{"id":7796,"date":"2015-08-18T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-08-18T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/business.cornell.edu\/centers\/2015\/08\/18\/how-to-draw-an-owl\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T18:17:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T18:17:16","slug":"how-to-draw-an-owl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/business.cornell.edu\/centers\/2015\/08\/18\/how-to-draw-an-owl\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Draw an Owl"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Ace Stryker, MBA \u201816<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Ace<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Applying in-class MBA frameworks to ambiguous business situations which result in meaningful recommendations can be much like drawing an owl.<\/p>\n\n

The first-year MBA core and immersion experience at Johnson can feel a little like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Owl\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The professors in your classes are tremendously helpful atgetting you through step one. You spend much of your time in class learning andpracticing frameworks that could apply in business situations (the sum of whichcomprises an alphabet soup of acronyms unlikely to feel even vaguely familiar amonth after finals).<\/p>\n

Those frameworks can be applied neatly to HBS cases andgenerally yield a set of answers that can be judged in class discussion. Youget a sense after each assignment of whether your approach was right or wrong,based on how the professor approached the same question \u2013 that is, whetheryou\u2019ve learned to draw some circles well.<\/p>\n

But there comes a time in each first-year MBA student\u2019s life\u2013 for many, it\u2019s the integrative case competition at the end of fall semester \u2013when the first unanswered, open-ended, substantial question comes along, andit\u2019s up to you to sift through your toolbox to pick and combine thoseframeworks you think will get you to a useful answer.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, the expectation has shifted: It\u2019s no longer enoughto correctly work through the concepts your professors have taught; the realchallenge lies in identifying the key issues and using your judgment todetermine which tools are appropriate, then deciding \u2013 without immediate,authoritative feedback \u2013 what form the answer should take. This is drawing therest of the freaking owl.<\/p>\n

And it can turn out pretty ugly, even if your circles wereperfect.<\/p>\n

This is where the Sustainable Global Enterprise (SGE)immersion stands apart \u2013 and lessons learned there have been invaluable duringmy summer internship in product management at HP.<\/p>\n

In the first couple months of the SGE immersion, I was shockedat how little time we spent reviewing frameworks. Acronyms were few and farbetween. I began to wonder whether I\u2019d made the right choice \u2013 friends in themarketing immersion were rapidly accumulating STPs and SAPs and SPSSes andwho-knows-what-else. The finance guys had spreadsheet models that looked to melike hieroglyphics. I was a month into my SGE consulting project with Emersonand still trying to nail down the scope of what we were doing.<\/p>\n

Progress on my team\u2019s SGE consulting project was often slow,with frequent stops and even occasional steps backward. The bulk of our effortin the first three months was spent clarifying our client\u2019s key questions andagreeing on what useful final recommendations would look like. It wasn\u2019t untilthe final two months of the project that the pace of actual discovery pickedup, with the team undertaking loads of research around the fairly technicalquestions we were being asked to answer.<\/p>\n

A sense of uneasiness lingered for the duration of thesemester. When my team made our final presentation to Emerson, I felt like wehad a good product, but candidly I was unsure what I had learned in five months.Outside of some basic design thinking vocabulary, I couldn\u2019t point to manyconcrete instances in which I thought, \u201cHey, I just learned to draw a newcircle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then I moved to Palo Alto. Very quickly it dawned on me thatmy employer did not care whether I could draw circles. My ability to calculatediscount rates or convert FIFO to LIFO was meaningless to HP. My mastery ofqueuing theory, formidable though it may be (thanks Prof. Davis!), wasimmaterial. None of the specific tools I\u2019d brought in my box from Johnsonmattered \u2013 except to the extent that they helped produce useful insights andrecommendations.<\/p>\n

In other words, I learned that in the professional world Iwas going to be judged almost exclusively on my ability to draw the freakingowl.<\/p>\n

Almost as soon as I realized that, another thought dawned:That doesn\u2019t scare me. And I have SGE to thank for that.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, that\u2019s what my SGE classmates and I had spentthe entire semester previous doing: learning to visualize the owl early on, torefine it over time, and to deliver a good picture at the end. Maybe some of myclassmates got better than me at drawing circles; that\u2019s fine, but it\u2019s only avery small part of what we\u2019re going to be asked to do in our post-MBA careers.<\/p>\n

The comfort level that SGE helped me develop with ambiguoussituations, and with structuring a process with my team to forge a new path todeliver meaningful results, can\u2019t be measured on a final exam. But it has madeall the difference this summer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Ace Stryker, MBA \u201816 Applying in-class MBA frameworks to ambiguous business situations which result in meaningful recommendations can be much like drawing an owl. The first-year MBA core and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":7797,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[161],"tags":[199,200,180],"ppma_author":[],"class_list":["post-7796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts","tag-graduate-student","tag-immersions","tag-two-year-mba"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow to Draw an Owl - Cornell Business Centers & Institutes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"by Ace Stryker, MBA \u201816 Applying in-class MBA frameworks to ambiguous business situations which result in meaningful recommendations can be much like\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/business.cornell.edu\/centers\/2015\/08\/18\/how-to-draw-an-owl\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How to Draw an Owl - 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