Applying the lessons of MBA school to the reality of COVID-19 [Show summary]

Al Dea, a tech product manager who earned his MBA from UNC, dives deep into what life is like after business school, including how the pandemic has impacted the post-MBA experience.

What steps can businesses take to help employees thrive during COVID? How can MBA programs help students thrive during this time? [Show notes]

Our guest today is a tech product manager, member of the UNC MBA class of 2015, host of the MBASchooled podcast, and author of the book MBA Insider: How to Make the Most of Your MBA Experience. Al Dea earned his bachelor's in marketing and theology from Boston College in 2010. He then became a Deloitte analyst and consultant until starting his MBA at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. He earned his MBA from Kenan-Flagler in 2015 and returned to Deloitte for a couple of years, then started in product management for a leading high tech firm in 2017, and today is a senior manager in product marketing at that company. On the side, he launched his website, MBASchooled, in 2015. A year ago, he published his first book, MBA Insider: How to Make The Most of Your MBA Experience, and started the MBASchooled podcast.

It's been about a year since he was last on Admissions Straight Talk, and we discussed in that interview his application experience and MBA experience at UNC. We’re not going to cover those topics again, but if you would like to hear Al's perspective on the topics I typically discuss, check out the original interview, MBA Insider Shares His Secrets in New Book.

How did you adjust to remote work both personally and as a manager working in tech? [2:46]

I’m someone who works as a knowledge worker and for a tech company. Relatively speaking, we've all experienced challenges, but my experience making the transition was rather seamless. Many of the people on my team have worked remotely for varying degrees of time, and in some cases, many are only remote based off of where they are, geographically speaking. It wasn't so much that we hadn't done this before; we just all hadn't done it permanently before. It was really about refining and getting used to this being an everyday thing. That said, even though we did have incredible resources to make the transition, even though we had some kind of norms for knowing how to collaborate over Google Hangouts and Google Meet and the like, it definitely was still challenging. Anytime you get a shock to the system, or you have to make an adjustment, it takes the body a little bit of time to adapt and evolve.

For me, a couple of things stood out. Number one, the fundamentals in the ways of working. Fundamentals: these are the things that are critical to helping you be at your best and do your job effectively. If you think about a professional athlete, if I think about someone like LeBron James, LeBron James is amazing on the court because of all the things he does off the court in order for him to be at his best. That was something that I took to heart as I made the transition to working more remote and thought about for the folks on my team. What are those fundamentals that, in this new environment,