0:05

You have to be very clear about what the

0:05

MBA is going to do for you specifically

0:09

and when you do that, then you get very purposeful about which

0:10

school that you choose, and for me,

0:14

when I looked at all the different

0:14

schools, the course that did it for me,

0:17

the one that sold me on

0:17

Sloan was System Dynamics.

0:21

Welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, a candid conversation with alumni and

0:24

faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and

0:28

how it influences what they're doing today. So what does it mean to be a Sloanie?

0:31

Over the course of this podcast,

0:36

you'll hear from guests who are making

0:36

a difference in their community,

0:39

including our own very

0:39

important one here at Sloan.

0:45

Hi, I'm your host, Christopher Reichert, and welcome to Sloanies Talking with

0:46

Sloanies. My guest today is Jawad Ahsan,

0:50

a 2014 MIT Sloan Executive MBA graduate.

0:55

Welcome, Jawad. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Let's see, how do I describe Jawad?

0:57

In looking at your work trajectory,

1:02

there's a long initial period

1:02

with GE lasting roughly 13

1:06

years, so very much in a big corporate

1:06

environment, although within divisions,

1:10

so maybe it didn't feel quite like that. And the roles you always

1:12

had a finance edge,

1:16

they're in financial planning audits

1:16

and moving into more senior roles as the

1:21

chief financial officer for various

1:21

divisions like Aviation Services and GE

1:25

Health Services later at

1:25

Market Track and Axon,

1:29

which I want to circle back on.

1:29

You continued with finance roles,

1:32

CFO for both of them, but also

1:32

a few other roles. At Axon,

1:36

you were responsible for leading

1:36

the finance corporate strategy,

1:39

legal and IT functions,

1:41

and you were instrumental in

1:41

helping grow Axon's market cap from

1:44

1 billion to over 13

1:44

billion, which is huge,

1:48

and raised 600 billion through two

1:48

follow-on offerings including a

1:51

pre-IPO from TASR to Axon,

1:56

I think that was the call sign. Later,

1:59

you started to add board and advisory

1:59

roles at Freepower and Store Capital,

2:04

with executive components

2:04

and some of those.

2:07

So how am I doing so far in describing

2:07

your professional background at least?

2:12

Yeah, that's exactly right.

2:12

As it reads on paper,

2:15

I will say I'm the least

2:15

financial finance person you've

2:20

ever met. I view myself as a creative at its

2:25

core. That's how I view myself

2:25

as a creative and the way

2:30

found I can have an impact

2:30

on organizations that I'm

2:35

my mark on the world is

2:35

through the finance lens.

2:39

But ultimately how I view myself

2:39

is really more I love to create.

2:44

Yeah, I think so. I was thinking about exactly what

2:45

you said that on paper so far,

2:49

finance guy type of thing.

2:49

But I agree with you.

2:52

I don't think it really tells a complete

2:52

picture of who Jawad Ahsan really is

2:56

and what motivates you.

2:56

You've also written a book,

2:59

"What they didn't tell me." about building

2:59

resilience as a leader and building

3:03

teams you can trust. And this became an Amazon bestseller and

3:04

was featured in Entrepreneur Magazine.

3:08

And you have a creative side, which you just mentioned, which is expressed through your Light

3:10

Mountain Creative producing books and

3:14

independent movies, but

3:14

also Light Mountain Capital,

3:17

which invests in startup businesses

3:17

including Free Power mentioned earlier,

3:21

and Light Mountain Craft, which provides executive advisory

3:22

and professional development

3:27

services. So you have lots of

3:27

energy and is the Light Mountain...?

3:32

So tie this together as a

3:32

person who's experienced and

3:38

continues to evolve through this sort of

3:38

firsthand, walk us through that a bit.

3:42

Sure. Yeah. For a large part of my career,

3:45

I had sort of the standard

3:45

trajectory where I

3:50

was at GE for 13 years, was a

3:50

divisional CFO three different times.

3:54

And then I left in 2014 to go

3:54

be a private equity-backed CFO.

3:58

And then after that I went to

3:58

Axon, did the public company thing,

4:01

and in 2021 had an

4:01

opportunity to invest in

4:06

Free Power. Some of Free Power's, origins,

4:09

its founders have ties to Axon. And

4:09

that's how I got connected with them.

4:14

And I was really enamored with this

4:14

idea of investing in a business.

4:19

And not only that, but I wanted to be very purposeful about

4:20

how I did that and set up something

4:23

that I thought could lead to a

4:23

broader investment portfolio.

