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As I finish my “SDA Application Portfolio” series I think about the utility of the knowledge gained in this class. It was one of those classes where you are not taught how financial instruments work, how brand management is done, nor how profitability is calculated. There were no formulas to memorize, no equations to be remembered. It did not go into the world of marketers or traders, it did not made me analyze a country’s economic growth, it did not teach me how to increase ROI. Yet, it taught me all that and more.

You may ask – What was this course? How does it fit into the MBA curriculum? How will it help you in the long run? Answers will follow.

This course was called “Strategic Decision Analysis”. It was a course that harnessed the power of analysis and thinking in order to take decisions and increase your chances of success. The course introduced many concepts such as Negotiations, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Voting, and Auctions, among others. But more than that, this course provided insight into how a human mind works and what it thinks. You don’t need to be a CFA, a Six Sigma black belt holder, or a Statistics major to understand all this. All you need is common sense thinking and more importantly what the other person is thinking.

It fits well into an MBA curriculum because it is expected of us to go out and take decisions. Difficult decisions. Decisions that will affect companies, people, nations. Decisions that will alter the way you live, you eat, you sleep, and all that in between. How can you take such decisions and maximize your chances to take the right kind of decisions? Note that when you are taking the decisions there is always someone else taking a similar type of decision. You have one goal – to win in this duel of decision making. Because if you don’t win, somebody else takes all the glory or the pain associated with the decision. This course, in part, was about maximizing your chances to win.

With knowledge comes great power. But also comes with it the “curse of knowledge”. It is dangerous and can be applied dangerously. An incomplete assessment of your own understanding of the knowledge can actually lead to disaster. So it becomes important that we become competent in the use of this powerful knowledge and how we apply it.

The reason I am stressing this is because the knowledge is not just limited to the world of business. Your understanding of six sigma will not make you a great husband, a great father. But this knowledge is different. It spans our daily life and our relationships. Thus it becomes more important to understand the subject matter closely and intimately. The most important piece of this knowledge is – knowing what the other person is thinking. Not what you know and think. Bluntly speaking – you need to drop your ego from the equation to apply this knowledge. You have to stop force fitting because there are ample opportunities to do so. One formula to apply this knowledge is this –> First, you need to drop what you know. Second, know what the other person knows. Third, apply what you know and what the other person does not know. What you know is what you have learnt from this course, from your observations, and from the uncommon common sense that has been bestowed upon you.

Final thought – Always remember – Cooperation is better than defection! It will become all too apparent for you to defect with this knowledge. With this toolkit in hand, you will take decisions that go against the grain of this thought, that of cooperation. Recognize such tendencies, observe your thought process, re-evaluate the knowledge, and then apply it again.

Class Connection: Optimization

Well, today is the last day for my application portfolio and last few hours before I hand over my exam. The phone rings and it’s my wife – Can you pick me up from the airport at 7:30pm? I say – why not? With a hidden hope that her flight gets delayed for an hour or two, I continued giving final touches to my application portfolio, cleaning up the grammar and other knick knacks. And then it happened!

How difficult would it be to schedule aircraft landing and takeoff at busy airports such as Atlanta? Captured by this thought, I quickly made my way to Wikipedia to gather some basic information. Atlanta’s Hartsfield International airport has 5 runways, 151 domestic and 28 international gates. It is the worlds busiest airport by passenger traffic as well as landings and take offs. Aha!! It had 994,346 flight movements in 2007 (a world record).

If I were to take up the assignment of scheduling the landings and take offs for my final project, how would it look like. First,I would have looked at what I want to achieve. Probably, minimum delays would be one objective. Then I would have thought of my decision variables – something like when will a particular flight take off, or when will it land, or when should it leave the departure gate (assuming the time it will take on the tarmac as constant). Then would come the constraints, many of them. Wow…even thinking of them makes me scared. Some would be, a flight should not be incoming, it has spent X amount of time at the gate, movement time after landing, and so on. There are so many uncertainties associated with this modeling. I could think of then doing a Monte Carlo simulation to simulate the incoming and departure of aircrafts. Something like a Poisson distribution may have helped.

A few minutes of thought and I feel glad that I did not broach this subject when discussing my final project. Something tells me that with the tools and resources we have, this simulation would probably have been very difficult and my poor team mates would have put me on the next flight to India.