I’m working at the moment with another cohort of MBA students on their capstone projects. Its a quite a challenge as the term is short and by necessity there is a strict word limit (thank God). Their ideas are often BIG as they want to hone their newly developed MBA skills and solve something they are passionate about!

So I remind them of the secrets from project management (with a little Pareto on the side), that it is all about finding the right balance between resources (word limit), time (the term) and cost (them). 

While some, in their initial proposal, come out of the blocks with at least 3 PhD’s worth of work. As they progressively focus their ideas down to something achievable (often data driven) …the end result of this compromise is often excellence!

Its a sage reminder for me that less can be more….but it takes hard work and quite disciplined thinking to get there, I guess that is part of the crucible of graduate study!