Park Perspectives: A pilot’s guide to the MBA
MBA students Ryan Gill, Nate Onorato and Adam Reznick attending the MBAVets conference in Atlanta.
Entering an MBA program brings a collision of emotions. Incoming first-year students feel excitement, drive and a sense of accomplishment, but also apprehension, anxiety and a healthy fear of the unknown. Prior to business school, I was a helicopter pilot. While it was a fun, fulfilling profession, it did not do much in the way of providing a sound business foundation for school. I couldn’t spell “M&A,” let alone tell you how to evaluate one.
Oddly enough, as I progressed through my MBA experience, I found myself relying on older practices that I had learned from my non-MBA background to keep myself on track in a novel, business-oriented setting. So here it is — a pilot’s guide to navigating business school.
Develop a good crosscheck
In the aviation world, the “crosscheck” is one of those fundamental skills that is critical to the success of the student pilot and the experienced pilot alike. At any given moment, a pilot is delicately balancing four or five different flight instruments such as an airspeed indicator, an altimeter, a trim indicator, and a horizontal situation indicator (essentially a compass), and all need to be continuously evaluated to ensure that the aircraft is doing what the pilot intends.
We teach young pilots to crosscheck. Every three to four seconds, they scan from one instrument to the next in a systematic way to ensure no information gets missed and they can rapidly adjust to changes including adjusting your altitude. In the same way, MBA candidates need to develop their own crosscheck.
The first semester alone had a thousand different elements to juggle. Between clubs, recruiting, extracurriculars and academics, I had to make sure I was covering my bases across all of them. I deployed a play from the pilot’s playbook and developed a new crosscheck. Every day before wrapping up for the evening, I evaluated progress across all these elements. I told myself that even 1% of progress across them all was success. As the adage goes, “What gets measured gets done,” and I found the best way to measure was the crosscheck.
Use a checklist
In aviation, high-risk decisions are in writing, and that writing is captured in a checklist. Whether you are starting an engine, preparing to land or, in the worst case, responding to an emergency, all actions are predicated on a checklist. In the heat of the moment, this all-important document ensures that your actions are sequenced correctly and every consideration covered.
Similarly, nearly every action as an MBA candidate should be captured in writing, whether it’s finishing an assignment, sending an email or reminding yourself to wish your dad happy birthday. These actions aren’t complicated in the actual “doing” but must be done, nonetheless. A daily checklist ensured that every action that I had to accomplish did indeed happen in the right sequence, at the right time.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed quickly with the number of tasks that get thrown at you, and even the exercise of taking a deep breath, writing them down and sequencing them is a valuable one. A checklist isn’t the most sophisticated way of measuring progress, but maybe that’s the point. Anyone can do it. Furthermore, it’s a must to ensure those critical steps — like starting the engine before you takeoff — are covered.
Develop your aircrew
Flying is not an individual sport. Even in those moments where I flew as a single pilot, I still relied on my base operations to ensure my flight plan was filed and my controllers to ensure I was clear of any incoming traffic. Similarly, the MBA is a team sport. You can’t do it all alone.
Every flight builds implicit trust between crewmembers; you know their strengths, weaknesses and goals. Even once the flight is over, the opportunities to build that trust remain. Post-flight checks and debriefs all offer opportunities to grow as a team. We had a very simple saying: “Leave the aircraft as a crew,” meaning no one left until all tasks and checks were complete.
Similarly, you need to build that trust with students to the left and right of you. Whether you’re working on a team assignment, practicing a case interview or reviewing resumes, you must know the person sitting across the table, and they need to know you. The only way you can improve is by sharpening your skills against the recommendations and experiences of others and ensuring that no one is left to complete the job on their own. Whether it’s a team assignment or a corporate presentation, I rely heavily on the strengths of my fellow classmates to ensure success.
The takeaway
The further along I go in this process, the more I appreciate the Johnson School experience — pulling in 280 people across various backgrounds, throwing competing priorities at them and letting the process work. Only now, writing this, do I understand the full intention behind this special place. The program is just regimented enough — and just flexible enough — to let you capitalize on the skills you already have and lend them to others as they lend their own to you.
What once felt intimidating now feels intentional. Johnson creates an environment where prior experience is not discarded but leveraged toward an entirely new and different goal.
About the author
Ryan Gill is a first-year MBA candidate at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management. Before business school, he served in the U.S. Army as an aviation officer and instructor pilot. Gill led aircrews on missions including medical evacuation and troop transport. His final assignment in the Army was as the commander for the Army’s Initial Entry Rotary Wing (IERW) Program, where he oversaw the training of new military aviators in the fundamentals of flight. Gill holds a bachelor’s degree in Spanish language and literature from the State University of New York at Geneseo.