The First Semester: Discovering That Business Is Alive

I started my MBA at LSU Shreveport with a fairly simple model of business: a company makes something, sells it, makes money, and—if things go well—keeps doing it.

I knew that was an oversimplification. I just did not appreciate how much it left out.

My first semester consisted of two accelerated, seven-week courses: MBA 706, Marketing Strategy, and MBA 705, Organizational Strategies and Policies. They were my first graduate-level courses, entirely online, and more demanding than I expected. By the end, I had learned some frameworks, written a great deal, and earned two A's. Those are all good outcomes, but they are not the most interesting part.

The more important change is that I no longer see a business as a product with a sales department attached. I see it as a living system: a collection of people, capabilities, incentives, customers, competitors, resources, constraints, and decisions that have to work together—or eventually start working against one another.

Marketing is not advertising

This one is a little embarrassing in retrospect.

Before MBA 706, my practical experience with marketing had mostly involved the visible end of it: SEO, physical campaigns, digital campaigns, and the work of getting someone to make a purchase. In my head, marketing was largely the process of persuading people to buy something.

It is that, sometimes. It is also much earlier and much broader than that.

Marketing asks questions that have to be answered before an advertisement ever exists. What need does this product or service meet? Who is it actually for? What alternatives do those people have? What does the organization do better, differently, or more credibly than its competitors? Is there even a market worth entering?

A company with a great product does not simply “need marketing to help sell it.” That skips most of the difficult questions. How do we know people want it? How do we know it solves the problem we think it solves? Do we understand the audience, the competitors, and the conditions in which this product has to survive?

Customer segmentation made this especially clear. It is tempting to stop at something like “people aged 18–24 in this area.” But age and location, by themselves, do not explain much. Behavior, preferences, lifestyles, geography, and the ways people cluster themselves can matter just as much. The task is not to locate a demographic and put an advertisement in front of it. It is to understand a population well enough to make a defensible decision.

That changed marketing for me. It felt less like promotion and more like preparation: analysis before action, with real consequences if you get the analysis wrong.

The creative part was not where I expected it

Marketing also surprised me because I had not expected to enjoy it as much as I did.

I have always had a creator's streak. I write, do graphic design, roleplay, and enjoy building worlds, systems, and stories. I had not placed marketing in that same mental category. Then I began to see that its creativity is not limited to making a clever advertisement.

The creative work is in the orchestration. You are trying to design a coherent relationship between an organization, its products and services, its customers, its competitors, and the larger environment around all of them. That requires imagination, but it also requires discipline. A good idea that is poorly positioned is still a poor strategic decision.

That mix of rigorous analysis and creativity grabbed me hard enough that I briefly wondered whether I should abandon my intended Accounting concentration and move toward Marketing. I am not making that change right now, but it was useful to discover a field I had underestimated so completely.

Research is not a trial in which my hypothesis wins or loses

MBA 705 covered much of the organizational strategy material I expected: competitive advantage, environmental analysis, mission and purpose, and the frameworks used to assess an organization's position.

The unexpected gift of that course was my first graduate literature review.

Before this, I tended to think of research in fairly binary terms. I had an argument; I found sources; the sources either supported the argument or defeated it. True or false. Proven or disproven.

That approach did not survive contact with the literature review.

I began with a research proposal and quickly found that the literature was not saying what I expected it to say. It was not even particularly close. My first reaction was panic. I had assumed that a mismatch meant I had failed to find the right evidence—or had somehow done the assignment incorrectly.

So I went back to the beginning. I contacted my professor, revisited the literature I had already collected, read about the actual purpose of a literature review, and talked with my wife, who had completed one herself.

Eventually, I understood the point: a literature review is not primarily an exercise in proving that your original idea was correct. It is an attempt to understand the current state of knowledge around a question. What themes are present? Where do researchers agree or disagree? What has been studied? What is missing? And, critically, what should be investigated next?

That was a much more interesting process than simply trying to win an argument.

