from bench to board

Post-MBA I became very intrigued by how senior leaders navigated their career progression. It was also at this time that I realized I learned nothing about this during my MBA and needed to fundamentally teach myself this from the ground up.

I started looking around for a good read on this topic, and stumbled upon John Beeson’s book – The Unwritten Rules: The 6 Skills You Needto Get Promoted to the Executive Level. I was specifically searching for a book on executive presence, but this book fit the bill.

Marketing is one of those functions, that if done successfully, requires a little bit of everything. In other words, it is highly cross-functional and requires a lot of different skills. In Kathryn Ullrich’s Book, Getting to the Top, Strategies for Career Success, she states that close to a third of CEOs have a sales/marketing background, which also turns out to be the biggest bucket for CEO background functions.

Being somewhat new to business, this was something I did not know before or during my MBA at Duke. I think my biggest misconception back then, which many other non-MBAs also had, was that marketing equated to advertising – the kind that went on cereal boxes at the supermarket.

Advertising, while a tactic that results from the development of marketing strategy, is only a very small portion of a marketer’s role, and probably the one that is the least impactful from a value-add perspective.

Where marketers add more value is in developing the strategy of a brand and deciding how to position it in the marketplace. This is the strategic side – after this marketers rely on leadership and operational skills to align teams and ultimately execute the plan. As you may imagine, the newer the brand, and the more brands that compete in a market segment, the bigger the challenge to marketers. Here's my experience taking the Marketing Strategy course at Duke Fuqua.

Here’s what hiring managers and commercial leaders look for in MBA candidates recruiting for marketing roles. Before you read on, here's a backgrounder on commercial/marketing roles in the pharma industry. 

In early 2012, when I was working as a biomedical researcher at the National Institutes of Health, I decided that I wanted to get an MBA and make the transition into the business side of health care. That was almost 5 years ago. Now as I pass my 1-year mark after getting my MBA from Duke, I decided that it is a good time to do some reflecting and see what the MBA has done for me so far.

Relationships, relationships, relationships. As someone who came from a science background – after doing the MBA and working in a Fortune 100 company – I’ve come to realize that networking is key to success in business.

I also know that there are a lot of books, videos, podcasts, etc on networking, but none of them are tailored toward MBAs. I will not repeat the basics of networking, but will assume that folks reading this have graduated from an MBA program or have read some books or articles and know them already. This is more of an add-on, as opposed to an intro into networking.

My MBA journey at Duke Fuqua came to a close in 2015. During those 2 years I’ve written a lot of content on my thoughts on the MBA and the admissions process with a lens from my experience at Duke, and I feel this blog has pretty robust content on that. Prospective students and current students alike should find the content useful and the feedback I’ve gotten from readers reflects this. 

Now that I’m done, I want to shift the content of my blog to more general post-MBA career development and leadership, since this is what I’m currently going through right now.