4:27

And so I created Light

4:27

Mountain at the time in 2021,

4:30

and that's how I invested in Free Power.

4:30

The idea was that for me, I wanted to,

4:36

I think everyone's dream to some

4:36

degree is to be their own boss.

4:39

And I viewed Light Mountain as the

4:39

springboard for that and really

4:43

the avenue to be creative. And so initially it started with

4:46

just an investment in Free Power.

4:49

And then over time I realized, look,

4:49

there's more I want to do here.

4:52

My book was released in 2021 as well,

4:55

and my son has released a

4:55

book as well through that.

4:58

And I have another book,

5:01

and I'm working on the film.

5:01

I've always been a big movie buff

5:05

and had an opportunity to help finance

5:05

a film that we're taking out the

5:09

festivals now. And there's some

5:09

other projects I'm looking at there.

5:13

So the idea was I wanted

5:13

Light Mountain to be something

5:17

that I could basically use for

5:17

all my different creative outlets.

5:22

And ultimately I was doing that for,

5:26

I left Axon last year

5:26

and was doing this for,

5:29

I took a president role at Free Power, but I was also kind of standing

5:30

up these other ventures.

5:33

And I got to OfferPad by way

5:33

of one of the parents who is

5:38

at my kid's school, we've

5:38

known each other for six years.

5:41

He's the chief legal officer at OfferPad. And I'd followed his journey over to

5:43

OfferPad and watched them go public,

5:48

was fascinated with the business, but didn't really feel like it

5:49

was something I wanted to do.

5:52

And then I met the CEO a few months

5:52

ago and got to know him as well.

5:56

Actually it was about a year ago. And more I learned about the company and

5:57

their mission and what they're trying

6:01

to do and also what

6:01

they're struggling with.

6:03

I felt like this is exactly the kind

6:03

of thing I can come in and help with. I

6:07

feel like they haven't historically

6:07

done a great job selling their vision to

6:11

investors. I do consider

6:11

myself a storyteller, right?

6:16

Really if you want to get down to the

6:16

heart of what I view as my creative

6:21

sort of strength, it's storytelling. And so that's where I felt like

6:23

I could add value also, again,

6:27

building high-performing teams, I felt

6:27

like they had a good team in place,

6:32

but I could come in and maybe

6:32

with stronger leadership help

6:37

supercharge them. And so I see a company. The other thing I love about OfferPad

6:39

is that real estate is the largest asset

6:43

class in the world. And

6:43

from a finance perspective,

6:47

I love a good TAM (total addressable

6:47

market) and I love a big TAM.

6:50

It just means lots of ways

6:50

to grow. And so for me,

6:53

I looked at this and saw a lot of

6:53

opportunity and decided to join full-time.

6:56

I'm trying to think of

6:56

the transition from GE and

7:01

ever-growing responsibilities

7:01

at a company that's renowned for

7:06

its executive training

7:06

and Six Sigma and all of

7:12

the stories about GE to smaller companies,

7:17

but with more responsibilities. So tell us about something that you

7:18

still carry with you from your time at

7:23

GE. My very first day on the job at GE,

7:26

somebody handed me a laminated business

7:26

card and on the back of it were

7:31

written GE's values. And I can

7:31

still remember to this day,

7:35

22 years later,

7:38

I can still remember it was the four Es,

7:38

Energy,

7:41

Energize Edge, and Execution.

7:41

It's like your personal energy,

7:45

what you bring to work every

7:45

day, how you energize others,

7:49

the edge that you show, the ability to

7:49

make tough decisions. And then execution.

7:53

And really execution was table stakes, right? You have to show up and do your job

7:55

every day because people are counting on

7:58

you. And that was it.

8:00

Those were GE's values for a long time

8:00

and they had everyone carry them around.

8:04

So what gave you some of

8:04

the confidence to pivot from

8:09

that journey to this more

8:09

portfolio type of career?

8:14

So my answer to this

8:14

question, Christopher,

8:16

would be the same regardless of the

8:16

audience. And really it was Sloan,

8:20

it was my experience at MIT. I went to MIT and the executive program,

8:25

and the idea was to go do

8:25

this for a couple of years,

8:29

differentiate myself relative to my peers,

8:31

maybe augment my learning a little bit, and then come back and I was going

8:33

to spend the rest of my career at GE.

8:35

I really enjoyed my time there. While I

8:35

was at Sloan, I just got bit by the bug.

