The 10 Minute MBA (Unaccredited)

After spending a significant amount of time getting an MBA, if find it interesting that the concepts that I thought were the most insightful, seem to be the ones least followed in the business world. Here’s my list in no particular order:

1) Be careful what you base the employee incentives on, because that is exactly what they will do.
2) Money now is worth more than money later. The degree of which is directly related to the likelihood that you get the money later.
3) For an individual investor, the stock market is pretty much efficient. A dartboard will pick stocks as better than an individual will ½ the time. The bigger the company, the truer this is.
4) When making a decision, only base the costs on the marginal costs affected by the decision, not allocated fixed costs that the decision does not impact.
5) The throughput (speed) of any process can ONLY go as fast as the throughput of its slowest component.
6) Marketing is not the same as sales. Marketing is creating demand for your product, and is focused on both your products and your customers. Sales is the last step in the process, getting the customer to make a decision.
That’s about it; everything else is just a detail you learn along the way. If you think about them, it’s pretty hard to argue. But these concepts seem to be very elusive in the corporate world, and especially IT.