For Vijay Mehta, managing director at Ziff Brothers, attending the Investment Management Workshop (IMW) was an opportunity to step back from his day to day obligations and re-evaluate the investing business as a business. Through the IMW he was able to takeaway new perspectives on industry trends and a self-reflection on how to approach them.
I believe that true learning happens at the margin, when you step out of your comfort zone, try on a new idea, and then debate the idea with people who have different backgrounds. The Investment Management Workshop (IMW) is one of the only venues I know of that can provide this type of setting for low-risk, accelerated learning.
Contrast this to the typical workday, which is composed of reading the same sources, analyzing the same companies, and discussing findings with people who have similar backgrounds. Now, consider that you spend 95 percent to 100 percent of your time doing this!
From that perspective, the IMW is one of the best uses of your incremental time. It's a very modest investment of time and money for an extremely differentiated learning experience.
It's not every day that you get to step back and look at the investing business as a business. In my day to day, I spend most of my time thinking about changes taking place in other economies, industries, and companies.
However, in the IMW, we flipped the question on its head and did a Porter's Five Forces analysis on our own industry, and the surprising, yet profound, question we came to was this: How might Amazon, Google, or Alibaba try to disrupt the asset management business?
The question sparked heated debate with some saying it could never happen, while others acknowledging that it had already happened. My takeaway was in noticing that the trends I was quick to point out in other industries were the very ones that I was reluctant or unable to see impacting my own job. The IMW provided the ideal opportunity for self-reflection and a healthy reality check.
Having graduated from Harvard Business School (HBS), I thought I knew what to expect from the IMW. What I hadn't considered was that in traditional MBA programs, the average student (including me) is relatively inexperienced, having spent anywhere from two to six years working professionally.
In the IMW, however, the experience level of my classmates was much higher and more relevant. As a result, the expertise in the classroom was obvious as we were discussing certain cases—one in particular stands out where a classmate shared her perspective, and it became obvious that she was one of the leading experts in her field.
In another example, a case focused on trade execution, we literally got to hear from a classmate whom I believe has traded the most notional dollars of stocks in the history of our financial system! By definition, this type of learning from peers could not have happened in a traditional MBA program simply because students, in general, don't have enough experience to be experts in their respective fields.
In addition to the classroom setting, there are ample opportunities to learn, debate, and network with classmates before and after class, and it was these experiences that stand out for me.
Before class, I got a lot out of the planning sessions with my learning team. It was an opportunity to hear different perspectives on cases in which I had a singular point of view. This was a good reminder that there were no right or wrong answers, per se, but rather many gray areas where we had to make the best decisions with the limited information at hand.
After class, I remember the great lineup of speakers that would come to have dinner with us and discuss interesting parts of their life stories or business. The speakers ranged from Jeremy Grantham, Co-founder of GMO, to Robert Kapito, President of BlackRock. The best part was that neither the speakers nor the IMW participants had any particular agenda, so we could focus on real issues and questions rather than stick to prepared statements.