8:40

I wanted to be an entrepreneur

8:40

and more than anything I really,

8:44

I wanted to have a bigger impact on the

8:44

world and leverage my skills and talents

8:49

in a way that I could have a

8:49

broader impact. For a long time,

8:54

I've tended to have this giant ticking

8:54

clock in the back of my head where I

8:57

recognize there's only so much time

8:57

that all of us have here and I want to

9:02

maximize my impact while I'm here. And

9:02

it just became increasingly clear to me

9:06

that my scope of impact would've been

9:06

limited within a company like GE,

9:10

and I wanted to go out and start to have

9:10

that impact felt in different places.

9:15

And that's one of the great things

9:15

about joining a smaller organization.

9:18

So when I went to Market Track in

9:18

2014, much, much smaller company,

9:22

but as CFO for the entire company,

9:22

my scope of impact was much broader,

9:27

and that was the first time I

9:27

also had a function that I owned.

9:31

Other than finance, I also own

9:31

the HR function and legal as well.

9:36

And that trend has continued. At Axon,

9:36

I had multiple functions. At OfferPad,

9:40

it's the same thing. So I love having

9:40

an impact across an organization.

9:45

So is there anything that you learned

9:45

at Sloan or is there a course that you

9:50

took that really sticks with you and

9:50

you come back to as a foundational,

9:54

I guess, thinking process? Yeah, there are a few.

9:58

I'd say organizational processes

9:58

was a really interesting one just to

10:03

the different lenses that you

10:03

view your environment through.

10:07

And I think I always kind of knew that

10:07

intuitively, but to have it structured,

10:11

and that's one of the great things about

10:11

Sloan is that just the mental models

10:13

you get just stay with you forever. And

10:13

they're so powerful, even to this day,

10:17

still every day I think about

10:17

how the most important part

10:22

and maybe the most difficult

10:22

part of answering any

10:25

And so a big part of my day,

10:27

every day when we're in meetings

10:27

talking with executives, board members,

10:31

investors, whatever it is, I want to make

10:31

sure whatever discussion we're having,

10:34

it's framed the right way. And that's how I really view my role as

10:36

making sure we frame it right up front

10:40

and then you're having the right discussion. Otherwise it's a lot of wasted energy

10:42

and wasted motion. Then I'd say

10:46

another one was negotiations. Actually,

10:50

it was in some ways very tactical,

10:54

but it just speaks to the human

10:54

psychology that's involved in

10:59

everything you do. Actually today, I

10:59

don't read a lot of business books.

11:02

I mostly read books about human

11:02

psychology and how the mind works.

11:06

There are a couple of great books that I recommend. One is called "You Are Not So

11:08

Smart". And the second follow-up,

11:12

the sequel is "You are Now Less Dumb".

11:12

And they're basically a compendium,

11:16

a collection of cognitive biases.

11:16

And that's another thing for me.

11:21

I also, every day I show up to

11:21

work and in all my meetings,

11:26

in all my one-on-ones I am looking for

11:26

and listening for cognitive biases.

11:31

Everyone has them, right? You can't

11:31

avoid them. I have them as well.

11:34

I'm not immune to that, but just being aware of them I think

11:35

also helps you very quickly get

11:40

to what people's motivations may be. Also,

11:44

how you can steer a discussion to make

11:44

sure that you're getting to the right

11:46

answer. I think that's another thing

11:46

that I took away from Sloan was

11:51

always making sure you to

11:51

the right answer, I think.

11:54

And now the way I articulated, I've

11:54

sort of learned this over the years.

11:58

There's three things that I focus

11:58

on. One is always work hard.

12:03

Just that work ethic has been

12:03

instilled in me from childhood,

12:06

always do the right thing. And

12:06

this is a really big theme at GE,

12:11

just operating with integrity. And then the third one now is

12:13

always get to the right answer.

12:17

And that one's probably the toughest

12:17

because everyone can work hard.

12:21

Everyone can control their own work ethic. Everyone can control doing the right

12:23

thing. There's a very clear line,

12:27

everyone knows it, right? You don't want

12:27

to cross that line. But the third one,

12:31

getting to the right answer is really

12:31

hard because it requires you to admit when

12:35

you're wrong.

12:35

And a lot of people can't do that.

12:39

You not only have to admit when you're wrong, but even to get to the point where you

12:41

can admit that you're wrong or you're

12:45

maybe not right about something, you have to have enough experience

12:46

to know what the right answer is.

