There’s that awkward moment in your software development life when you realize that most of the people in your company aren’t programmers. Scanning your address book reveals Marketing, Sales, Accounting, Human Resources, and yes, the “business people” with their Masters of Business Administration (MBAs).

I’ve always been curious about what MBAs really do. In my weaker moments, I’ve even thought that the only reason people got an MBA was to demand a higher salary or to “move up the corporate ladder” into some management job. What did these MBA ninjas actually learn in school? Would having an MBA help me better understand how I affected my company’s bottom line? Although I had the curiosity, I never acted on it. This changed when another programmer recommended that I read The Ten-Day MBA by Steven Silbiger.

Sure, I knew that no one would anoint me with a real MBA at the end of the book any more than watching MIT lectures online would make me an MIT grad. Besides, going to a nice MBA school is more about being around other motivated people and professors. The real value in having an MBA is in applying the concepts, not the concepts themselves.

Disclaimers aside, I was determined to read the book and take notes on what a programmer should know about an MBA.

Day 1 - Marketing

Every developer painfully learns that technology doesn’t win on its own. At best, it just gives you a shot at marketing. Marketing is proof that software doesn’t sell itself, no matter how good it is.

A software company might have a Marketing Requirements Document (MRD) that outlines what the next version will contain. This usually is the result of a standard marketing analysis that the book outlined:

Consumer Analysis - Who are they? What do they want? How many different segments of people do you have? Is the buyer of your product different than the user? (The book gives the example that women buy the majority of men’s socks and underwear, thus it’s good to market appropriately). Market Analysis - How big is your target market? Is it new? Is it growing? Where is the product in the life cycle? Competitive Analysis - How do your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOTs) compare to your competition? Distribution Analysis - What “channels” does your company use to reach your customer? Who are the intermediate players (e.g. the Apple Store, Amazon.com, etc)? What cuts do they take? What are their motivations? Plan the Marketing Mix - How will you differentiate your products? How will you place it, promote it, and price it? Determine the Economics - How long will it take before you break even? What are your fixed costs vs. margin costs? (Thankfully software has a low marginal cost) Revise - Tweak and repeat as needed.

One big marketing theme is to “own a word in the consumer’s mind”:

If you establish one benefit in the consumer’s mind, the consumer may attribute other positives as well to your product. FedEx means “overnight delivery.” Only one company can own a word and it is tough to change it once it’s established… The easiest way to own a word is to be first. Consumers tend to stick with products that work for them. Kleenex cleans runny noses. p.26

This explains why your family still uses MapQuest despite your repeated attempts to show them how much better Google Maps is. It’s also helpful if your product name matches what it does. “Drano” is easier to remember than a “Web 2.0” name like Qoop.

I was surprised to learn that the popular online advertising term Cost per Thousand (CPM), is a relatively old term that has long existed in print media. In general, the more targeted a group is, the higher the CPM is. This explains why a programming ad on Stack Overflow can probably fetch a better CPM than the same ad on a site like Pandora, even though programmers use both.

Marketing people typically have their reasons for doing things that frustrate us. For example, if your software will take a long time to get through a distribution channel or marketing foresees a long customer buying process, they might begin to “market” your code long before a beta is available with the belief that it’ll hopefully be read by the time the customer is ready to buy.

Sometimes marketing has to make an extreme choice. When GTE faced rebuilding its tarnished brand in the 1990’s, it was probably a clever marketing person who suggested that they give up on fixing their brand name and re-brand themselves as Verizon.

Despite all the good advice, I was disappointed by the book’s lack of coverage of the Apple/BMW style of “marketing” the engineering department can do by creating a remarkable product. Creating a product that allows users to quickly jump over the “suck threshold” is just one example where a programmer can make a tremendous “marketing” contribution.

Day 2 - Ethics

Ethics seems easy to understand: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” The hard part is realizing how the “others” are affected by your actions. Others include customers, executives, shareholders, suppliers, employees (and their families), the government, the planet, and the “future generations.”

