******************************************************************************
They say that every life has a story, and the media does a fine job reporting intimate details in the lives of the rich, famous and sometimes infamous. But from time to time, the most intriguing tales can be unearthed right in your own back yard. Case in point, here’s the one about Once upon a time, Mr. & Mrs. Love of While sharing a two-bedroom apartment in After his brief show business career, Love paid the bills by working as a furniture refinisher in It was there that Love encountered a French vagabond named Together the two men opened an antique refinishing business and remodeled the interiors of retail shops in throughout “I gained a lot of weight when we moved to Love needed a hernia repair and while in the hospital he met his surgical team including a person called a scrub tech. “At the time I had no idea what that was,” said Love. After surgery Love sensed it was time for some major life changes and spent his accumulated globe-trotting money to return to school. At age 22 he became a surgical scrub tech himself and was hired by During his five years at Cedars, Love worked with a surgeon who performed stomach-stapling surgery as a treatment for obesity. “I scrubbed all his cases because I could handle his temperament. Finally I asked him if this would this work for me. He said he had been waiting for me to ask!” Love explained. “I believe it was a gift from God that the surgeon performed the surgery for free, the anesthesiologist, who was a good friend, didn’t bill me, and the hospital didn’t charge me because I worked there.” This was in 1987 and after topping the scales at Although his weight loss goal had been reached, Love had new frustrations. No where in LA could he find affordable housing in a relatively safe area, this in spite of earning a decent wage. “I got mugged in But still more changes were in store. “I met my wife Connie in the OR at Saddleback and fell in love with her the third day I knew her. We dated for five years before she would marry me,” said Love. During those years Love returned to school once again – this time at “I look at a lot of things in life now as how God has ordered my movements through different experiences with different people so that I could be who I am now,” said Love. In addition to his duties as a staff operating room nurse, Love served stints as Neurological Clinical Coordinator and nighttime charge nurse for two years. “I’m not an administrator. I kept going to school at night and got my bachelors degree so I’m very cognizant of the business component of health care and personnel management but it’s just not my style. It was much less stress for me to stand down into a staff role where the only work ethic I had to worry about was my own,” Love said. “It was also important to me to have direct patient contact, something that was impossible while working behind a desk.” With all the pieces of his life seemingly in place, what motivated Love to undergo yet another surgery to have the stapling reversed? “Connie was an avid cyclist at the time we met and got me into biking,” explained Love. “I started exercising a little bit but couldn’t eat really well because of the stapling. About the only fruit I could eat were bananas.” “The top of your stomach gets filled first and tells you psychologically that you’re full,” said Dr. Kenneth Deck, the surgeon who performed the reversal on Love. “In the gastric banding procedure that Jeffrey had, a band made of special material was placed around the stomach near its upper end, creating a small pouch and a narrow passage into the larger remainder of the stomach.” After surgery, a person can generally eat only a half to a whole cup of food without discomfort or nausea. In addition, everything eaten must be well chewed into a mushy consistency to pass easily through the decreased opening. Clogging the passageway may require medical intervention to reopen it. “My meals had to go through a space that for me was less than a centimeter wide into a cavity about the size of a teacup. I could drink a glass of water or eat a half of piece of chicken and be full,” said Love. “Once I started getting into mountain biking pretty heavily I wasn’t getting enough to eat. Cycling was doing more harm than good because I wasn’t able to refuel.” He went to a metabolic specialist who confirmed he was suffering from metabolic starvation. For Love, God was transitioning his life in still another direction. Attitude is everything. The reversal was performed in November 2000 and Love was back on his bike within three months. In April of 2001 he rode 105 miles as a participant in the annual Solvang Century ride. “If I had stayed the way I was when I had the surgery, which was rather sedentary, I probably would have been okay. But there was a quality of life I wanted. My wife is very health conscious and now that I’ve been reversed we’re cooking wonderful low fat meals at home. She’s overjoyed.”
