No. I took accounting and economics at NKU, but no finance or marketing. I'm sure more business training would have been useful, but I didn't have any trouble learning these things after graduation. You can't learn everything while in school, so when making tradeoffs of which courses to take, consider which things might be difficult to learn on your own versus having an instructor teach you.
Typically come across math or stats related things I'm not familiar with while reading a research article. Then I google it to learn how and when I would use it. I also had to read a lot of books. Principles of Forecasting was really helpful early in my career while building our sales forecasting system. Over the last couple years I also have used more online learning websites to take courses or just learn a new skill or topic.
Yes. Smaller work environments are easier to see the difference re making. The people are great and we interact plenty. We have an open office with no cubicles. I do have noise canceling headphones on my desk if I need them.
It hasn't happened yet, because we can always create more ideas. The system for creating an ideas starts with gathering stimulus and then using that along with the diversity of a team to create. So if we hit a wall, we just need to get more stimulus or some fresh thinking from different people. When gathering information as to use as stimulus we find new technologies, patents, academic articles, industry trends, customer trends, customer insights, the competitor's offerings along with unrelated things that just help people think differently. There is an endless supply of stuff, it just takes time to organize it and make it useful. Individual ideas or projects can hit a wall and those need to be stopped, but running out of ideas has never been an issue. The other thing that happens is that the client changes the boundaries. Maybe the reason all the ideas are failing is because certain directions were off limits from the start. Changing the boundaries and allowing the team to explore those directions opens up a lot of new possibilities as well.
I don't know. Clients are typically pleasant to work with. I would say the hardest clients to work with are the ones who don't want to learn or do anything differently. These are a small minority. We can make anyone who is willing to learn and innovate able to do so, but if they aren't willing, then it obviously gets harder. In these situations, you have to spend time selling them on why innovating is important and urgent.