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The first real lesson from business school isn’t about supply and demand or Net Present Value. Forget Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, even, because it’s with French existentialist philosophy that B-school truly begins. Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion that “Hell is other people” is the inescapable starting point of the curriculum, here.
Other MBAs will recognize, I suspect, that I’m talking of ‘Group Work’, a method of learning and assessment rather unique to B-school. Sure, everybody works in groups, in almost any discipline, but business school takes the practice to a whole new level.
Do I dislike my group? Hell no. Dislike my classmates? Uhh, negative. (In fact, I just wrote a fawning little piece about them for Cambridge’s student web diaries, and was being remarkably honest throughout.) But the tortuous fact is that all these initial projects assigned to our five-person ‘study group’ can really be done faster and easier on one’s own. There’s that adage about how one farmer can build a barn in a year, two working together in six months, three in four, and so on - but that heartwarming model doesn’t apply to five students poking and grabbing at a laptop crunching Excel spreadsheets. The law of diminishing returns in action? Recipe for disaster is more like it.
The school admins wickedly love this stuff. They’ll readily confess that they engineer study groups to be as fractured and as contentious as possible - and with 104 students from 33 countries, the Judge Institute operates with a massive advantage over its peers in its ability to assemble volatile mixtures of geopolitical / social / cultural / professional backgrounds. I suppose that, for them, the entire exercise is a thrill not unlike high-school chemistry - mixing and shaking all sorts of stuff, hoping it will go boom.
‘Course there’s no swapping or shuffling of teams allowed - the mantra is always ‘Work with it’. And so you do.
Mostly.
My group has actually been quite the breeze to work with. We’re a surprisingly good crew. There’s rumors, though, talk-in-the-hallway about other groups less fortunate. Some have gone begging and appealing right up to the Director, searching for a mediator. As for myself, I’ve watched other groups out of the corner of my eye, especially during high-pressure, time-constrained assignments, and spotted, here and there, dynamics like Tom and Jerry in a tussle - just a twirling, indecipherable blur of conflict, radiating cartoon stars, smoking squigglies, and technicolor exclamation points. (Almost.)
I’d congratulate myself on avoiding this, but I’m just lucky, so far. Conflict is unavoidable when working under pressure. But I suppose the whole ‘learning to work together’ bit will be equally inevitable, for all of us. Meanwhile, be glad there are no pots, pans, rolling pins or gigantic wooden mallets hanging on the walls of our study area.
That would be a bad scene.
