Graduation Speech: The Value of my MBA
The following excerpt comes from Taylor’s speech at the Evening-Weekend MBA Class of 2009 graduation:
“It’s been a long journey for all of us, families included. Though, looking back, 20 months has flown by faster than any of us might have imagined. So what did we learn during this whirlwind of class, study and stress? What did we get for our time, effort, and thousands of dollars in tuition? I think most of us learned how to sleep less and drink caffeine more. We studied and then, in some cases, forgot all the classic business school subjects – Accounting, Statistics, Finance, Econ, Strategy, and the like. We read Michael Porter until our eyes burned, and we learned that at least 23 academic frameworks and possibly a primer can be applied to every business problem. And while these proved worthy pursuits, the more important lessons may have been realized during the act of studying them.
In the process, we learned how to work in diverse, geographically separated teams and discovered how effective good teams can be. We also learned how to manage our time more effectively ever before. We balanced the responsibilities of demanding jobs and family life with those of graduate study. Many of us did so in the midst of a host of life changes, including moves, weddings, too many babies to count, and one set of triplets. And yet, we’ve all found time we never knew we had for weekly conference calls, “learning-experience-style” exams, papers, presentations, and on and on. We became unimaginably productive, and the quality of our work rose even as the time it took to complete fell. Though we may not have realized it at the time, the rigors of the program propelled us to a level of professional and academic excellence beyond our wildest expectations, and the effect of this experience proved far more consequential than more concrete concepts such as the five forces model or the CAPM.
As we graduate today, our mastery of these new lessons begs the question, what should we do now that we’re finished? How do we maintain and apply the lessons of the last 20 months? As one of the younger members of our class, I’ll answer this by drawing on the wisdom of someone much older and wiser. Aristotle is quoted as saying:
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
After the past 20 months, we’ve done the hard part – like it or not, the EMBA program provided a great deal of “training and habituation.” Now our challenge is to maintain the excellence we’ve achieved here in the months and years to come.”
