Tony Bacos is General Manager at Hubbub Health in Portland, Oregon and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2012.

Being a member of the inaugural MIT EMBA class of 2012 has nearly all been fantastic. For some of us (including me) the unpredictability and frontier nature was actually a big draw. One of the realities of going first at anything is that you have no point of reference - you can’t ask anyone who has walked the path before you, “So…what should I expect?”

While I won’t guarantee that I can provide a remotely helpful answer to that question for you, I can at least share a few of the things that I discovered along the way that helped me survive and thoroughly enjoy my EMBA journey. If you happen to be a ~40 year old technology exec who flies...

Willie Wu is managing director of PQD International in Plano, Texas and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2012.

As companies grow from local to global, there are a lot of critical decisions to make. They need to decide whether to retain their hub and spoke system – where the headquarters is the hub and regional offices are the spokes – or to embrace a distributed model, such as a “meta-national” with high global integration and national responsiveness as well as a strong emphasis on global knowledge sharing. They need to decide how people in each country will share knowledge and figure out a fair reward system.

Discussions on this topic both in classes and during our Global Organizations Lab (GO-Lab) resonated with me as my company is headquartered...

Shahriyar Rahmati is a vice president of the Gores Group in Los Angeles, CA and a member of the MIT EMBA class of 2012.

My day job is pretty amazing – I work with a group of highly intelligent, highly driven people at a private equity firm in Los Angeles.  I don’t lack opportunities to make impactful or important decisions. The key question for me is: Am I bringing the best thought leadership possible to bear on my decisions, and how do I make sure that I’m not just fishing from a pool of similar ideas and backgrounds and letting “group-think” assure the wisdom of my actions?

I came to MIT Sloan’s EMBA program to make me better as a thinker and as a business professional.  That sounds pretty philosophical, but you don’t want to be &...

Shawn Atlow is director of facilities, legislation, and grants and funding for the Los Angeles Unified School District in Los Angeles, Calif.  and a member of the MIT Sloan EMBA class of 2013.

Working for a government agency, I wasn’t sure how the MBA curriculum would apply to my job. It turns out to apply more than I ever imagined. Even the entrepreneurship classes have been right on target for the ways my organization needs to think and innovate, especially in light of the current economic environment. Here are a few examples:

Find a framework

A key step for entrepreneurs is finding a framework for evaluating opportunities. You need a way to filter the opportunities you’re considering to ensure that you offer value to your stakeholders/customers without wasting...