My experiences about Cranfield MBA ..... and beyond

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

What good is your education?

A very recent personal experience has prompted me to pen down these thoughts.

Time and time and time again, I see examples around me where people (myself included) continue to fail in applying their education (and hence, knowledge).

I would challenge any arguments that would offer "memory loss" as the reason. I am beginning to believe that this has more to do with our failure to have learnt and educated ourselves truly and completely; it is a finger pointing towards how superficial our educational pursuit has been; above all, it is a reflection of how indisciplined we are as individuals.

A very powerful lesson I picked up at during my MBA at Cranfield UK was "the Ladder of Inference" - this is something that I have written about earlier too. More than 5 years after having completed my last full time education, I find that I still am a culprit - I fail to follow this mantra 100%....sometimes the slip-up is in my professional life, sometime in my personal life.

It does not matter whether there are many other MBAs who may also be failing to apply their education in real life. My use of "I" should at least tell the world that I am taking onus. The key reflection I need to do is "Why do I slip-up? What good was my education?"

Well, my education and my experiences at Cranfield were not only good, they were brilliant, irreplaceable and life-changing. However, perhaps that was the easy part. The difficult part began after the MBA - applying my education in real life and no one promised me that it would be easy.

So, here's the question to you - How good are you making your education to be?