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Name:
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GoneFishin
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Subject:
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Harvard MBA
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Date:
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5/11/2010 9:57:17 AM
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Exerpt from article in American Thinker
February 03, 2004
By Thomas Lifson
President George W. Bush is the very first President to hold a Masters Degree in Business Administration. Even better (or worse, depending on your perspective), his MBA is from Harvard Business School. The comparatively small amount of attention paid by the political press to the President's Harvard MBA partially reflects a generalized ignorance of, and hostility toward, the degree itself.
The very first lesson drummed—into new students, as they file into the classrooms of Aldrich Hall, is that management consists of decision—making under conditions of uncertainty. There is never perfect information, and decisions often have to be made even when you'd really prefer to know a lot more. Given this reality, students are taught many techniques for analyzing the data which is available, extracting the non—obvious facets, learning how read into it the reasonable inferences which can be made, while quantifying the risks of doing so, and learning the costs and value of obtaining additional data.
The job of the executive is to weigh probabilities in evaluating imperfect information; to assess the costs and benefits of acting or not acting; and to construct scenarios around the various possible time frames for taking action, taking into account the probable reactions of the other vital actors. That political opponents at home carp at him over his imperfect data at the time is no surprise, and no reason to regret his decision. The costs of not acting were simply too great, and the downside potential of erroneous information too low to prefer inaction. Better data would have been preferable, of course, but President Bush shows no sign of remorse for doing what he knows was the prudent thing under the circumstances.
A second broad and important lesson the President learned at Harvard Business School is to embrace a finite number of strategic goals, and to make each one of those goals serve as many desirable ends as possible. The truism of this lesson is that if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. If you can't focus on everything, then you need to be able to focus on those few goals which will have the broadest impact, leading to a future capacity to attain other desirable ends. No exact number of goals is the limit, but three is an awfully good number to aim at. Those goals should be mutually consistent, so that the step—by—step accomplishment of each one aids in the achievement of the others.
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