Unfortunately, when simplicity is lost, Sarbanes-Oxley Acts are found.

Day 3 - Accounting

In theory, accounting is simple. Just answer these questions about your entity/business:

What does a company own?

How much does a company owe others?

How well did a company’s operations perform?

How does the company get the cash to fund itself? - p.72

If you get nothing else out of accounting, know how to read a balance sheet. Although Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped out of Stanford’s MBA program to become employee #24, he knew balance sheets were important:

In 1980, I came in to “be a business person” whatever that meant. Didn’t know much. Frankly all I’d ever really done is interview for jobs and market brownie mix. I wasn’t exactly well credentialed. I’d taken the first year at Stanford Business School so I can read a balance sheet – that was pretty important. We didn’t have that much money back then so there wasn’t much to read. But anyway those lessons were important.

Balance sheets are simple to follow:

As the name implies, the balance sheet is a “balance” sheet. The fundamental equation that rules over accounting balance is:

Assets (A) = Liabilities (L) + Owners’ Equity (OE)

What you own (assets) equals the total of what you borrowed (liabilities) and what you have invested (equity) to pay for it. This equation or “identity” explains everything that happens in the accounting records of a company over time. Remember it! - p.83

For example, your work computer is a company asset (which explains the “asset” tag on it). Your company created an equal liability to pay for it. When your company started, the founders gave up some of their money to increase the new company’s cash assets (left side) in exchange for stock in the company (right side).

For example, we can read Google’s balance sheet for the first quarter of 2009 and see:

Assets = $33.51 Billion Liabilities = $3.66 Billion Owner Equity = $29.85 Billion (which includes $14.98 Billion in “retained earnings” that Google is keeping for growth rather than giving it back to the owners of its 315.75 million shares)

Sure enough, everything “balances”:

From basic data, we can derive a bunch of helpful ratios to see how healthy Google is:

Liquidity/Current Ratio = (Current Assets / Current Liabilities) = 33.51 / 3.66 = 9.14 (Greater than 1 means there’s room to pay for liabilities) Financial Leverage = (Total Liabilities + Owners’ Equity) / OE = (3.66 + 29.85) / 29.85 = 1.12 (Greater than 2 indicates a company is using a lot of debt to operate) Return on Equity = (Net Income / Owners’ Equity) = 1.42 / 29.85 = 4.77% (Which indicates how efficiently the company is using shareholder equity) … and many more …

Day 4 - Organizational Behavior

The whole purpose of Organizational Behavior (OB) is to get you to think before you act around people. You want to motivate people? OB has an equation for that:

Motivation = Expectation of Work will lead to Performance * Expectation Performance will lead to Reward * Value of Reward.

Feel free to tweak the variables as you see fit. You can Manage by Objective (MBO) where you set goals and then get out of the way or you can Manage by Walking Around (MBWA) where you play a more active role in day-to-day execution. The best choice depends on your environment and culture. You might need to mix the two. Remember that we humans are delicate creatures with our own wants and desires. Be careful.

Day 5 - Quantitative Analysis

Quantitative Analysis (QA) explains why Excel has so many functions that I’d never heard of. A core idea is that “a dollar today is worth more than a dollar received in the future.” (p.173).

Imagine that someone promises to pay you a dollar in a year if you give them money now. What is that worth to you today? Obviously, it matters on how much you trust them to pay you back. The more you trust them, the more you’re willing to give them now. Similarly, the less you trust them, the more you might “discount” that dollar in the future because they’re tying up money that could be used for better investments. This is called the “discount” or “hurdle” rate. Having a 10% discount rate means that the dollar in the future has a net present value of $0.91 today:

$1 * (1 + 10%)-1 = $0.91

This simple idea has lots of consequences. For example, let’s oversimplify things and say that you can spend $2,000 today to buy and maintain a server that will last for 3 years or you can lock in a price with Amazon for that same server for $800 a year for the same 3 years. A naïve person would just see that $2000 is less than $2400, but a QA person that assigns a 10% discount rate would see:

… and come to the conclusion that it’s about $10 cheaper, in today’s dollars, to have Amazon maintain the server.

