CHAPTER 6Map the Trip
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV
Introduction
In 2011 I was doing my PG Diploma at Said Business School, University of Oxford. We had a diverse set of students making up the cohort. Diversity across age, gender and nationalities really helped the classroom experience. One of the more senior people in the class was an investment manager from San Francisco. I felt he didn't need a b-school to learn global business.
He had a general management degree from Harvard Business School and had done a few more modular courses from Yale and UCLA. During our third module of the course, we had to walk from one campus to another and I got into a casual chat with him. He asked me what I planned to do after the course. I said I had two potential courses to take. One was a masters in finance or a masters in financial engineering.
However, I confessed to him that I was split between the two. He gave me an analogy to help me decide between the two courses, and it has stayed with me since. He said that if I wanted to be the person who understands the wiring, circuitry and all the technical ‘stuff’ that happens to identify the speed of a car and show it on the display, do the financial engineering degree. Instead, if I wanted to be the person looking at the speedometer, watching at the road, and wanting to steer the car in the right direction, do the masters in finance.
It was an excellent insight, and it helped me understand where ...
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