12:50

And this is another thing I see now. I'm now into the third decade

12:52

of my career and I see people

12:57

starting off, and I'm sure I

12:57

was like this at one point too.

13:00

They're just so confident that

13:00

they know the right answer.

13:04

They're so confident that they're right, and they've got maybe five years,

13:09

maybe 10 years of experience under their belts, and they just don't have enough

13:11

life experience in general.

13:15

When you're 30 years old, you

13:15

may think you've seen it all,

13:18

it all just because you've read every

13:18

substack and every post out there

13:24

that you could possibly read, and you're

13:24

like, okay, great. I'm ready to go.

13:26

Conquer the world. You're

13:26

not. You're not. Right.

13:28

And this is where you really need to

13:28

lean on people with more experience.

13:32

And so that's another thing that

13:32

I've just crystallized from Sloan,

13:36

was really being inquisitive

13:36

and humble enough to

13:41

ask the tough questions to get to the right answer. Yeah.

13:44

So when you said with

13:44

the third one being get

13:49

the right answer, what about the

13:49

process of asking the right questions?

13:53

How do you go about that? Yeah,

13:55

that's really the core of getting to

13:55

the right answer is asking the right

14:00

questions. And again, going back to

14:00

framing the question the right way here,

14:04

I'm very much a principal

14:04

and mission-driven person.

14:08

So if you go to my website,

14:08

you go to jawadahsan.com.

14:10

The very first thing is you see my

14:10

North Star. And when I'm in interviews,

14:15

the first question I ask everybody

14:15

is, what is your North Star?

14:18

What are you driving towards in your career? And you'd be surprised how many

14:20

people struggle with the question.

14:25

I think a lot of people don't think about

14:25

it, but for me, it guides everything.

14:28

You have to have a North Star as an individual, you have to have a North Star as

14:31

a company, as an organization,

14:34

whatever it's that you're doing, you have to have something that you're

14:34

driving towards. You can change it,

14:38

you can update it, you can refresh it,

14:38

you can overhaul it whatever you want,

14:41

but you always have to have one. And

14:41

the analogy I like to use is if you were

14:45

walking down the street and somebody

14:45

pulled up next to you in a car and they

14:49

roll their window down and

14:49

they ask you, Christopher,

14:51

could I please get directions? The

14:51

first thing you're going to ask them is,

14:55

where are you going? And if

14:55

they can't answer that question,

14:58

how are you supposed to help them? And it's the same thing for an

15:00

individual or for a company.

15:03

If you can't articulate where you're headed, how is your organization

15:05

supposed to get aligned with you?

15:07

How are other people supposed to help you? So the North Star is really important

15:10

because it just guides everything that you

15:14

do. And when you're now trying

15:14

to get to the right answer,

15:18

it should be in service of driving

15:18

towards that north star, right?

15:21

You have to always keep in

15:21

mind what your core values are,

15:23

what your principles are. It's like your personal mission, the

15:25

mission statement of an organization.

15:30

So I see here that your North Star is to

15:30

build and develop high-performing teams

15:35

that will drive transformative

15:35

societal change.

15:38

Yes. So there's a profit component,

15:43

but also it really talks

15:43

about transformation and it

15:49

there's a moral element to it. Yeah, I would say I never had a profit

15:51

element in mind when I wrote that.

15:56

The two aspects, one is

15:56

the high-performing teams,

15:58

and the second one is

15:58

transformative societal change,

16:02

because I found that I've

16:02

built high-performing teams,

16:05

but I've done that in environments where

16:05

you're not really having much of an

16:10

impact on society. And for

16:10

me, that's not fulfilling.

16:12

And so it's the two together

16:12

that are really important.

16:15

I also serve on the board

16:15

of my children's school.

16:19

It's a nonprofit, and I

16:19

think about that as well.

16:23

When we think about when we're in

16:23

our board meetings and we're having

16:25

discussions about the future of the

16:25

school, there's no profit involved there,

16:28

but we very much want to put the right

16:28

team on the field and help the head of

16:32

the school be high performing

16:32

and build high performing teams.

16:35

So, what was it at Sloan

16:35

that flipped you from going

16:40

back to a large corporation

16:40

which had opportunities for

16:45

further growth to saying, you know what?

16:48

I'm going to go off and

16:48

really go a less beaten path.

16:54

It was really the energy you get

16:54

on campus and you see the energy.

