Happily Peeing Next to UF MBA's

After you have a kid, life flies by. One day, you've got a little baldy with no teeth and a bunch of eczema, and then you blink, and that little rash infested, old-man looking, skullet-sporting creature turns into a walking human being, saying "no" to everything you say. The first term of the UF MBA program rushes by in a similar fashion, but instead of measuring time by rash reductions and length of hair, you measure time by Jason's Facebook posts. 

Every few months, Jason would post up on our cohort's Facebook page how far along we were to receiving that little piece of MBA paper with the $200 frame. When we made it to "P1MBAS13 = .3125 (MBA)," I could hardly believe it. 

As time sneakily flew by, our cohort magically started becoming one giant group of friends. Maybe these friendships were the result of collectively understanding what it's like to sit in a weekend of classes while everyone else is at the beach, or maybe this was the result of a bunch of Type A's with presumably similar interests - Gator football, Tim Tebow, less government intervention, Gator football and Tim Tebow.

Who knows how we all made friends, or how little groups of friends started getting tight, or how anyone becomes friends with anyone. But I like what the articulate and thoughtful C.S. Lewis says about the initial emotion - "Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!'" 

I pretty much hate Facebook, but using it for groups is genius (and also for stalking people). Every class, we all used our closed Facebook page to write what we were thinking about the class, or to post up a picture of something funny. When I felt a vibration on my iPhone alerting me that the beautifully bearded Matt was asking the tall, body-that-makes-you-not-want-to-take-your-shirt-off-at-a-pool-party Derrick what color deep V t-shirt he was going to wear that evening, I'd watch the whole class gradually smile, like a bunch of drunks doing the wave at a Jaguars game. Or when Candace posted up a link to the Titanic Coloring Book (because every child should be coloring dead bodies in ice cold water, as our eccentric writing professor, Jane Douglas, matter-of-factly presented in class), I randomly laughed out loud, confirming the brand I carried of a bearded homeless man that talks to himself and creepily laughs at his own thoughts.

Our cohort studied together, peed together (those bathrooms are packed during breaks), drank together, learned together and made fun of things together. I read once that a Harvard MBA isn't a Harvard MBA because the curriculum is so far beyond anything else. A Harvard MBA is a Harvard MBA because you're studying with - and peeing next to - really rich and smart people - people that will become major industry and market leaders. I'd say those are good people to know.

At UF, it's no different. I like peeing next to smart, articulate people- people that will, no doubt, become leaders, if they already haven't. I like learning from them and debating with them. I like being philosophically challenged and I like when people have answers to problems that I can't even seem to comprehend. My humble and engaging father told me last week, "It's not about what you know. It's about how you handle what you don't know." No matter how criticized MBA programs are for lacking true value, this personal piece of value goes under the radar in cheap quantitative studies about MBA employment rates and salary levels. The true value, as in anything, is in the people. The UF admissions team, turns out, is not only funny, but good at finding quality people with big bladders. And maybe that's why we're all okay peeing next to each-other - we're in this program to learn, not just from the professors, but from each-other.

What a handsome group! (P1MBAS13) 
-click to enlarge-

Group Meetings and Thinking Too Much

Studying at home with a screaming toddler running around is problematic, to put it kindly. I remember one night, while preparing for my first team meeting, my little angel was sprinting across the living room in her expensive Seventh Generation diaper, shrieking at the top of her lungs. "What the heck is wrong with her?" I asked my frustrated and ready-to-explode wife. "She only wants to eat yogurt for dinner." I also thought I heard her mumble under her breathe, "I'd way rather be trying to figure out whether a risk-free-rate should be taken from a 20 or 10 year T-Bond than trying to feed a 13 month old peas."

My first call with my new teammates was long, as expected. Each group member wanted everyone else to know that they had read the cases, prepared for the meeting, and was really into this MBA thing. And when five people want to prove that they're awesome at life, you get a two hour meeting that ends where you started.

