Now
Last updated: July 2026
Current Status
I'm taking MBA 705 Organizational Strategy and Policy. MBA 706 (Marketing Strategy) wrapped a few weeks back — it was a genuinely broadening experience. I came in thinking I understood marketing from running campaigns; I left with a real sense of how deep and wide it runs end-to-end across industries.
I'm just finishing the first week of 705. Frameworks I first met in 706 (SWOT, STP, situation analysis) are reappearing, but through a broader organizational lens instead of a marketing-only one. I'm also revisiting them with more nuance now that I've already applied them once.
Learning threads
I'm stretching SWOT across the full organization and layering Porter's frameworks and PESTEL on top. Both of those surfaced in my own graduate research during MBA 706, where I applied them to dissect company and industry marketing strategy; here in 705 they're aimed at long-term organizational strategy rather than continual competitive scanning. The marketing course taught an ongoing rhythm of analyzing situations, competitors, and economy; organizational strategy reads more like planning years or decades out.
My study method has refined further. I've dropped passive re-reading and lecture note-taking for flashcards, self-quizzes, and navigation charts that map the course material's structure — all built around active recall, which is what the learning science actually supports. I haven't designed any course-specific apps this term; anything I'd build for 705 would just be a GUI for quizzes and cards. My build-to-learn energy has moved sideways into LLMOps and AgentOps instead.
Something I'm sitting with
I don't have a deep unresolved struggle yet — I'm only a week into 705. What's struck me is how varied and layered organizational strategy actually is. At the top level you can speak in broad strokes, but mapping a real industry means layers inside layers, and no single framework fits every case.
The course immediately dispels the incorrect notion some may hold that corporate strategy is easy — as if the people at the top have the softest jobs. From where I'm sitting, it's a specific, complex mix of analytical rigor and high creativity. That combination is rare, and it's clearly something you have to deliberately cultivate, as our careers tend to push us in one direction or another, and even educational pathways tend to separate us into neat little buckets of science or arts.
Building
Active building right now is in LLMOps and AgentOps, not course tools. I've built two custom MCP servers and a customized LibreChat server, starting with personal assistant agents using OpenClaw for my wife and I while expanding into agentic automation and deeper MCP work (exploring OpenClaw, HERMES, and related frameworks).
Separately, I'm running a sandboxed environment to observe how AI agents construct a sense of identity and place — a conceptual synthesis of published agent-architecture ideas rather than any one source. It's in progress and not something I'm detailing publicly yet (blog to come), so no screenshots.
Previously built (released and active):
CMO Learning Desk (formerly CMO Desk) and SWOT Learning Check (formerly SWOT Check Tool) — Streamlit apps for 5C/STP and SWOT/TOWS practice. Write-up →
LBO Value Creation Bridge — Write-up →
Accounting Learning Simulator (formerly Accounting Simulator) — Write-up →
Watching
For MBA 705, all learning attention is on the course itself — textbook, assigned readings, and my professor's videos. The pace doesn't leave room for outside browsing, same as 706.
Outside that, what I read is documentation for the LLMOps/AgentOps work: OpenClaw, HERMES, the MCP SDK, and similar framework docs. That's reference material I read to build, not to consume passively.
Next up
Next up is MBA 704 — Organizational Behavior, starting in the fall semester. No prep underway yet; I'm keeping focus on 705 through to the end.
Previously
May 2026 — MBA 706 Marketing Strategy completed. Built CMO Desk (now released as CMO Learning Desk) and SWOT Check Tool (now SWOT Learning Check) as interactive Streamlit learning apps; both shipped and blogged. Finished and released the LBO Value Creation Bridge and Accounting Learning Simulator (formerly dual-perspective accounting simulator), also blogged.
March 2026 — Pre-program self-study focused on the three financial statements, debits and credits, and accrual accounting. Built an LBO value creation bridge and a dual-perspective accounting simulator in Python/Streamlit ahead of the first course.
For my full background and the story behind the pivot, see About.