A gap is not necessarily a failure

The mismatch between my initial expectations and the literature turned out to be the interesting part.

My review opened up a particular business area and industry that I had previously only been vaguely aware of. It also revealed genuine gaps: questions that have not yet been adequately answered and may be worth further research. At the same time, it gave evidentiary support to concerns people in that industry had been raising. What might have looked like anecdotal frustration had a deeper basis in the research.

I found that genuinely exciting. Research stopped feeling like an isolated academic requirement and began to look like a large, collaborative project. Someone identifies a problem. Someone else tests part of it, finds a limitation, or identifies a gap. Another person takes the work further. Knowledge improves by increments.

That literature review is probably what I am proudest of from the semester—not because it was perfect, but because it changed how I think about what research can do. It did not just answer a question for an assignment. It introduced questions worth continuing to ask.

Business is alive

The two courses also began to connect in ways I had not expected.

Terms such as competitive advantage, SWOT, environmental analysis, strategy, and organizational purpose keep appearing across the MBA. But they do not mean precisely the same thing in every course. A concept can be recognizable while taking on a different emphasis in marketing strategy, organizational strategy, or organizational behavior.

At first, I thought of the courses as separate boxes: marketing over here, accounting over there, operations somewhere else, strategy in its own category. That picture does not hold up for long.

These functions are closer to organs than separate machines. They have different jobs, but they belong to the same system. Marketing cannot make promises the organization cannot operationally fulfill. Strategy is not useful if it ignores customers and competitors. Accounting can tell a vital part of the story, but not the whole story. Decisions in one part of the organization create consequences in the others.

That is what I mean when I say business is alive. An organization grows, adapts, develops blind spots, responds to pressure, and sometimes becomes so attached to its own idea of what it can do that it begins undermining itself while believing it is succeeding.

I can now look at a business more critically. I can conduct SWOT and situation analyses from marketing and organizational-strategy perspectives, and understand that those are not identical exercises. I can use Porter's Five Forces and Generic Strategies, VRIO, and PESTEL to form a more complete judgment about an organization's present position and future prospects. I can write a damn good mission statement. More importantly, I am starting to recognize when an organization has a realistic chance to pivot and survive, and when its assumptions may be the thing putting it at risk.

That is more useful than simply knowing a collection of business terms. It is the beginning of judgment.

The other lesson: stop trying to earn the right to be there

There was a more personal lesson underneath all of this.

I was terrified for much of the semester.

The courses moved quickly. They were rigorous. I had never done graduate-level work before, and the online format meant that I often sat alone at my computer trying to decide whether I understood the assignment, the material, or what was expected of me. Graduate school involves less hand-holding; that is normal. Unfortunately, I interpreted that as a constant test of whether I belonged.

So I overcompensated.

Across the two courses, I completed more than 70 pages of academic writing. I earned two A's, including one grade above 101 percent. Objectively, I was doing fine.

The problem was that I was doing far more than the work required because I was afraid that merely meeting the stated requirements would expose me as not good enough. The rubrics were there. The professors were generally clear about expectations. Yet I mentally recast every requirement as a bare minimum that had to be exceeded at all costs.

That is an excellent way to exhaust yourself.

A classmate who follows the rubric efficiently can earn the same grade as the person who turns every assignment into a referendum on their worth. This should not have been a revelation, but apparently I needed graduate school to teach it to me.

Uncertainty does not disappear because you work harder. Perfection cannot settle the question of whether you belong; it only creates another assignment to perfect. Doing excellent work and trying to prove that I deserve to be here are not the same thing. One is fear-based. The other is simply being a good student.

I am still working on that distinction.

One semester down

I began the MBA expecting to learn business tools. I did learn them, and I have already started using them to look at organizations more carefully.

But the semester also made business feel larger, stranger, and more connected than I had expected. Marketing is not advertising. Research is not just confirmation. Strategy is not a binder full of frameworks. And an organization is not merely a thing that sells a product.

It is a living system. The more I study its parts, the more I can see how they affect one another.

That seems like a good place to begin.