for letting me be part of this discussion because I think, again, it's an important one.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's an important one for not just leaders, but it's an important one for the country because you start to see yourself and you start to see businesses making decisions that I think are questionable in some ways.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_02: And it's important for us to understand how to lead as leaders and not as financial managers.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm all about schooling.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm all about undergraduate and graduate schooling.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think our country is better because of it, but you have to take a step back and say, okay, why?
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: Why would I take that class, that course, that degree?
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: What am I getting out of it?
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: What is my long-term goal and how does it fit into my own personal context?
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: An MBA can fit into a lot of people's personal context and make them much better at what they do.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: The question is, how am I using it?
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: What am I not getting out of it that I don't want to get out of it?
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to get it in other areas.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us for everybody.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed this conversation about what an MBA is and what an MBA isn't, at least from our perspective.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Send us a note and tell me I'm wrong.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us that we are completely out to lunch.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: Call me from your MBA program and tell me everything that you're learning and how we missed the boat and clearly we didn't go to a good school.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll have an ongoing conversation with that.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: I always love a little bit of verbal combat.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to have that personal conversation, also reach out to me and we'll have a direct conversation about that, about what I mean, about why we felt like this topic was important and any other topics that you want to talk about.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: Join us by subscribing, liking, commenting.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: That helps us with the show and it helps us make it better and helps more people join in on the show.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we love having more people join us here.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: Help us to become better decision makers for better results.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that's it for today's episode of Commander's Intent Podcast.
• 43:53
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• 43:58
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• 44:03
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• 44:12
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