Let’s jump over the basic degrees here, the associate’s degree and the bachelor’s degree. Let’s assume you are here following along with one Someday Wise many years after completing a B.S, B.A, or similar traditional four-year program.
You’ve changed since then. Grown up. Worked a while, maybe started a family, bought a home, the whole shebang. Now you’re a late twenty-something, or maybe a later-something. You’ve been thinking about your current career and future prospects, and the notion of a Master’s of Business Administration has popped up. Maybe some of your peers have one. Maybe you always loved school and it sounds like fun. Maybe your local college has figured out a new, much needed revenue stream by offering such a degree option to nearby residents.
Oh boy. I have an awful lot of opinions on this, and after getting to the point, I’ll rant on for a while later on in this post about it.
But now, a story about one Someday Wise: A new leadership position was tentatively on the horizon, one that could have been a potential match for me. All just potential, mind you. Maybe the position was going to be created, a supervisory position within my own department, for my own job function, within a year or so.
This was one of those carrots that get dangled in front of the workers, and frankly, during the long slow, twenty-year slog of my early career, I’d seen a few of these. More than once, in completely different types of businesses, fabulous future opportunities were hinted at, never quite to be obtained by one Someday Wise.
Oh boy. These were all complicated situations, with lots of variables (humans are like that). The variables dealt with the whims and resources of management, and the potential skills and immaturity of, well, me. Someday Wise. The Someday part of that felt very far away, very elusive during those years. More like Never Wise.
I, like many others before and since, thought graduating college with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree at 23 years old, with the associated employment of the grad program (teaching and research assistant), would start me on a satisfying career as the ink was drying on my last credential.
Anyway, during the next couple of decades, I managed to support myself, trying to seek out good opportunities, but actually making lots of mistakes. Like, over and over. I now see where woody, dried-out carrots were dangled in front of me that led to dead ends, and tasty, crunchy carrots were dangled that did not suit my tastes, so I foolishly walked away from them.
Water under the bridge. Moving back to my more recent career situation, I saw where a leadership opportunity might be coming up and decided I should do SOMETHING to prepare. A lot of people might think an MBA improves your chances at a promotion. Perhaps it can – every situation is different, and hiring managers may be impressed by all sorts of things. But I did not think it would help in this case. So I did something different. Something free, and in my opinion, worth on the order of $10,000. That’s the kind of math that is helping me become Someday Wise.
I signed up for Coursera, which offers free Massive Online Open Courses. I searched for Business classes, specifically in Leadership and Management. I found a specialization of six classes being offered by Northwestern University. This is a prestigious, expensive college well known in the Midwest, specifically Chicago, as one of the very best colleges available.
Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, is a private college that one Someday Wise would have loved to attend, had she come from a background affectionately known as “old money.” Or “new money” would do the trick as well. “Money,” really, is what I am getting at here. The place costs a fortune. Always has, probably always will. It’s rigorous and selective. I mention in other posts that I wanted to go to the local huge land-grant state university, and that is true, because it was the most desirable place that I had any chance of actually attending. If I were dripping with trust funds, of course I would have preferred someplace even more exclusive and glamorous, to my not-yet-wise self.
Back to the present day and this Coursera situation. At the time, sometime around 2015, it cost about $600 to complete all six classes and receive an official credential. Or, you could audit five of the six classes, for free, and pay only if you chose to do the sixth, which was a capstone project. I went this second route, though I did not finish the fifth class. In short, I dropped out after completing 2/3 of the program. And I did it all for free, in terms of dollars, spending only my time, all at my home computer, in the early hours before work each day, because Someday Wise is a morning person.
“Someday,” you may be thinking, “what a waste of time and effort that was on your part! You started the program but did not complete it! Pointless!” No, reader, it really was not pointless at all. It was pointed. It may have been the most valuable advanced education I ever received.
A disclaimer might be in order, since it sounds like I am doing a commercial now, for Coursera, or for Northwestern University, or for its leadership specialization. All apologies, folks, for any agenda-pushing, but I can assure you nobody is paying me anything to tell you this. (If that ever changes, I will disclose it, because that is how Someday Wise rolls).
You see, I knew a few people at my company who had an MBA, mostly from our own small, local, private university, and most of them looked to be in exactly the same jobs they would have had without it. And I don’t like to be mean here, but let’s just say, some of them did not appear to have real great leadership skills in spite of their MBA.
Someday Wise may have finally developed some wisdom, because here is what she thought:
“If I get an MBA, I will spend a lot of money. Having the degree is of little value unless I actually apply the knowledge to being a better leader. Northwestern is providing FREE knowledge, delivered by the same faculty who teach in their MBA program. What if I just get the KNOWLEDGE and start actually USING it in my everyday job, for free? What if I start appearing to those around me, to be an obvious choice for leadership opportunities?”
