Mastering Business for Creative People

MBAs, Uncertainty, and Learning Smarter Decision-making

It must have been about eight years ago that a UCLA recruiter came to New York. I had a coffee with her at the Stumptown near Washington Square on a perfect spring day, and we talked about the Executive MBA program. From there, it felt inevitable, one of those decisions you make without fully knowing why, compelled to do it by some part of you that’s calculating life at a much deeper level than your rational brain.

A few years later, I moved to LA for work, and then only applied to UCLA Anderson’s executive MBA program after half-heartedly considering some others: USC (too strict), Berkeley (too much of a tech feeder), NYU (too far). And now, I’m a member of an alma mater that I’ve long admired, part of a community that stretches from the hilly campus in Westwood across the globe. 

There’s a great deal of value I’ve derived from this experience. The network is the rote answer—a Rolodex of smart people from every industry under the sun. The locality is another thing; I moved to Los Angeles a couple years before the world shut down, and my life in the city was stunted. When people ask me how long I’ve been in Los Angeles, I marvel that I’m almost at the 6-year mark; I feel brand new, what’s past the 405 is a mysterious hinterland, and it seems I’ve barely checked off the endless lists of LA things I want to experience. Being embedded in UCLA, the largest educational institution in the city, made LA my home in a way that I never anticipated. 

And yes, I learned a great deal. Working in advertising, there are few MBA’s; it’s a creative industry first and foremost, full of people who’ve built their lives on turns of phrase or visual constructs or brand personalities that tick up the number of sales and brand awareness. It’s our clients—the brand managers, CMOs, and CEOs—that are often MBAs, armed with data and financial analyses, and they make decisions that can sometimes feeling baffling to the creative-minded. Strategy in the ad business is often a translator, from the business needs of our clients to the language that speaks to and inspires creative teams. 

As a strategist at an ad agency, this MBA is accelerating my ability to understand and translate the business end of things. So after two years of digging deep into the details of finance, operations, accounting, management, innovation, and, yes, marketing, I’m sharing with you a short series of learnings.

A few topics I’ll be covering:

• Excel, finance, and predicting the future

• Corporate strategy and what to do when a competitor is eating your lunch

• Making smarter decisions with a decision tree

Especially in this moment in time when uncertainty is more prevalent than ever and we can’t always turn to what’s worked in the past for answers, and the most sure-minded are the least trustworthy, it’s worthwhile to examine the foundations of how we make decisions. Every forward-looking decision is some form of kicking the tires on the future, a hypothesis on how we think things will be. Let’s equip ourselves with a few tools to be ready, shall we?