You can also do the inverse calculation. Assume you’re Amazon and that server costs you $1800 today and you can get someone to pay you $800 a year for it for 3 years. What is your internal rate of return for this investment?

Here we see an internal rate of return of about 16% on the server.

We could also use the time value of money to include valuing users. Early adopters of eBay and Twitter were worth more per user than late adopters because the early ones were more likely to tell their friends who hadn’t used the service and thus attract more new people.

Day 6 - Finance

Finance blends time, money, and risk.

To start, a business needs a structure that gives it some capital. Popular options include:

Sole Proprietorships - An individual or a married couple. You are effectively your business. All earnings are treated as personal income and taxed appropriately. You take in all the profits but also have unlimited liability. You can’t divide the company up. It’s simple, but the downside is that it makes it hard to raise money.

Partnerships - Involves more people than a proprietorship. Several people come together and can be general partners (each having unlimited liability) or limited partners (liable up to the investment). As a partner, you pay taxes on your percentage of the business’s income on your personal taxes.

Corporations - Effectively you give birth to a new legal entity that is distinct from the shareholders. Most large companies are “C Corporations” and have a double taxation issue where the corporation’s income is taxed and the dividends it issues to shareholders are taxed as well. If you have a smaller company with fewer than 100 shareholders, you may qualify for “S Corporation” status. S Corporations usually don’t pay income tax and instead rely on shareholders to pay the associated tax on their percentage of the income. This tends to give S Corporations the legal liability benefit of corporation status and the single taxation benefit of partnerships.

Corporations issue stock to raise money. Stock entitles the holder to a residual claim on earnings and assets after other debt obligations have been met. One obvious question is “what’s a good stock price?” This has a lot of factors, such as a company’s growth potential and the company’s earnings. Popular metrics include a company’s ratio of its stock price divided by its earnings (P/E ratio). Higher P/E ratios tend to indicate that shareholders have higher expectations the company will grow and eventually make more money in the future. Some examples:

Company P/E Ratio Google 31.47 Microsoft 13.98 Amazon.com 54.98

After you raised some capital, you should carefully think how you’ll spend it. There are many ways to do this. The Payback Period Method has you calculate how long it’ll take to recover your investment. The shorter the payback period, the less risky the investment is. For example, adding RAM is so cheap that the productivity boost has a short payback period. In contrast, completely rewriting a huge codebase might have put your company out of business before you get your money back.

Another approach is to use the Net Present Value Method to see how much the investment will return over its lifetime in terms of today’s dollars. Once you determine the discount factor to reflect the risk, you only consider investments that have a positive Net Present Value.

Day 7 - Operations

Operations is about making stuff. Popular operations guys include Frederick Taylor from the late 1800’s who is famous for breaking up tasks into small pieces and walking around factories with a stopwatch to find the “one right way” of doing them. Elton Mayo’s bold claim was that caring about your employees mattered. You could even make terrible working conditions if the employees were otherwise treated well and felt important.

Although some MBAs might use some programming techniques like optimizing flow-charts to improve operations, it’s more likely to see factory techniques used when managing programmers. Oversimplifying things, software development is a factory that turns capital into code. To this end, you’ll often see popular manufacturing processes like Toyota’s Kanban method of using visual cards to control workflow making their way into our world as “new” or “agile” software methodologies.

Day 8 - Economics

Economics is the magic that allows me to write software in exchange for steak burritos. As Adam Smith realized, society as a whole becomes “wealthier” when we seek division of labor to specialize and do something well rather than trying to do everything ourselves poorly.