16:58

One of the first things, actually, it

16:58

was, I think the very first day on campus,

17:02

we got addressed by the

17:02

president who said very clearly,

17:06

I'll never forget this, MIT

17:06

is an institution, right?

17:10

We take the I part of

17:10

our name very seriously,

17:12

and you are here as part of a broader

17:12

group of people that are looking

17:17

to learn and advance technology,

17:20

and there are more graduate

17:20

students than undergrad.

17:24

And you look across all the variety

17:24

of graduate programs that are there.

17:29

What I loved about being

17:29

at Sloan is that there was,

17:33

yes distinctions between, okay, I'm here for business or I'm here for

17:35

electrical engineering or nanotechnology.

17:40

But there wasn't a lot of,

17:42

I'd say distinction between an

17:47

MBA versus an EMBA versus a Sloan Fellow.

17:51

We were all there for a

17:51

common cause, and I love that,

17:54

right? I love that aspect of it. And then you get to have discussions

17:56

with folks and think about, okay,

18:00

what brought you here? Why are you here? What are you looking to do with

18:01

your career, with your life?

18:05

What's the impact that you're looking to make? And having those discussions with

18:07

people you realize like, look,

18:09

there's just so much that I

18:09

can do, so much I want to do.

18:13

And GE looks smaller and smaller by

18:13

the day, and I just felt like, look,

18:17

I want to go out there. And for me, it was always taking another CFO

18:19

role and another one after that,

18:23

there were more stepping stones to

18:23

doing something else down the road.

18:28

When you get up in the morning

18:28

or you start your week,

18:30

how do you plan your week

18:30

given that you've got this

18:35

also have these creative vehicles?

18:39

It was one of the things I

18:39

talked about with Brian Bair,

18:42

the CEO at OfferPad before

18:42

I joined. I said, look,

18:44

I've got a lot of things I'm involved

18:44

in and they're very important to me.

18:48

Obviously I know OfferPad

18:48

is my number one job,

18:50

and that's going to be a key focus, but

18:50

I am on another public company board.

18:54

I'm still on the board of Free Power.

18:54

I'm on the board of my kids' school,

18:56

and that's important to me, and then I have these other outlets that

18:58

I also want to continue to invest time

19:03

in. And he was really supportive of that.

19:06

Just having that alignment and having

19:06

that understanding upfront was very key.

19:11

I live by my calendar. If

19:11

it's not on my calendar,

19:13

then it basically doesn't exist. And when

19:13

you think that way, you realize, okay,

19:18

there's so much time that

19:18

you can use in a given day.

19:22

Everyone's got the same 24 hours. How you use that time is just so key.

19:27

And so I use the screen time on my

19:27

phone, I make sure I keep myself,

19:32

give myself 15 minutes

19:32

a day of social media,

19:37

and I just try to limit where

19:37

I'm not being productive.

19:42

I have this sort of informal

19:42

counter in my head of how am I

19:47

basically being creative versus consuming?

19:52

So the creative work that you're doing,

19:55

you've got this movie that you mentioned

19:55

that you're starting to shop around to

19:59

the film festivals, I suppose.

19:59

Tell us about how that came about.

20:03

Yeah. So my older son, he is 10 years

20:03

old now, but he's been in theater,

20:07

in local theater for

20:07

a couple of years, and

20:13

one of his friends in the program, her mother was trying to basically

20:16

start this production company here in

20:21

Arizona. She's a real estate scion,

20:24

and she wants to break out from the

20:24

shadow of her very successful father.

20:27

And so she started this production company

20:27

and she asked us if we wanted to join

20:31

her in investing in this

20:31

one film. So Lilly Singh,

20:36

she's a Canadian comedian, she's an actor.

20:40

She started on YouTube and has had

20:40

quite a bit of success over the past few

20:44

years. She had a late-night show on NBC. She was the star of the

20:47

Muppets Show on Disney recently

20:51

and has been a number of different

20:51

things over the past few years.

20:55

And she's now trying to get her

20:55

first feature-length film made,

20:59

and she wanted creative

20:59

control over the project,

21:02

and so wanted to try to raise financing

21:02

through a venue other than the

21:07

typical Hollywood financing route.

