Inside Kellogg

First-year student Rohan Rajiv is blogging once a week about important lessons he is learning at Kellogg. Read more of his posts here.

Many of us are in graduate school to learn. There are many interesting things we expect to learn, like how to develop understanding of strategy and marketing, for example, or how learn to work better with teams of diverse people.

I believe the most important thing we are being asked to learn is something we might not have expected: Decision making and trade-offs.

One of the nicest things about being in graduate management school is that the classes have a lot to do with many of the things I have been reading about over the past few years. So, I’m excited to share some of my favorite learnings from classes under the “MBA Learnings” series.

Today’s learning is a concept called “Omitted variable bias.” The origin of this idea lies in statistics but we all see this nearly every day of our lives. Most of the false claims we hear fall prey to omitted variable bias. And, let’s face it, we hear many false claims.

When we encounter a situation or problem, we always have an intuitive response. And, one of the biggest learnings in the first two weeks of our marketing management class has been to remind ourselves to “ask the customer.”