(originally published in Los Angeles Times Supplement)
International Management Group founder Mark H. McCormack says in his book, What They Don't Teach You in Harvard Business School: Notes From A Street Smart Executive, that the best lesson that anyone can learn from business school is an awareness of what it can't teach you. All the ends and outs of everyday business life is largely a self-learning process. Phyllis Buford, CEO of the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management agrees. MBA graduates should come away with certain skills: how to ask questions, how to look at things from different points of view, how to take risk, how to analyze and research and come up with a workable plan that they can either execute or recommend to someone else. But when it come to such things as, evaluating the performance of an individual you are supervising, motivating staff, handling difficult people, and keeping a balance between what is theory and what is reality, those are some things that you going to have to have some common sense about. Schools don't teach you common sense. "I don't think any school can teach you the practical common sense things. These you're going to have to learn on your own. Use your own insight. Learn how to read people and work with them. Sometimes what you will find is once a person gets a degree, the degree can really cut off creativity. Because they've gone and gotten an MBA, they think they know it all. When you get the degree it just teaches you to think differently and to know how to approach things in a different way. You can't learn everything in two years," says Buford. When somebody is thinking about going to business school, that person needs to sit down and really do some research. Perspective students need to determine just what exactly it is that he or she wants from business school and which program is going to provide the skills they need to enhance what it is they want to do. But once that decision has been made, what else can students do to get more out of their MBA experience? No man is an island, and one thing is to take advantage of your peers. Says Buford, "Everybody is not an accounting major, or an economics major. You have people coming from different backgrounds all across the board. Business school is very quantitative and so if someone with a non-mathematical background runs into problems with quantitative material, they need to let their peers know. Again it's about teamwork and balance and helping one another." Students also need to get known by their professors. According to Buford, "I think this particularly true for minority students. You can't sit in a class and expect the professor to know you. You're the one getting the education. You've got to go out of your way to develop a relationship. And when problems arise, you don't wait until it is too late." Once the student gets to know a professor and has some established some on-going dialogue, they may gain some deeper insight into the professor's expectations, and where he or she is coming from with their theory. But again, it's up to the student to make the effort, not the professor. But it's not all classroom and theory. Take the time to be involved somewhere in the community, giving something to others. Using and sharpening interpersonal skills at all times is very important. Also, learn how to listen and observe. "We don't have to always be talking, so we do need to listen and study people," says Buford. "I don't think graduate school can teach you that." At the Ohio State University Fisher College of Business, minority MBA students are invited to participate in the MBA Corporate Mentoring Program sponsored by the Office of Educational and Professional Diversity. Susan Josephs is Associate Dean. The program, now in its sixth year, is voluntary. Because it is offered through the Diversity Office and utilizes its resources, it is currently open only to women, minority and international students. The mentoring program offers students an opportunity to explore current job market trends and also provides them with networking and career exploration opportunities. Every attempt is made to match the student and mentor in similar career interests. This provides the relationship with a starting point, and also provides the student with a personal resource when making career related decisions. "Mentoring is something that has gone on informally for years. But sometimes when it is informal, the status quo can be reinforced. People who are comfortable with each other tend to work with each other," says Josephs. "Although the program voluntary, we want our students to understand that if you chose to participate, it is a real solid commitment. Not only do you hurt yourself if you let the ball drop with this relationship but you hurt the program for future students." "In many cases, if not all, we've had great testimonials from both mentors and proteges about how they enjoyed the program and how useful it was to them," says Josephs. Terrill Cosgray is the Director of MBA Program, at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, one of the top graduate business schools in the country. "Our students feel like when they walk into the workplace, they've acquired some skills in the classroom that they can actually apply right away," said Cosgray. "Many returning second year MBA students report to us that that their peers from other MBA programs don't always feel that way. And in some cases the companies that they are working for don't have those particular skill sets and our students become highly valued." One of the things that Indiana MBA students have pointed out that has been really helpful is the amount of time spent helping them learn how to use electronic tools to do forecasting and other aspects related to the financial side of the business management. However there is one thing that Cosgray says his students are surprised by when they go out into the workplace. And that is just how many decisions that they are required to make. In the classroom setting, there is a faculty member to lay out the problem for them and to walk them through the steps of gathering data to solve that business problem. But when students go out into the workplace, suddenly their boss calls them in and says, 'well we've got this problem that we would like you to work on and its XYZ'. And that's it. Students are left feeling like they really don't know quite how to go about the process of problem solving in the workplace. Because the "We think that by doing this assessment and then providing very particular, specialized training, our students won't feel quite so lost when they go into the workplace and are faced with these rather ambiguous business issues," said Cosgray. Mark Lang agrees that MBA students may fall short in the area of problem solving. He is a former Director for the "A lot of times they are unprepared for the realities of what it is like in a fast growing company with the bumps and bruises that occur while you are trying to make things happen. They've got the right information, but they've got to learn that there is a huge filter that everything flows through, and how information is applied in everyday real life situations. When they go back to work, the first couple of years are, in a sense culture shock, trying to adjust from book to building." Lang is now the Director of Programs at the Edward Lowe Foundation in At historically black According to Brent Johnson, the Director of the Graduate Program, students today have a different mind-set coming in. "I think the generation of young people that is in school now is different from a generation or so ago. Some of the things that we may have taken for granted, we have to start all over again with the generation that we are trying to educate now," explains Johnson. At various points in their growth and development, this has been called the "me" generation. There may be some unwillingness to pay their dues, so to speak, or start at the bottom with a respect for experience. "What we do not do in schools is give these young people a sense that there is value in starting at a point and honing one's skills to be the best that they can be in a particular area," says Johnson. Part of it may have to do with people changing careers more frequently. A generation or two ago people didn't necessarily have four or five careers in a lifetime. This is commonplace now, so perhaps spending 10 years trying to learn their craft doesn't fit into the students' overall plan. But Johnson says the responsibility for better preparing students lies with both the student and the school. "I do see students that have a seriousness of purpose. They know what they are here for and are really committed to trying to do things in what I might consider to be the right way." Students should come in with a willingness both to learn and to put their learning together with their experiences to make themselves more marketable. On the other hand, schools should acknowledge the areas where student skills are lacking and address those needs. Johnson sees a proliferation of soft skills development and leadership development programs at a number of schools. These programs are either part of the curriculum or additional workshops and seminars in areas such as team building, conflict resolution, and interpersonal communication skills. Clark Atlanta has a program in presently in the development phase. Cosgray's advice to all students entering
WHAT YOUR MBA DOESN’T TEACH YOU