Henley MBA journey is over. What a relief.

It’s done. Unbelievable…three years of hard work are over. I handed in my master thesis last Monday and have to wait 10 to 14 weeks until I get back the grades. I should be doing ok ☺. The Henley MBA has truly changed my life.

Master thesis was challenging
The thesis was extremely challenging but worth every minute. After a diligent literature review about marketing metrics (loads of marketing performance measurement articles included) I have formulated a couple of research questions (basically one overarching question that has been broken down into 7 sub questions) that were answered in the investigation part with the help of internal qualitative interviews and an external quantitative survey. The analysis of the internal interviews followed a thematic coding approach and was carried out deductively. The quantitative survey used descriptive statistics to describe frequencies and inferential statistics to test hypothesis with t-tests, Kruskal-Wallis tests, ANOVAs and linear regressions. Quite challenging I have to admit but I managed it quite well.

Analysis of marketing metrics on this blog soon
You’ll find some basic analyses of the survey on this blog soon. I guess marketing metrics are extremely important and the feedback I got from the respondents was overwhelming. Many agreed on the importance, many asked loads of deep questions and many wanted to have the results of the final analysis. However, I have to admit that I had hoped for clear correlations between success of companies (that has been adjusted to reflect the credit crunch) and the used metrics in terms of number of metrics, frequency of measurement, dashboard and success etc. None of these relationships could have been proved significantly so far with the used methods. That was due the scope of the thesis as well. However, some interrelations exist, especially between non-financial marketing metrics and company success. Guess I have to analyse it further out of personal interest in the next couple of month. Nevertheless, at the moment I’m just glad that the thesis is done and the MBA journey is over.

Work-life-balance – got it back now?
The MBA journey is history. No more learning at the evening, at the weekend, at the holiday etc. Just family and social life. I guess in retro perspective this has been the biggest trade off I had to accept. Not sure whether it has been worth, time will definitely tell.

So what’s my recap of the MBA just a few days after the end? Extremely valuable, learned a lot of applicable stuff that has made me a better manager for sure. Made some international friends for life. Have proved that I can work for a long time over the limit if necessary despite the fact that overall health definitely suffered. Nevertheless, I’m so much more better in many ways compared to when I started the MBA…holistic, interrelationships are not any more just fancy words. However, as said before I now have to turn to work-life-balance again. Imagine: For the first time in 3 years that I have mown the lawn without a guilty conscious!! Fantastic. Need more of it. And I guess I have deserved it as well.

New objectives? Yes. I’ll keep you posted. Soon. Now a bit of celebration seems to be appropriate to me.