How the MBA Helped - Peer Group Working

One thing which I have constantly noticed working with different people across the spectrum (within my organization or with that of the clients), that many of them know how to work with their superiors, most of them think they know how to work with the people who report into them, but very few people have the knack and the maturity of working with peers. And more often than not I have found people who have this ability are those who have had that experience in the past and have worked under pressure situations with people having differing skills.

This is where I also noticed that individuals who had done their MBA from top B Schools, had this opportunity during the course of their MBA. I also found that my experience at ISB helped me immensely in this aspect personally. Experience in ISB has been the most humbling experience for me ever. I went to the school thinking I was God's gift to humanity and surprisingly found out that there were more than 400 better gifts in the school. To top that I was paired with 4 individuals from differing backgrounds and an average experience of less 2 years in comparison to 8 years of mine. But when we all worked in a team for all of our assignments for 6 months (and then later in different groups as well), it was one of the most difficult times for each one of us. We all thought that our POV was the most logical and accurate. We all thought that there is just one correct answer. We took more pains to explain our POV and how that was accurate than listening to what the other person was saying. Our first case study on Splash Marketing took us more than 30 hours and 3 big fights to reach any conclusion. (By the time we were in our last days, a case study never took more than 30 minutes). The journey from that case study where we all were trying to prove ourselves to the time where we all understood that in business there is no one correct answer and that those differing voices of others not only ought to be heard but also ought to be accepted.

The experience of working in many diverse peer groups in ISB has surely helped me a lot and thus makes it easier for me to work in that kind of environment / projects / meetings where there is no hierarchy, where you cannot escalate to someone and look for a solution, where you cannot just muscle your way or throw the weight of your position around. ISB has been unique in that sense because of the diversity that the school ensures and the spread of experience that the class has.

One more thing that I learnt while doing my MBA with ISB...... seems abstract but is very tangible in experience.