During my MBA studies at the Presidential Academy, I jotted down ideas that gave me valuable insights. I share my notes – perhaps they will be a useful reminder for some, and an inspiration for others as they begin their journey in business education.
- Financial accounting: the task of studying an accounting report becomes interesting if you look at it as a process of finding weaknesses in the business lifecycle. Then working with accounts and figures becomes reverse engineering an organisation to find its weaknesses and interesting features.
- Managerial economics: A decision graph is a set of available choices to achieve goals. To find the shortest path in this graph, it is important to have context at each step. The more context you have, the more likely you are to make the right decision. And then there’s the third lesson.
- “Intuition is like a pre-trained neural network model” – I was surprised to hear this from a technical expert and experienced manager who often talks about intuitive problem solving during his interviews. That’s the point.
- The Development and Management Decision Making course introduced a new tool – the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ). Now, when describing the Definition of Done of any task, one should remember the need to first formulate an ‘ideal end result’ before embarking on the search for a solution.
Quotations in the margin:
Innovation is a solution to a contradiction
Compromise is a weak solution
- Strategic Management’ reminded me of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) mentioned earlier in the context of building the Security Operation Centre. TOC views any system as a chain of interdependent elements. Therefore, the whole chain cannot be stronger than its weakest link. Constraints in production and business are the main reason why their efficiency decreases. If you want to increase efficiency, look for constraints.
I have also written a quotation in the margin:
Strategy is also the answer to ‘what are we not doing’ and ‘what opportunities are we missing’.
- Strategy is also the art of choice. It’s not just about where we go and what we do to get results, it’s also about what opportunities we deliberately turn down.
Until you learn to say no to opportunities, you are not a strategist.
- Kurt Lewin’s force field analysis. All individual and organisational change is the result of two competing forces: drivers and restraints. In strategising, you need to list these forces, assess their impact and work out which ones you can change.
Sometimes it is easier to remove barriers than to increase support.
- Key differences in the decision-making system of the entrepreneur and the manager in crisis situations. While researching this topic, I came across research supporting the hypothesis that the entrepreneur is quicker to deal with negative feedback.
- During a training module in Armenia, I discovered a company that builds solar power plants. What was surprising was not so much the scale of the construction and investment, but the pet project that the founders were implementing not far from the transformer structures: using the hot air from the transformers to set up the production of dried fruit. At the intersection of technology and creativity, a sustainable business model is born.
- The ability to manage energy is more important than the ability to manage time.
Once again, this idea was expressed in several training modules at the same time.
The role of a leader is to create a surplus of energy.
- In the ‘Acting for the Manager’ module I caught this quote:
A manager is a director who organises the management of attention in the given circumstances.
It is important to be able to analyse the circumstances, classify them into groups of factors and, depending on this, define a scenario.
For example, a negotiation scenario. And that is the next insight.
- Like cinema, the negotiation process has its own plot and its own ‘design patterns’.
SMART negotiation goals are divided into two groups: must-goals and wish-goals. Achieving the former determines the success of the negotiation. Achieving the latter determines the degree of success.
On the basis of these objectives, a decision tree – i.e. possible scenarios – is created. This formalisation of the negotiation process makes it more predictable and controllable for the ‘director’.
Perhaps the negotiation prep plan is the most important takeaway from the Negotiation Techniques module this semester.
- You need to create an adaptive space – an area where you can explore and challenge ideas.
I wrote this idea down in the Knowledge Management module so that I could later study in more detail the approaches and research associated with the concept of adaptive space. These underpin the transformation of large organisations. Perhaps some of these approaches will also prove useful for personal transformation.
A leader’s potential is determined by the quantity and quality of his followers.
May 2025 bring more adaptive space for research, hypothesis and discussion. And if it does not, let us create it ourselves.
