Goal orientated

University study can seem a long way from a football clubhouse, but lessons learnt as part of Monash University study are forging impressive results on the field at one elite Australian rules football club.

They are the fundamentals of business success: strategic planning, organisation, time management and an understanding of the many variables involved in running a successful business.

They are skills learnt by Hawthorn Football Club coach Alastair Clarkson during his Monash Master of Business Administration (MBA) and applied to building the Hawks into the Australian Football League's (AFL) best team in 2008.

"I didn't have a coaching career in mind when I decided to do an MBA, and I don't think too many people would link an MBA with coaching, but now I see the enormous benefits and parallels between the two," he said.

"For a long period of time the role of the coach was really just to teach and educate his players on how he thought the game should be played and to try to develop some sort of camaraderie within the group.

"But now the role of AFL coach demands a lot of organisational management skills and also crisis management, and how to deal with adversity, and how to manage the media. All those things were common threads within my MBA program."

Clarkson completed his Monash MBA a decade ago, when he was coming to the end of a successful 11-year AFL playing career, to prepare himself for a shift into football's then rapidly expanding corporate sector.

"But at the end of all that, I turned around to my wife and said: 'I'm actually going to coach a footy team now, that's my passion'," Clarkson said.

"She said, like many others did, 'what's an MBA got to do with coaching a footy team?"

Back then Clarkson was a bit stumped for an answer, but when the question is asked of him now, at age 40, he has no trouble providing a detailed response.

"Undertaking the MBA certainly helped enormously in shaping the way that I think and my philosophies on certain aspects of business and management. I'm certain it had enormous influence on my appointment at Hawthorn."

Marketing was a focus of Clarkson's MBA and that also had a spin-off for the footy club.

Anything to do with marketing requires you to have some sort of vision of where you think something will evolve to and seeing opportunities that aren't right in front of you at the present time but actually investing some time in them now for some future benefit.
Alastair Clarkson

"That concept has helped enormously in preparing a football side. Some of it is to do with how you help market your club and its profile, and some of it is to do with planning to ensure that you've put the right people and programs in place to allow you to achieve your vision."

Clarkson is not the only Monash-Hawthorn link. Hawks chief executive Ian Robson is a Monash graduate, having completed a Bachelor of Economics at Monash in 1983, and three current Hawks players are studying at Monash. Tom Murphy is studying a Bachelor of Business, Josh Kennedy is studying Commerce and Tim Clarke is following in Clarkson's footsteps, completing an MBA.

The Monash MBA, celebrating its 40th birthday this year, has been ranked by The Economist magazine as second in the world in the category of "personal development and educational experience" and 43rd in the world overall, the highest of any Australian MBA.

The Monash MBA allows students to combine units from their area of professional interest with core business units such as accounting, marketing and economics.