What you learn on the Oxford MBA – 4

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 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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