Due to my obsession with all things google, we did our first few meetings on a google+ video chat, we had dynamic google docs on our screens, collectively making notes (although sometimes I'd sneakishly write, "Dave is hot" in the middle of a long paragraph just to see if people were awake - God I hope we remembered to take those tidbits out of our cases), and we worked through gmail. As all of us were secretly wondering how google makes any money (who ever clicks the sponsored links?!), we got through our first meeting.

I went to the fridge to grab life's most amazing two dollar treat - Stonyfield Oikos Caramel Greek Yogurt. It's heaven, especially after two hours of looking at and listening to my new teammates. Don't get me wrong - I love my teammates. I really do. I just like my bed more. And I'm a people guy! Maybe if we were talking about how all of our days went at work instead of whether Nike's calculated cost of capital was accurate, I wouldn't have needed that little cup of incredible creamy goodness, but this night, I needed it. I needed it bad. And at 110 calories, my figure wouldn't even be compromised - win-win for everybody!

I went to bed and it was about 10:00pm, an hour past my pre UFMBA bedtime and 2 hours past my sit on the couch and watch Modern Family time. My wife was asleep in our King Sized West Elm bed (that we bought - including mattress - off of some good friends that recently moved to Seattle. Of course, everyone knows that buying used mattresses is kinda weird. And then I think about all of those nights I've spent at Hampton Inns on business trips, and how many people peed the bed, or did other things people only do when they're traveling. I remember hearing about a real winner who peed in an ice bucket at a hotel. This guy either felt so free from life's normal and repressive home constraints that he had to show off his autonomy by relieving himself in a cheap plastic bucket, or he had a lot of hot ladies he had to impress. Either way, this guy was super cool, and he's the reason I don't walk around bare foot in my hotel rooms).

Anyway, my wife was sleeping when I got to bed. I shut the lights off for her and grabbed my iPhone to catch up on all of the Draw Something games I was getting nudged on by Landon. While I was finger drawing a figure with a big dress and a pointy hat that looked more like a piece of cheese pizza on a demented person's head (how'd you guess - it's Gandalf!), I got to thinking about everything. Maybe it was those two cups of coffee my wife told me not to drink before the meeting, or maybe it was the mental stimulation from my new knowledgeable teammates. Who knows, but my mind was stirring like a spoon attacking some Arborio rice to craft creamy risotto.

I thought about technology, and how I can't even understand the mechanics of two cans connected by a string, transmitting voices through vibrations, let alone an iPhone that picks up my voice and invisibly and instantly moves it to my brother's house in Santa Cruz, CA - it's magic to me. I thought about politics, and I played in my mind the idea that if one of the presidential candidates used their campaign funds for something other than weightless and snakey ads, I bet the public might actually start trusting their judgment. "Probably not" I chuckled, but come on now - someone has got to be more creative than the current interruption marketing tactics these politicians so thoughtlessly distribute. I guess they're just indebted to too many contributors to actually think and act with any sense of freedom.

I thought about business, and why the heck I'm in business. You see, I'm a bit of a hippie, in thought and beards at least. I struggle with the notion that all corporations know what's best, because every working human being that isn't sleeping at work knows that the way to get to the top is to artfully pretend and present that you're better than you actually are. Perhaps I'm naive, but if a good portion of leaders at the top are just people who know how to talk, and not necessarily know how to think, analyze, criticize and question, then aren't many of our corporate decisions poorly made?

Are some companies led by people who have simply bulled their way to the top, sucked up to their superiors and nodded their heads to the quantitative? Are we less than we could be, say if we just poked the box a little more? And this is why I went back to school - I want to know what I'm talking about. I want to learn how to analyze and scrutinize data, people and especially the two working, and sometimes not-working, together. I want to learn how to lead and engage, not through artificial presentation, but through sincerity, knowledge and experience. Jeez - those two cups of coffee really sent me for a loop eh?

I put my iPhone down on the bedside table, turned onto my beer belly and put my arm around my sleeping beauty - this thinking stuff was making me tired.