The unforgettable MBA Journey:Part 1 - Why MBA?

First of all, accept my apologies for not writing for so long. I know, some of you requested me to write more but life has been a roller coaster ride in the last two years and hence peace of mind & writing took a backseat. 

But it's such rides in life that fills you up with experiences and stories that kinda push you to write again. 

So, here I am, writing about my MBA journey. I dreamt about the tickets to such a  journey in 2008 but could only earn the tickets in June of 2014 :) 

For long, I have been wanting to pen down this unforgettable, challenging, and at-times painful experience. The experience truly was a life transforming and once in a lifetime event and I am grateful to Hult International Business School for this. 

The trigger for writing this series of blogs was also because of the people who have been contacting me to know about my experience at Hult. I get 4-5 emails every week from prospective students asking about my HULT MBA experience. Hope this series of blogs will help you find your answers. In part 1, I am giving the reasons that led me to do a MBA.

So let's first rewind and go back in years. What will your response be if I tell you that until 2008, I never ever wanted to do an MBA? Since 10th standard, I have been very passionate about computers and with a Bachelors of Engineering degree in computers, I always wanted to stay close to working on computers and so in early days in my career when I was a developer, MS was one of the options in my mind but MBA wasn't even a distant option.

So what led me to make my mind to do MBA? They say, realization is key to attaining. I had three:

The first realization came when I started reporting to my boss, Jason Law, then CTO at my previous Company, Finicity. I was a software development manager and was responsible for building teams and guiding them to be one of the world's best in being able to ship softwares. With the aim so high, guided by Jason, we started framing ways in which we can achieve our goals. As part of this excercise, we started researching on how other companies have achieved such a goal and we also started asking what it takes to build a company that can last forever. Yes, our conversations and actions were guided a lot by books like 'Build to Last' and 'Good to Great'. This was also the first time I saw company's leadership involving employees from all levels in the organization to collectively define what it means to be great. During this excercise, the goal was not just to touch the minds of employees but also hearts. We were looking for ways to make every employee a stakeholder in company's success. It's is during this excercise that we dove deep on how we are developing software today v/s how we aught to be. We even questioned personal habits of a software engineer which positively or negatively are impacting growth. 

It's at this time that Jason exposed me to concepts like Organization Culture, Managing Complexity, Managing people vs managing delivery, Data driven and revenues seeking decision making and what not. Guided by these concepts and mentored by him, we built teams which years later became saviour during recession. I was amazed with his ability to steer all of us to connect everything we do, even in tech teams, to business value and on how acutely he applied his learnings from MBA to challenges the company was facing.

It is during this transformation that I realized that if I want to be at senior leadership positions in technology companies and most importantly if I want to pursue my dream of being an entrepreneur, I must think of doing an MBA. 

But they say when life is going great and you continue to see successs come your way, you procrastinate on your dreams. So did I, until the second realization hit me. 

I tried to launch a non profit initiative in 2010 geared towards bridging the gap between engineering education imparted in colleges vs the industry expectations. I had a grand launch of the website thanks to my college, AIT, Chickmagalur. The idea was very well taken and the initiative was covered within the state by 10 print media papers. But still It could only last a month, for many reasons than one. I still feel that it was a lost opportunity. It's this failure which made me realize that I had gaps in my enterpreneurial ability and I lacked enough business acumen to take my ideas further. 

This was summer of 2010 and by this time I was certain that if I have to realize my dream of being an entrepreneur, I must do an MBA. So why it took me four additional years?

I wanted to do my MBA from USA as I was inspired and impressed by Jason's MBA experience. But journey still took 4 years to begin. This time though, during this four year period, I was not procrastinating, I was acting. I quit my startup to join Deloiite with the plan to move to USA after a year working for Indian arm of Deloitte. But sometimes life puts you in situations where you make choices to slow down a bit for your greater good as not everytime your plans work. I had to quit Deloitte and move back to Mumbai. I knew this will further delay my USA move but was the right step towards my life goals. 

I came back to the startup but this time to eventually take a very challenging but rewarding task. I was at the peak of my career with everything going for me. I was the youngest General Manager the startup has had and I was learning everyday with the opportunities and challenges such a position brings. But while others in the company were seeing strengths of me, I was realizing the gaps in me. I was managing HR and Accounting team with no prior experience or knowledge of such fields. Same was the case with marketing and back office teams I was indirectly managing.  

The biggest opportunity, also the biggest challenge and the final realization came when under the guidance of the Finicty's COO, Nick Thomas, the company was looking to mend the old ways of  building user-experience in its softwares, was looking to embrace distrupting changes in technology and the company was needing to build software at a blazing speed, almost 10 times faster than the company has ever done before. When the goal is so steep, the vision which is coming from top and the visionary and its beneficiaries sitting across the globe in USA, the task to lead the employees to execute the vision was daunting and it became even tough because of disruptive competition which was eating company's top line. Everyday, I added new skills and everyday I also realized that there are tones of skills that I need to acquire to do my job better. This awesome, enriching but constructively self critical phase finally pushed me to take the step to do my MBA. More on this on another blog :)

 While,one of the reasons, I came back was that the startup will work on getting me to USA which will eventually enable me to do my MBA few years down the line but things were moving really slow on this front. Although, the startup was working to get me to USA but it was one of the many things that they were trying to do. On the hindsight, during my MBA, I realized that this deal to get me to USA as part of  move back to the startup was poorly negotiated with not much fault on company's leadership side. More on this in another blog :) 

But for me and my wife, time was running out. After all, MBA was one of the milestone to get to our dreams and we had many more personal and professional milestones to achieve. Don't they say, " you can not catch the sky until you yourself climb the heights". My realization: You can't have someone else build your way to your dream. Here I was, filled with determination, passion and all the energy to start it all over again for my MBA dream. 

It took 4 years for me to finally make a decision that after 10 years of industry experience, time has come for me to take a study break. It was summer of 2014 that I tendered my resignation and started preparing for the next phase in life: MBA Student Life at Hult International Business School.