What’s up, everyone. I’m here with a short recap of the National Basketball Players Association executive education program study group session I participated in last night. The program was attended by current and former players and administrators from the NBPA and, from the ones I spoke to, they’ve all got a common desire to learn about business. The session started with a pre-dinner reception, where I had a great conversation with one of the regional directors of the NBPA who is based in ATL…I’m hoping to link up with him once I get back down there in a few days. During the dinner, I had conversations with some current and former players, but got into a really in-depth convo with a current player who was sitting beside me. We discussed a common deisre to reach back into communities where we came from and affect some major change and I can’t wait to see him do his thing because he’s a lot closer to making that happen than I am.

After dinner, we moved into the study group break-out rooms, where we would spend a couple of hours discussing two cases, one on PROTRADE and one on HRJ Capital (Ronnie Lott’s set of fund-of-funds). I was assigned to a group of five program participants (three current players and two former players who now work for the NBPA) who were tired from all the stuff they’d had thrown at them for the previous four days, but were as excited to dive into the discussions as I was to be in the room with them. I started the meeting off with an overview of Porter’s Five Forces as a means to analyze industries and I swear I haven’t seen people write notes so fervently since I took the Core Data and Decisions class in Fall 2004. After that, we plowed through the assigned questions for the evening and those guys had many business insights that I wasn’t expecting. I have to admit that I’d fallen victim to the stories that usually appear in the media painting players as having little business savvy…from what I saw, these guys definitely didn’t fall into that category. At the end of the study group session, I told my group that I was available to them if they had any further business questions or issues and I’m hoping that they’ll hit me up in the future. I got excited while I was helping the group break down the two cases and I’m pretty sure that a similar excitement would carry forward into helping them with their real life business situations in the future. I am still amazed whenever I think about how much I’ve learned at the GSB and how it’s all become a part of my regular thought processes…hopefully, that learning will continue at McKinsey in a couple of weeks.

I REALLY enjoyed participating in the NBPA session and events like this are among the things that I will miss most about being at the GSB. We get exposed to such cool things at the school and it’s easy to take those things for granted until you’re about to walk away from them.