Thanks to all of you, I have successfully completed the Master of Business Administration program at Tokyo Metropolitan University Graduate School in March 2022, so I would like to write a summary of the entire two years of classes and how fantastic the lectures at this school are.
Curriculum
If I had to choose three memorable classes among the many I took in the MBA program at Tokyo Metropolitan University Graduate School of Management, they would be “Business Risk Management,” “Scenario Planning and Real Options,” “Financial Planning,” and “CSR.” I cannot pick just three. I think that my selection shows the characteristics of Tokyo Metropolitan University(TMU) very well. All of these courses were offered by invited outside practitioners, and we could hear exciting stories based on their extensive actual experiences. Unfortunately, I have heard that the teacher of the first subject will not be teaching this year, but I highly recommend all of these subjects to the students attending the course.
Here, please do not misunderstand this. The classes on business administration as an academic study conducted by full-time professors, while also touching on cutting-edge research, are of course very interesting as well. Since we can learn the fundamental theories of various areas at the same time, we can use them as a basis for a deeper understanding of the more practical subjects. I think this is a significant feature of the curriculum at TMU. Just as is often mentioned in comparisons with other university programs in Japan, lectures at TMU are organized on a balanced curriculum of both academic theory and practical case analysis.
In my master’s thesis, I focused on the dynamics among stakeholders within and between organizations. On the other hand, through the classes, I could broaden my interest in and deepen my understanding of corporate strategy, finance, and accounting, which I had not been familiar with before entering this program. Even when I have been a student in the Department of Physics at TMU originally, there have been countless occasions brought unexpected connections of knowledge through attending classes in a variety of fields. There were a series of replications of such scenes also at the MBA.
Contents of lectures
All the classes were interesting, and honestly, there were no classes that I thought “did not work for me.” Here I will not spoil the content, and I highly recommend you to take the class actually and to enjoy the reality of the course. I took classes through the online system, so if possible, I would like to see how they would be in the face-to-face classes.
In particular, the “Financial Planning” class, while certainly dealing with cashflow modeling that is not a spiritual approach but a numbers-based management decision making, also discussed intensely not only how to play the abacus but also the underlying fundamental perspectives and made us think about how to “bring spirit into numbers.” Moreover, the “CSR” class was designed to consider not just the short-term methodology of “how to promote the CSR activities in our company,” which many corporate investor relations staff tend to think about, but “what CSR is” and “why CSR is necessary,” based on the understanding of social, economic, and environmental changes, and investigation of case studies of various companies. In particular, these two subjects hit me precisely at the heart of what I was looking for since I already had a background in social business, and I was more satisfied than I had imagined before taking the classes.
Additionally, in the MBA program at TMU, the numbers of students in the introductory courses are about 10 to 30, and those in the advanced classes are basically 10 or less, so each attendee has a lot of time to speak during discussions and can ask as many questions as they want. While for me, this small-group education has been standard since my undergraduate degree, it is really a very luxurious experience.
Utilizing Animals and Biodiversity for Business Management
In the final class of the two-year MBA program, that is, the grand final with only the final review of the master’s thesis remaining, I participated again in the CSR class I had taken in the first year of the master’s program and gave a one-hour lecture on the theme of “Utilizing Animals and Biodiversity for Business Management,” which was a very valuable experience for me. For me, it was the compilation of all the learning I had done during my two years as an MBA, and by extension, during my 10 years of parallel career, in a different form than my master’s thesis.
The content of my presentation was to focus on the new economy that has emerged from the 4th Industrial Revolution and the words that were popular “at the time,” such as ESG, Generation Z, and D&I, one by one, and then to go through them with my past experiences in aquariums, environmental education, and complex systems. That is, I have fully integrated the knowledge of IT, finance, environmental education, physics, and other fields. Frankly, I am proud to say that people who can tell this story are pretty rare. I had published the slides on Facebook only for a limited period of time, but if you give me a chance, I will talk about it while updating the content.
Of course, I could not have delivered this lecture without the background of the much learning I received not only from the MBA degree but also from everyone I had met in my parallel career. This story could not have materialized if any of the coincidences were missing. It goes back to my undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics at TMU, where I was trained to approach abstract problems. Additionally, I have recently realized that it is also connected to my difficult upbringing, which I have not talked about in public. So I would like to graduate from an instrumental life that no longer focuses on sacrificing the present and working hard for my future, and from now on, I would like to live a more consummatory life, attaching importance to the present moment as seen by the people surrounding me.
As I have written before, the terms ESG, Generation Z, D&I, etc., have already become overused buzzwords, so while understanding of their essence by society is improving, I suspect that they are often regarded only superficially or misjudged. In addition to these, new notions continue to be installed into society rapidly. Therefore, I cannot give the very same speech in the future again. In such a world, we need to sharpen our eyes to look at the “now” that we are facing, to accept and sense ongoing “change” through the sounds, smells, temperatures, textures, and tastes, and to live flexibly and adaptively to the environment through asking the “problems” themselves which arise along with such change. Exactly, we will live together in an “ecosystem” by interacting with “animals.” Of course, we can easily say “accepting” changes, but in the natural world, we cannot do that with half-hearted determination; we must continually refine our senses and develop our strengths to survive. It made me realize that this is the way to live in a VUCA age by learning from animals and ecosystems.
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