Author: Kengo Baba, TMMBA Class of 2013
TMMBA opened my eyes from the first month of school experience and every month has been a fresh learning opportunity although it can be tough and painful sometimes. We got exposed with a room full of energetic and experienced class mates to share their own perspectives and approaches to solve the problem or generate new idea.
We all knew to some level in our head that everyone sees the same object from different angles and have different opinions. But we do not often get to actually experience the formation of common team’s point of views from various view points from peers as we discuss wide range of business management subjects outside of work environment with a level of hierarchy structure. Some discussions made us looked at other in disbelief of grossly different point of view. Who is right, who is wrong?
When our point of view significantly differs from others, the first reaction is to tie our own historical knowledge data point to justify your view to defend our point of view. But after exchanging and sharing various point of view and opinions from intelligent peers, each of us realize that other peers’ point of views also make sense and they are not necessary wrong. The answer is not right or wrong. “It depends……”
Unlike engineering study where there is clear right or wrong answer, we learned soon learned that most of MBA class answers are “It depends…..”. Depends on what? Well, it depends on so many things that one person cannot cover all angles. One individual may not effectively come up with the best answer from limited point of view of his or her knowledge from historical data point and intuition. Realizing that there are so many ways of looking at the same thing and sharing various views would create refined collective team point of view which covers many more angles of dependencies.
Some of those lengthy and heated discussions that I recall were the greatest learning opportunities that I would remember for a long time, although I may not remember Modigliani and Miller Theorem. TMMBA provided me the practical learning lesson to effectively generate solutions and new ideas from peer’s different perspectives that I cannot possibly come up with by myself.
Secondly, as the program progressed, we realized that learning was twice as much, mainly because we could discuss our points of view on topics ranging from personal finance to business strategy right at the dinner table. Some people might consider this extreme and they might be right. Our social life during the program was close to nil. Our close friends jokingly comment that we come out of our hibernation only once in 3 months (which is not completely untrue). However by doing the program together, we saved ourselves 18 more months of crazy hours. As our economics professor would put it, there is something to be said for opportunity cost of time.
TMMBA students arrived in Santiago last weekend for the International Study Tour. One student is sharing stories from the trip on 
