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, and then what I’m good at is talking through the items, finding bits that my financier may have missed, and discussing what an appropriate discount rate should be.

While I can write a detailed marketing strategy, I’m better at coming up with the broad strategy and leaving the details to those who are best at it.

Teams work well when they work together; almost no one works in isolation. Use your strengths and let your teammates shore up your weaknesses.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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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, for instance, doesn’t sell coffee, it sells an experience, the “third place” which is familiar and homelike, where you have music and comfortable seating, you can have a meeting, but you aren’t distracted by either home or work needs (except when your BlackBerry starts flashing and vibrating at you). This is why they haven’t made a competitive response to McDonald’s. People will choose one over the other, but McDonald’s isn’t going after Starbucks’ core business-the experience.

On the other hand, lots of people go to business school to give them new opportunities in their lives. One of my friends had worked extensively in technology (as had I), and we were looking for a change. We went to speak to our strategy lecturer about it, and he advised us that, strategically, if you were throwing away IT and tech skills in this market, you’d be unwise.

This caused us to look back at ourselves and really try to analyse what it was that we were good at.

I’d already been on my second career-I’d shifted from performing arts and nonprofit entrepreneurship to technology work in Silicon Valley-arguably one of the entrepreneurship centres of the world-certainly for IT companies. I turned down very good, very lucrative jobs building and running data centres, and I started thinking of myself as an entrepreneur rather than a technologist-defining myself my who I was rather than what I did.

Whereas most of my colleagues in IT had focused on a sector-biotech, say, or the Internet, I’d worked almost exclusively for small, growing companies in a wide range of fields-biotech, Internet services, advertising, security, chip design, theatre, event management, consulting, government services, transportation. Where my colleagues argued for clean, elegant design and tight, efficient code, I’d try to look at the big picture, to understand why it was that Marketing made seemingly unreasonable demands, why it was that the executive management would ignore profitable centres while focussing on money-losing businesses, and why Finance would drop critical line-items from our budgets. I certainly did make a lot of unreasonable arguments myself, but I ended up often being the person who made the connections between those groups.

My self-searching provided me with a list of things I was good at:

· Making connections

· Seeing the big picture

· Translation between groups (how you talk to engineers versus salespeople)

· Developing and mentoring

· Strategic direction, in product, marketing, sales, or overall.

· Choosing which details to focus on

All of which adds up to entrepreneur. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised when I was knocked back from the big private equity houses and consulting firms-while they’d have a use for someone like me, they couldn’t see it.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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 things. These are (or have been) important people- important to someone, anyway.

Suddenly, these people are in strange bidding wars, having to jump through hoops and submit assignments and not getting any feedback on them and, in some cases, failing.

There were people who, through the complicated elective-choosing system, didn’t get to have lecturers or courses that they came to Oxford for. Some of the lesson here was to make better choices. Some of the lesson is that you can’t do everything. Some of it is to just pick yourself up off the floor and deal with it.

There’s an economic principle called Sunk Cost, the lesson of which is that, once something is in the past, you can’t get hung up on how much it cost-if the right decision is to move on and trash it, you trash it. You move forward. You look at the situation you’re in and move forward from there-not from before you became the King of Bad Decisions.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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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 know your lecturers, what they liked or didn’t, and you knew what to focus on.

The Oxford system, like life, is much more complicated and difficult to navigate. To start with, we had to tread a fine line between business writing and academic writing. Secondly, your papers are all double-blind double-marked. You hand them in at the exams schools with only a number on them, and you receive them back, without comments, with only a mark on them. You had to read others’ papers and intuit what you may have done wrong. Third, you didn’t get to know who marked them, so you couldn’t ask. The lack of a grading scale meant that it was that much harder to deconstruct what you didn’t know.

Yes, it’s unfair. And frustrating. Welcome to life. It’s a little glib, but it’s also a bit of a dose of reality.

Just like you might go out and start a business or get a job and it’ll turn out wrong, you’ll fail, lose all your money, your grandma’s house, and whatever else, so it is with work.

On the flip side, you might end up with a great mark for something that you thought was terrible. Maybe you hit on some nice insight, or maybe you just got lucky. Sometimes overanalysis is worse than underanalysis. Sometimes you just manage to start Friendster and have a decent run on VC money while you figure out what to do with your life.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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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 poets were terrified that the final exam was a detailed review of the mechanics of accounting standards.

The lectures consisted, for the most part, of a Japanese and Italian man making jokes and examples about how the science of accounting is really a grey area, as the values of things change depending on the business operations.

The lessons learned were to think critically about everything-especially the hard numbers on a balance sheet. What is your inventory really worth, when it was purchased at different prices at different times? What does “goodwill” really refer to? Define revenue (you’d think that one would be easy). The other lesson learned was the bootstrapping-you had to learn all the mechanics of accounting yourself (there was an evening class for those with trouble), but Tomo wasn’t going to sit with you each week and go over adding and subtracting columns of figures-his work was on strategic accounting-what a manager needs to know about what his accountant is doing.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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(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 only apply to Oxford. I feel very fortunate to have the gall to apply, raw intellect to get in, persistence to succeed, and perhaps the wisdom to let a little of what I’ve learned sink in, not to mention a great heap of humility in the face of so many talented and fascinating classmates.

Business school – like any school – is an experience, not a lesson or a set of skills. If you want to learn the skills of an MBA, you can do it on your own, with books. I’d start with a good micro- and macroeconomics primer, an accounting book, the McKinsey book on valuation, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, and then start working through the Personal MBA.You can teach yourself strategy, operations management, valuation, management, statistics, economics, and marketing all on your own. What you won’t get out of that is the experience of others’ experiences, the network, and the time off/huge student loans. It’s up to you.

Some of what you’ll have the opportunity to learn at Oxford is here. This is beyond all the cool guest lecturers, the Oxford Union, the speakers, conferences, and amazing professors you would encounter there.

This series is all be tagged “Lessons learned” if you want to read all of them.

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