Is The Wire better than an MBA?

It’s not been on general TV release in the UK as far as I know, but you can get hold of DVDs of each series quite cheaply from Amazon.

What’s amazing me is that this russian novel of a TV show gets under my skin and I keep randomly connecting things that happen in my every day life with events from the show.

Being on the Clore Leadership Programme, I’ve had lots of discussions and been in a fair few training sessions and workshops all around the theme of ‘leadership’, which is a term that is as meaningful to many as it is difficult to tie down for others.

But through all of that (and I’ve only just realised) I’ve been almost using The Wire as a way to bounce all that thinking back into how the real world works. I know it’s a fiction, but I swear that watching this series while going through what is so far one of the best things that’s happened to me in my professional career (getting some training!) has been a really interesting thing to do so far.

It’s got so much in it (aside from murder, drug crime and dense dialogue): leadership, challenges to overcome, organisation structure, distribution, pitching, management, supply and demand, entrepreneurship, politics, networking, collaboration…

But more than anything The Wire says to me - you’re only as good as what you do today and what you plan to do tomorrow, what you did yesterday is meaningless.

As Michael Wolff said to me last week - “You are not your portfolio”, and when you see huge characters suddenly and dramatically exiting the storyline that suddenly makes a lot of sense.

Anyway - it makes you think: sometimes the learning you gain doesn’t have to be structured in some sort of MBA style format, it can come from unexpected places.

Mine’s a TV show, what’s yours?