Today’s class was a great first experience in college. Truth be told, I have never once been excited by the first day of class in my academic career, but today was different; this class feels rewarding, fulfilling, and incredibly valuable as a base for my beginning as a business student.
Learning how to manage in complex environments is, well, complex. Each exercise feels like I am pushing my brain to its limits. This, of course, is the nature of MCE: the environments which you are asked to diagnose in both in the present and future are unbelievably complicated. There is no right answer to whether or not a company will or will not succeed in the future, or even whether or not that same company is succeeding at this very moment. There are agency problems that inhibit owners from having full control over their firm’s goals. There are many different stakeholders, all with their own set agendas and varying levels of power. There are different metrics by which one can measure the success of a firm. Each firm is clouded in volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and that makes business exceptionally complicated.
Fortunately, this also makes business fun, and even more fortunately, there are legitimate strategies that we can use to keep a firm successful in the present while setting that same firm up for prosperity in the future. For instance, by assessing Porter’s five forces, we can hedge our bets as to what decisions a firm should be making to keep itself successful. By tracking megatrends, we can determine whether or not a firm is headed in the right direction based on global market trends. By studying the political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, legal, and environmental characteristics of any given environment, we can adjust firm structure from environment to environment based on any given set of inputs such that the firm fits better into the overall context of business within that environment. In short, business environments have a tendency to become extremely complex; I am already learning about ways to adjust for, diminish, and control that complexity.
Tomorrow I hope to see this complexity at work at Ernst & Young; I absolutely can not wait to pick the brains of some extremely intelligent individuals about general business topics, as well as about the specific measures they take to ensure success within a complex environment.