Thunderbird Student Voices

Guest post by Kelly A. Sheridan, MBA 2011

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corporation once said, “I like to tell people that all of our products and business will go through three phases. There’s vision, patience, and execution.” After completing my first year as a Thunderbird MBA student in Global Management, I see many parallels between Ballmer’s statement about business strategy and my passion for running.

Vision: I started my MBA at Thunderbird wanting to train both my mind and body. A frequent reader of The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, I was excited to see how I could share my passion for business with those around me.

I also had a goal of running the New York City Marathon – my first marathon – just two months into my MBA. Most of my family and friends thought that I was crazy. But, like business, I wanted to focus on using my drive to execute a shared goal with 42,000 runners in my favorite city.

Patience: Returning to school after being in the working world can prove to be quite a challenge. I exchanged my high school TI-89 calculator for a finance calculator and tried to prepare myself for my new lifestyle – the graduate student.

While I was thrilled to embrace my new status and to meet people from all around the world, I soon realized that with this title comes the inevitable privilege of endless work; you can always study more, network more, learn more. Patience with myself – to learn and grow – has proved pivotal throughout my first year, equally shaping my philosophy on running. No matter how many miles I would run I felt that I could always do more.

It was not until I befriended a Thunderbird friend from Tanzania, Lily Mramba, that I learned that running was as much about flexibility and adaptation as it was about commitment to race day. Lily showed me how integrating training into my life required not just persistence, but patience. I try to abide by this philosophy in both my approach to business and life.

Execution: While most people look to a singular event for “execution,” I have learned that execution occurs all along the way. There are days where I really did not want to run at 4am in order to avoid the Arizona heat. Likewise, there were days after completing the New York City Marathon where I was running to, quite simply, run. Running by itself was the goal – it was the execution. The cumulative effect of those hundreds of miles enables the final result – the bottom line of whatever goal one wants to achieve, be that a casual run with a friend or a marathon.

Vision. Patience. Execution. While each of Ballmer’s phases may appear to be distinct and separate from one another, I would argue that they are tightly integrated concepts. For example, one cannot execute without vision or patience, just as one will remain impatient if there is not an overarching vision or drive toward execution. Integrating these three core concepts into a company’s organizational behavior, as well as into our daily lives, will drive our respective bottom lines, whether we are running a business or a marathon.

(Photos, top to bottom: Kelly Sheridan, Kelly with friend and fellow Thunderbird Student Voices blogger Kelly Fuson after the Prague half marathon, Kelly running the New York Marathon.)

Posted: 07|7|10 at 12:11 pm.
Filed under: Kelly Sheridan, Student Life, ThunderSports, Travel.
Pinging is currently disabled.