At a micro level, economics is a simple matter of supply equals demand. When you look at the larger/macro economies, more complicated equations pop up like this one:

This equation shows that it’s important that money is moving around (e.g. isn’t hidden under your mattress) and that prices are stable or have reasonable growth.

One of the best things about the economics of software is that it has really low marginal costs (e.g. the cost to copy it). With processors, bandwidth, and storage all roughly following Moore’s Law exponential curves, the capacity is doubling every 18 - 24 months which implies that the cost for a fixed amount is falling by half over the same period.

As Chris Anderson points out in his book Free, it can sometimes makes sense to round these increasingly lower marginal costs down to zero and make money in different ways such as advertising or selling complements. It’s hard to find other industries that have as many economic freedoms as software.

Day 9 - Strategy

Strategy should be simple: have a remarkable product that people want. Bad things happen if you don’t do this. It’s especially helpful if you have a cash cow you can milk for lots of money to fund new initiatives. For example, Google makes so much money from ads that it can have this strategy:

Revenue = Amount of Web Pages Viewed

Google’s strategy of getting you to view lots of pages (which conveniently have Google ads on them) explains a lot of what it does. From wanting to speed up the web, to making a free phone OS, to creating a ton of free services to keep you hooked on the web. Google really doesn’t care what you do so long as you enjoy it and take in the targeted ads.

The book tended to focus on more traditional forms of strategy such as “cost leadership”, “differentiation”, and “focus on the customer” as well as applying lessons from the famous prisoner’s dilemma. I acknowledge that these are important as well, but I think that at its core, strategy can be simple.

Day 10 - Minicourses

The book ended with “minicourses” in areas relevant to business such as:

Property (real estate, patents, copyright, etc)

Leadership (e.g. schools want to create ‘leaders’ because they’ll be better future donors).

Although those were interesting, the section I enjoyed the most was on business law.

In our jobs, we often bump into legal matters. We face End User License Agreements (EULAs) and Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) that we rarely read and often don’t fully understand. It was interesting to see any proper contract requires the following four conditions to be valid:

Capacity of Parties - Parties must have legal authorization and be mentally capable to enter into the agreement. Mutual Agreement (Assent) or Meeting of the Minds - There must be a valid offer and an acceptance. Consideration Given - Value must be given for the promise to be enforceable. Legality - You can’t enforce a contract dealing with illegal goods or actions.

When bad things happen, it can sometimes escalate to a “legal action” which has a standard procedure involving steps you sometimes hear in the news:

Jurisdiction - For a court to hear a case, it must have “jurisdiction” to hear the case and power to bind the parties the decision. Pleadings - The paperwork to start the trial process. The plaintiff (p) files a complaint asserting that the defendant (?) has done something wrong and requests a punishment or remedy. Discovery - Lawyers gather witnesses and evidence before a trial. Each side is allowed to see the evidence held by the other side. Pretrial Conference - The lawyers and judge try to focus the case on the most important issues. This is also good time for out-of-court settlements if possible. Trial - Occurs before the court. The jury decides the factual disputes. The case can be thrown out by the judge with a “summary judgment” if it has no merit. Jury Instruction by the Judge and the Verdict - The judge instructs the jury about the relevant law involved and the jury makes its decision about the facts and penalty within its authority. Posttrial Motions - Options include asking for a retrial if an error of law or procedure occurred (e.g. jury misconduct). Appeal - Each party in a lawsuit is entitled to one appeal at an appellate court where they can file a written brief with arguments for a new trial. Secure or Enforce the Judgment - Send the person to jail and/or collect money.

While the short overview was intriguing, it enforced my belief that it’s important to have an attorney or a lawyer when it comes to the legal matters. At the very least, they usually have malpractice insurance if things go really bad.

Conclusion

The Ten Day MBA helped me move from being unconsciously incompetent about business administration to becoming consciously incompetent in just a few days. I think that alone made it worth the time. I don’t have aspirations to get a real MBA, but I now have more respect for those that do.

And now, back to programming…