Last Monday I began a 2-year MBA program at Brigham Young University, and all of last week I participated in an intensive, full-time introduction to the program. I was thoroughly surprised and impressed by the quality of the teaching and am excited to be able to be able to learn from such high-quality professors.
Some of the highlighted concepts from the first week of my MBA courses included:
(1) Don’t hire anyone you can’t fire. Charity does not tolerate poor performance. When employees feel they cannot be fired, their performances drop and it does a disservice to them and the company.
(2) Opportunities multiply as they are seized. In my life, when I jump through one window that has opened another series of opportunities presents itself.
(3) Be Fair, but have the intestinal fortitude to make the tough decisions. Many companies allow themselves to be run into bankruptcy because they are not able to make the tough decisions, such as cutting staff and raising prices when necessary. When companies reach bankruptcy, a turnaround expert comes in and takes those difficult courses of action. If the bankrupt companies could have chosen to take those actions themselves they may have avoided bankruptcy. So, as business owners, we need to be willing to make the difficult decisions ourselves. If we can’t make these difficult decisions ourselves, we should get out of business. However, if those difficult decisions, such as letting staff go, ever cease to be painful, we should also get out of business.
(4) Don’t do anything stupid. This was a famous quote by the CEO of a company that was embroiled in accounting scandal. I originally felt that this quote referred to his desire to keep everything legal. However, it clearly became evident that this quote was iconic because the CEO and his team were consistently pushing the boundaries of ethics and this statement created a “moral ambiguity” under which ethical and legal lines were crossed.
This quote took on much more meaning on Friday, when we went to Aspen Grove to participate in team building activities that taught us business principles. Our guide for the day took us to two railroad ties that were about 15 feet apart. A rope hung down in the middle but was too far away to reach. Our group had to get across the gap between the railroad ties. To complicate the situation, many of the team members were given disabilities. For example, one of the team members had no arms. So, one of our group members created a lasso with belts and a shoe tied to the end, and lassoed the rope. Then, after a few members had crossed the chasm, we tied a loop in the rope hoping that the member of our group who was not able to use his arms would be able to sit in the rope loop. However, the rope was so high that it was very difficult to lift him into a sitting position. The “disabled” group member had only his feet in the loop as we were struggling, and he finally asked us to just let him swing. The entire group filled with laughter, because we could see what he could not… His head would have hit the railroad tie if we had let him swing. The point of these two examples is that we need to be sure there is no ambiguity between what is right and wrong so that we don’t do something stupid, and we don’t let others around us swing into that railroad tie.
Posted on August 5th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: BYU Marriott School, Business Management, Entrepreneurship, Ethics, Mergers & Acquisitions, Self Improvement
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