Use who you are & what you’re good at in your teams
Teams are groups that are cohesive. In most of the work you’ll do in business school, in work, and in life will require the assistance and aid of others.
While I can build a financial model, there are others who can probably do it better, [...]

African Branding
Kampala– and much of Africa– in incredibly brand-conscious. Entire buildings and building blocks are painted (often just for the cost of the paint and labour) in UTL blue, Warid red, Zain purple-pink (a particulalry hideous shade that makes me think of a little blood mixed with Pepto-Bismol– see below), and now Orange.

Bugolobi trading centre [...]

Figure out what you’re good at and be who you are.
In strategy courses, we talk a lot about sustainable competitive advantage-what it is that makes your company better than others at doing what it is that you do-in some cases, you may have companies that compete in markets but don’t directly compete against each other-Starbuck’s, [...]

You don’t get to make the rules; deal with it.
This one you hopefully learned in undergrad, but it bears some repeating. You take a top international business programme which requires several years’ experience to get in and you’re quite likely to have a lot of talented people who are used to having their way with [...]

You don’t get to know the rules; deal with it.
For most of my academic life, I had some idea of what the grading policy would be for my work-I always lost all the penmanship points, but got most of the rest of them. You could, of course, use this to game the system-you’d get to [...]

The most important lessons are learned, not taught.
You can only be taught so much in life, but most of what’s important you’ll have to learn yourself.
A lot of people were frustrated in our core Financial Reporting course-the accountants were upset that the course was teaching that their science was all tricks, smoke, and mirrors. The [...]

What you learn at Oxford’s Business School
(The most important parts of which they don’t teach you)
In my final set of posts about Oxford, I take a look back, six months out, and reflect on what I learned at Oxford.
I suspect that some of this applies to all business schools, though much of it will certainly [...]