The time for my 1-year MBA seemed to fly by exponentially. I had just three terms - Summer, Fall, and Spring - and each seemed to go by faster than the previous.

My motivation for going back to school was to develop leadership skills and business acumen. While I definitely got exposure to many new hard skills (accounting, finance, strategy, optimization modeling), the biggest takeaways have been in the soft-skills. Three experiences stand out: management with purpose, leadership fellows, and the storytelling summit.

Management with Purpose, a course taught by the professor-influencer Suzy Welch, was about being a 'lanager' (leader - manager). The thesis being that leaders are often thought of as charismatic visionaries, while managers as process-oriented executors. To be successful, you must be both. This actually turned out to be one of the hardest courses I took (up there with Finance), and my lowest grade (B- which is as low as you can go in B-School; I got an A in Finance though). Still, I suspect it will be the content I will be able to best recall in 10 years. We covered frameworks and techniques for establishing culture, dealing with personalities, driving teams to consensus, crisis management, and more. My two favorites were: 1) OILS - a technique for giving feedback and having difficult conversations: state your Observations, note the Impact of those, Listen to the other's perspective(s), and co-create a specific Solution; 2) Culture as the OS of organizations - you should define values that align to your organizations' mission and strategy, then be sure to talk, walk, celebrate, enforce, and calibrate them often.

Leadership Fellows is a course by Stern's Leadership Accellerator. It comes in several formats: full-year, single term, and a 3-day intensive. I chose to do the intensive (in order to spread out my credits on diverse credits). While Management with Purpose was theoretical, this was a lot more practical. It was a small group of 16 students where we role-played various scenarios of conflict. The professor hired (very good) actors to play different, challenging characters that made the situations feel real. It was good practice deploying classroom learnings (incl. those from above!) in live setting. The intimate setting also allowed for honest feedback from peers, and I learned much about my tendencies.

The Storytelling Summit, also led by the Leadership Accellerator, was a 2-day weekend intensive workshop. We reviewed different types of storytelling frameworks, practiced telling a few short stores, and worked on one flagship one. The experience was so inspiring I wrote an entire stanalone post about it: The Power of Storytelling.

I'll end with my favorite quote from the year (discovered in Management with Purpose), by Clayton Christensen: "Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it's a magnificent profession."

I'm not yet sure what next for my career, but I am coming out of this program feeling invigorated and excited.