21:07

And so that's how she found this woman,

21:11

Anita, who started the

21:11

Camelback Productions Company,

21:13

and that's how we got attached to that. And so we ended up investing

21:15

alongside Anita in this program

21:20

because we liked Lilly, we

21:20

wanted to support South Asian

21:26

comedian and just in general,

21:29

we were very curious about this

21:29

side of making film. So like I said,

21:33

I've been at movie buff my

21:33

whole life. When I was at GE,

21:36

I had a stint in Universal Studios,

21:36

so for a while GE owned NBC,

21:40

which owned Universal

21:40

Studios. And in 2006,

21:44

I did a stint out in LA auditing the

21:44

film business and was just fascinated by

21:49

the business of movie-making.

21:52

And so this was just an

21:52

accelerated version of that,

21:56

just way more in depth. I got a crash course and

21:57

what it means to produce and

22:02

finance a film, and it was fascinating.

22:02

I'm just a very curious person.

22:06

And so I just loved learning it, just learning about a production bond and

22:13

a CAMA (Collective Account Management

22:13

Agreement) and how the different pieces

22:16

come together and what it means. The executive producer relative to

22:18

a producer meeting the director,

22:22

hearing her vision for the story,

22:24

meeting Lilly and what she

22:24

was looking to accomplish.

22:27

Just the entire process

22:27

was really fascinating.

22:29

So the film shot over the summer

22:29

and it's now in post-production,

22:33

and we've actually mostly wrapped it,

22:35

started shopping it to different

22:35

festivals and hoping that it's going to

22:40

sell sometime next year. In one of your blog posts,

22:43

you asked the question,

22:47

should I get an MBA? You went

22:47

through and in your blog post,

22:52

you talk about your thinking process. How did you decide on Sloan given all

22:53

the different business schools that are

22:58

out there? Yeah, it's interesting. At the

22:59

time I was CFO for a division,

23:03

we had spun off into a joint

23:03

venture with Microsoft.

23:06

And that process of standing up a

23:06

company from scratch working with

23:10

external consultants and

23:10

lawyers, bankers, et cetera,

23:14

I realized in that process that that was

23:14

part of what went into me leaving GE,

23:19

where I realized I'm not going to

23:19

learn everything I need to know. Hey,

23:21

I should probably go augment

23:21

my learnings with an MBA.

23:25

Up until that point in time, I actually felt like I was learning

23:26

everything I needed to learn at GE and an

23:30

MBA wasn't really going to do anything

23:30

for me. And at that point in time,

23:35

I realized, you know what? Actually, no, there are some things I probably can

23:37

go learn. So that was part of it.

23:41

But the other thing is that

23:41

you have to also think about,

23:45

you have to be purposeful about what

23:45

is the NBA going to bring to you,

23:49

right? It can't just be a check-the-box

23:49

exercise. I've met so many people,

23:54

and actually I was like this at one point

23:54

where I viewed an MBA, like a panacea,

23:58

where I said, you know what? I'm not

23:58

happy with where I am in my career,

24:02

my career growth, my

24:02

advancement has stalled.

24:05

I don't want to be in finance anymore, or I don't want to be

24:06

in marketing anymore, so I'm just going to go get an MBA and

24:07

it's going to solve all my problems.

24:10

And if that's your mindset, you are 100% going to fail or you're

24:11

not going to be happy not how it works.

24:16

You have to be very clear about

24:16

what the MBA is going to do for you

24:19

specifically. And when you do that,

24:21

then you get very purposeful about which

24:21

school that you choose. And for me,

24:25

when I looked at all the different

24:25

schools and the course that did it for me,

24:28

the one that sold me on Sloan was

24:28

System Dynamics. That was, for me,

24:33

the most powerful course that it not

24:33

only got me to Sloan and got me really

24:37

interested in the program,

24:37

but as an economics major,

24:40

I just love understanding how

24:40

systems work and how they fit.

24:43

And being able to think at a macro level

24:43

and going down into the micro level

24:48

system dynamics was an evolution of

24:48

that. And so for me, I felt like,

24:53

look, I can go to Sloan and

24:53

the things that I'm looking to,

24:56

the holes that I'm looking

24:56

to fill in my experience set,

25:00

I can get that at Sloan. That's great. Well, I think with that,

25:03

I want to thank Jawad Ahsan Sloan

25:03

class of 2014 for joining us on this

25:08

episode of Sloanies Talking with Sloanies.

25:11

You can learn more about Jawad and

25:11

connect with him on his website,

25:14

jawadahsan.com. So thanks for joining us today.

25:22

Thanks again for having me, Christopher. My pleasure.

25:27

Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is produced

25:27

by the Office of External Relations

25:31

at MIT Sloan School of Management.

25:34

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