Why I Went Back to School (Without the MBA)

I’ll admit, when the MasterClass Executive invite first landed in my inbox, I let it sit there for a few days. I’ve spent twenty-odd years in strategy roles, and been pitched more executive programs than I can count. Most of them end in a nice certificate that I never look at again.

So I’m genuinely excited (and a little surprised) to share that I’ve been selected for the inaugural fall cohort of MasterClass Executive.

What changed my mind? A one-on-one call with David Rogier, the CEO of MasterClass. He walked me through what they’re building, and three things stuck with me:

The quality of the material 🎓
A selective cohort 🎯
A fraction of the price of an MBA 💸

The content is what you’d expect from MasterClass: polished, practical and taught by people who’ve actually done the thing, in conjunction with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

The cohort is the real asset, though. There were more than 57,000 candidates for roughly 700 spots, and that’s a room I want to be in.

I’m a little biased as someone who never wanted an MBA (no offense to those who have an MBA...some of my best friends are MBAs 😉), but a program built for today’s AI-driven economy feels a lot more relevant than a curriculum written before anyone had heard of ChatGPT.

It didn’t hurt that Mark Cuban is hosting the very first office hours. Most people know Mark as the Shark Tank guy. I know him first and foremost as the longtime owner of the Mavs and a die-hard basketball fanatic. So while everyone else is polishing their pitch, I’ll be the one asking if he can get me courtside seats... 🏀

What I actually signed up for

MasterClass Executive is a 16-week cohort program, and OpenAI collaborated on it alongside Booth. We kick off on October 20, and it’s designed to run alongside the day job rather than replace it. Here’s the shape of it:

10 subjects, from AI foundations to finance, strategy and marketing 📚
Weekly hands-on AI labs 🧪
Weekly office hours with the instructors 🎤
About 10 hours a week, mostly self-paced ⏱️

The instructor list reads like a fantasy dinner party. Indra Nooyi, Ray Dalio, Paul Krugman, a couple of Nobel Prize-winning Chicago Booth economists and, yes, Mark Cuban. I’m not sure I’d know what to order.

The AI labs are the part I’m most curious about. Each week, builders from companies like OpenAI and ElevenLabs run a live working session on a real business problem, and you walk away with a working project rather than a page of notes. The topics include customer support, content creation, customer research and self-serve dashboards. That’s basically the to-do list of every studio owner I know.

Why this matters if you run a wellness business

Most operators I’ve worked with, from boutique studios to big-box gyms, learned the job on the job. Nobody hands you a semester off somewhere between payroll, a no-show instructor and a broken treadmill. Learning is the first thing that gets cut when the week gets busy.

The trouble is that AI is changing the job underneath us. It’s already reshaping how members book, how coaches program, how studios market and how businesses price. The operators who learn it early will set the standard for everyone else. The rest will end up buying it from them later.

It’s not lost on me that DICK’S Sporting Goods is one of the company partners that helped define the program’s performance standards. Our industry already has a seat at this table. The question is whether the people running studios, spas and clubs will take it.

I spent a big chunk of my career as the strategy and systems person in fitness companies, and I still felt behind on this. That’s the honest reason I went back to school. If I’m going to advise wellness leaders on where the industry is heading, I need to be doing the work myself, not reading the summary.

What comes next

I don’t want to keep this to myself. Over the next 16 weeks, I’ll share Notes from the Cohort here on the blog: the frameworks worth stealing, the AI tools worth trying, and the ones I think are mostly hype. All of it will be filtered through one question: what does this mean for running a business? If you’d like those notes in your inbox, the subscribe button is at the bottom of this page.

The best operators I’ve worked with have two things in common:

They persist against all odds
They never stop being students

I’m aiming to make good on both of those, so it’s time to start paying attention. Put an hour of learning in your calendar this week, and don’t let it sit in your inbox for a few days like I did.

Class is in session. 📚