I did an MBA on Friday – It was easy and excellent fun too

It was brilliant in fact. Fancy being able to complete a really usable MBA in a single afternoon!

It wasn’t a traditional MBA though – you know the ones – that restrict your thinking and drive you into the word of paralysis by analysis – but a real world one that will directly benefit our business from tomorrow.

Meet Up,
Benefit from others’ experience and
Accelerate our learning.

It was organised by my good friend Andy Hanselman and in this first run, saw five of us sharing notes, ideas and good practice that we could take into our own businesses, even though on the surface they may have nothing in common.

I learned loads about the view of an art teacher and how beards and funn (sic) are important in business from a brilliant and beautifully designed presentation by Jonny Douglas – A man who can even out-talk Andy and myself (which is some feat!).

I learned from an anonymous business guru in the book Millionaire Upgrade by Richard Parkes Cordock that Andrew Seaton, brilliantly summarised for us. He’s an IT man who seems to specialise in making your IT problems go away with his business Resolve IT.

Gill Hanselman scared all of us by showing us pictures of really bright young business people who we all need to be able to admire and not be scared of. Business is about your mindset and not always by the number of years you’ve been doing it.

And Andy introduced us to 21st Century Entrepreneurship with a profiling system that I loved and will complete first thing in the morning with a clearer head. If you want to understand your own business brain, I suggest you do the same.

And I picked their planet sized brains about what else I could do with social media. I now have a checklist of what to do, in order to maximise the experience I have gained in this enormously scary rollercoaster area of our business.

Its not often I stay in Sheffield until well after the close of business. But it was worth getting to the pub late, because learning needs to be this much fun and this directly beneficial.

We’re meeting again in a month or so, to do it all over again. I guess that will be my second MBA in as many months then.