The phrase WHAT IF? is fast becoming a favorite of one Someday Wise. People who ask this question are often the world’s problem solvers. I think they always have been. There should be classes just called What if? that explain this to people. Classes in elementary school, high school, and college. Because otherwise you don’t figure it out until a long someday in the future.
So I asked myself the question and I answered it with, “well, Someday, let’s try it and find out what if.” I enjoyed the four classes immensely and often felt I was getting a world-class MBA education without the price tag. Or at minimum, a series of those executive development seminars that take place over a few days away from the office, typically with exorbitant costs rivaling the degree programs themselves, though they, like my Coursera program, do not provide a degree at the end. They just provide knowledge. Knowledge I was getting. For free.
Supplemental, optional reading was suggested, with the most current version of various real college textbooks cited. As with the entire textbook racket, the current versions were anywhere from $25 to $150 each. And let’s face it. Hardly anyone does ALL of the recommended reading, even for real college classes with real credit hours.
Some of these textbooks had earlier editions, which included essentially the same information, but with slightly outdated references to organizations that had since failed or merged into other organizations. Big deal. Same concepts, and anyway I am old enough to remember the previous organizations so those references did not bother me.
The more editions back you went, the cheaper the books became, presumably because they are perceived to be ever more outdated. I only bought those earlier editions, on ebay. I ignored titles that were first editions at the time I took the classes, with no cheaper earlier version. I paid less than $10 for each book I bought, including shipping. Old books nobody wanted, that were going to sit around on shelves forever, or end up in an incinerator or landfill.
I liked the way the content was delivered, in short, fast-moving, engaging lecture modules of 3-10 minutes. This fits the adult attention span, and also my schedule as a busy working parent. I could fit in at least one module almost daily, and some days I did several. Steady progress was quite easy. I was glad I bought cheap old editions of only a few of the textbooks, as I did only a fraction of the recommended reading.
Best of all, the information resonated with me in a way that made me feel Currently Wise. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I got it. I fully understood, and agreed with, everything they were saying. I’d experienced, in my own 25 year career, similar examples of good practices and bad practices regarding leadership and management. I knew intuitively that the information was spot-on, and many days I went in to the office and applied a concept that I had learned earlier that morning, with a good measure of success.
You see, my friends, learning that is never used is pointless. If it’s used someday, it’s less pointless. If it’s used even a little bit, to help understand something else useful, it’s less pointless.
Learning that is used, applied in a practical way, to actual real-life situations, is valuable. I mentioned that I knew some people with an MBA who did not appear to have great leadership skills. Of course I don’t know how the content of their programs aligned with the free classes I was taking on Coursera, but either it was not easy to apply, or some of these folks were not doing a great job of applying it.
What’s the ending to that story of one Someday Wise? Well thankfully, my story is not really over yet, per se, but I did use the information, consistently, to improve my own performance on the job from that point forward. The effort was noticed, the leadership job did get created, I did apply and interview among a competitive pool of candidates, and I was selected for the job. During the interviews, I referred several times to these classes and how they had already helped me perform better, and how they would help me be an effective leader. Classes that had provided me no formal credit whatsoever.
More than two years hence, I continue to apply the information from those four classes in my daily work. I have shared with my team, repeatedly, many of the concepts, and how we can use them to perform better as a group, and watched them incorporate that thinking. I actually made that information part of my being. A recent experience surprised and delighted me with confirmation of how well I really learned those lessons.
My company is trying to do a better job with development of our workers, but as with all organizations, financial resources are limited. So I started my team (totally optional for them) on the same path I took almost three years ago, using work time to do it, and sitting through it with them.
Most of the video lectures are the same, and even though I watched most of them only once, I was surprised at how many I remembered. I am surprised how much of this I have already applied in my leadership support for these people, often to the letter. They already have heard me going on about teamwork, and they have seen me apply many of the concepts that are now being defined and explained to them. This information makes sense to them, because they have seen it in action.
I really, truly, learned, and applied, this information. My team and I have really, truly, benefited from it, even though I have no formal credential to “show for it.” I have great people wanting to come work for my team, because it is becoming known as a great team to work with. Why is that? Are my people great? Well sure, and I do everything I can to make certain they shine with their own light. Which is hard, frankly, because like many people who are not currently wise, I think I want the credit for myself. But in my quest to become Someday Wise, I know that putting them on a pedestal while I cheer them on from the sidelines, is the ultimate secret to success for all of us. That kind of deep introspective thinking is what wisdom is all about, and I hope to achieve it Someday.
Have a nice day!
Someday Wise 