MBA Week 1 - Redefining What Business Means to Me

Dear MBA Diary, 

I have never been one interested in blogs or blogging myself, but am excited to get a little out of my comfort zone in sharing more reflective thoughts regarding my experience in obtaining my MBA with a focus in HR Management. Personal and Dream journaling however, is something I have been used to since childhood and so I have decided to stick to that format for a bit of familiarity and consistency here. 

I wasn't too sure what to expect with this program and having very little educational experience in Business or Economics, aside from a few intro to Business and Marketing courses, I must admit that reviewing some of the content has been a little intimidating, but I have always been up for a challenge. Reviewing one of the first slides it stated something along the lines of the ultimate goal of Business being to essentially make maximum profit...period. Coming from an HR background, this immediately didn't sit well with me as I personally feel there are so many other factors to consider when running a successful business, and not every business is a greedy money-hungry machine. I immediately thought to myself "Uh-Oh...what did I get myself into"?

This quickly turned around once getting to the Business Ethics section of Module 1, specifically in watching a short lecture from Dr. William Kline. In it, Dr. Kline almost immediately called out the fact that many of us have distorted views of what Business is and how it is easy to be perceived as a selfish industry and field of study, but then went into more context of how it is part of our innate human nature to trade, which is, in it's simplest form, BUSINESS! 

It made me think about how we as humans trade for the benefit of both parties and how that can be looked at with monetary transactions such as buying goods from a business as well as without monetary transactions with examples being clothes swaps between friends to the trading of goods/services without money at certain festivals or gatherings such as Burning Man; Trade is all around us and always has been. Cue Dr. Kline talking about Archeologist, Denise Schmandt-Bessarat, who's research has pointed to old documentation of accounting/trade, which predates that of written language, further showing this natural inclination of humans to trade with one another - Mind Blown! 

Schmandt-Bessarat, Denise "Economic Tablet Dealing With Quantities of Textiles, From Uruk, Iraq, ca. 3100 BC" From Accounting to Writing - University of Texas. 06, 06, 23 https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/from-accounting-to-writing/

Top top things off, the heart of the lecture was talking about how a business must be ethical to be successful. Looking at this from my HR lens, things started to click a bit more for me. Having had to hold myself accountable for maintaining ethical behavior be it in the hiring process or an active employee relations investigation/termination, this was something I was more familiar with and so hearing this topic discussed so early on really made my heart sing and sparked a whole new level of excitement for me. One of the quotes that really stood out to me from Dr. Kline as it pertains to Business was:

"You can't be radically selfish. Your self interest is served by reaching out and figuring out what satisfies the self interest of others"

It really made me think of "Business" in a new light and really gave me some food for thought as far as the kind of Business I would like to work for or even operate on my own. As a fan of Tarot, I immediately thought of the Hanged Man - A card that represents sacrifice in order to gain a new perspective. Turning the world upside down so you can see things from another angle. Perhaps that's what this new journey is all about. It's time for me to release old ideas of what Business has meant to me in the past and use this opportunity to shape it into what I want it to be moving forward.