C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University, and Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, was an intellectual giant of the 20th century. In later life, reflecting on challenges he faced in his younger days, Lewis remarked:

“I could never have gone very far in any science, because in the path of every science the lion mathematics lies in wait for you. Even in mathematics whatever could be done by mere reasoning as in simple geometry I did with delight. But the moment calculation came in I was helpless. I grasped the principles but my answers were always wrong. Yet though I never could have been a scientist, I had scientific as well as imaginative impulses and I loved ratiocination*.”

To be candid, I have some apprehension when it comes to Excel . . . made all the more pressing because of how central excel skills are to the practice of finance. So when I consider my excel challenges I draw much encouragement from these thoughts of C.S. Lewis.

Although I have a deep passion for finance, and have worked in investment management for 10 years, my position at work has been more about interpreting and leveraging excel generated data, rather than performing the actual work of creating spreadsheet models myself.

The result is that up till now, my excel skills have languished.  Thus I’m grateful that our MBA program has forced me to improve. In this spirit, (and acting on the advice of professor Noonan) I’ve set out to build my own personal top 10 excel skillset, that will be useful to my financial career.  Some of these may seem rather obvious, but excel is my self-selected focus area and I figured that I could subject my list to public opinion and scrutiny, in the hope that collaborative discussion might occur. I also thought that some of this material might be useful for those considering a financial career.

Rough draft of “Top 10” excel skills for investment management and financial planning for high net worth individuals, families, trusts, and charitable foundations:

1. Precision tree
2. Sensitivity analysis, useful for evaluating insurance policies
3. Goal Seek
4. Historical market and financial instrument analysis
5. Excel integration with Word and PowerPoint
6. Configuring excel for pleasant appearance and functionality
7. Mortgage / Bond / Annuity amortization schedules
8. Learning to manipulate and efficiently sort data – this is hugely important for many areas within our business such as ranking client positions, asset allocation decisions, analysis of individual positions, and assessing performance in order to prioritize investment decisions
9. Graphing portfolio performance vs. relevant market benchmarks
10. Leveraging excel with proprietary finance software used by major financial enterprises. (our firm uses Advent)

When I reflect on the challenges of the first year of MBA school, I am glad that I have improved in several of theses areas and incorporated them into different assignments and projects. Our cohort has aided much of my improvement.

For example, during first semester, I was fortunate to be on a team with Shehzad Shabuddin, who was quite generous with his time and patient with helping me make progress on excel. Shehzad’s blog post, The Excel trap, reminds us of the dangers of reducing life to data and mathematics. Excel-ing in Real Estate by Bob Caperton and the article by Barry Slaymaker on MBA level excel skills were both particularly helpful. I’m also hopeful that I can persuade Joe Song to give me some Excel lessons between now and graduation.

One of the most powerful lessons I have learned in life (and a “key content” area of MP) is the importance of surrounding yourself with others whose complementary strengths have the capacity to offset your personal areas of weakness.  My next blog post will examine a leader who intimately understood just how powerful this principal is, and became a great, and most unexpected, actor in history.

*Ratiocination, noun. – the process of logical reasoning. [1520-30]