ANDREW CHOI, HEALTHCARE MBA

One of the best classes I have taken so far at USC Marshall is MOR 571 Leadership and Executive Development with Professor McCall. Prior to business school, I had led in various contexts and read about great leaders, but never thought about my leadership philosophy or the language of leadership. This course has helped me explore the challenges of leadership through various approaches of great corporate and military leaders, corporate practices used to develop leaders, and derailment of leaders. It also helped me explore the strengths I have used or exploited as well as flaws I might have hidden or compensated for to get to where I am today.

The course explores the central challenge of leadership, which is creating a context for other people to be successful in achieving the organization's mission. Meeting this challenge depends on how leaders face five primary demands:

• setting and communicating direction,
• aligning people behind the direction,
• developing the temperament to handle the stress, ambiguity, and conflicts inherent in the job,
• setting and living values,
• and growth of self and others.

Part of the course includes the development of The Map of Your Life, which is basically a way for us to figure out for ourselves who we think we are, what is worth pursuing, what we offer and what we need, what brings us to life and what saps the life out of us.

While working on this exercise, time and time again, I go back to my conflicts between money vs. happiness and rat race vs. fulfillment. Just going through all my blog entries from the past provided some interesting perspectives on my view of the world and my internal conflicts throughout business school.



Anyway, we are going to have the distinguished Warren Bennis, a leadership guru and one of the top business thinkers, in class next Monday. Maybe I can get his thoughts on some of these conflicts I keep coming across...