Why I Went Back for a Doctorate After 30 Years in Sales

People are sometimes surprised when I tell them I’m pursuing an executive doctorate in business. After more than thirty years in sales and sales leadership, the assumption is that I’ve seen what there is to see. In a sense, that is exactly why I went back. I had seen the same problems repeat across companies and industries, and I wanted to understand them more rigorously than experience alone allowed.

I’m an EDBA candidate at the University of Houston’s C.T. Bauer College of Business, after completing my M.S. in Sales Leadership there. This post is about why I made that choice and what I hope it adds for the leaders and students I work with.

A question I couldn’t answer from experience alone

My career has moved through a lot of different settings: twelve years in the U.S. Army, then insurance with American Family, then industrial sales and leadership with Harbison-Fischer, Miller Electric, and Maintainer Corporation of Iowa. Across those environments, one pattern kept showing up. Strong individual sellers were promoted into frontline management, and many of them struggled.

The standard explanation is that they lacked management skills, so the fix is training. But I watched capable, motivated people go through training and still struggle. That made me suspect the explanation was incomplete. The question I wanted to pursue was whether the failure of newly promoted frontline sales managers is less a skills gap and more a structural or systemic problem, built into how organizations promote, support, and measure those leaders.

Experience gave me the question. It did not give me a disciplined way to answer it.

Why an executive doctorate instead of a PhD

An executive doctorate in business is designed for experienced practitioners who want to conduct rigorous research on problems they know from the inside. A traditional PhD typically prepares people for full-time academic research careers. The EDBA keeps one foot in practice by design.

That fit me for a few reasons:

• I wanted research that leaders could actually use, not only research for other researchers.
• I wanted to bring decades of field observation into conversation with established theory.
• I wanted to keep working with companies and students while I studied.

The program has pushed me to read deeply in organizational theory, including the Behavioral Theory of the Firm from Cyert and March and Herbert Simon’s work on bounded rationality. Those ideas give me a vocabulary for things I had only felt in the field: that organizations run on routines, that people make decisions with limited information and attention, and that systems often shape behavior more than individual intent.

What theory has changed in how I lead

Studying theory has made me a more patient and more precise leader. A few shifts stand out:

1. I look at the system before the person. When performance falls short, I now ask what the structure rewards and constrains before I ask what the individual did wrong.
2. I respect bounded rationality. Sellers, managers, and buyers are all making decisions with limited time and information. Good design reduces the burden instead of adding to it.
3. I distinguish evidence from anecdote. Thirty years of stories is valuable, but it is not the same as careful evidence. The doctorate has made me more honest about that difference.

My Lean Six Sigma background already pointed in this direction. The doctorate has deepened it. If you want to see these ideas applied, I’ve written about the systemic reasons top reps fail as managers and bounded rationality and how buyers really decide.

Bringing research back to practice and the classroom

The purpose of all this is practical. In my role directing the Center for Professional Selling & Leadership at Schreiner University and teaching Marketing Management, I want students to learn sales as a serious professional discipline grounded in evidence. With companies, I want to help leaders design sales organizations where new managers have a real chance to succeed.

Going back to school after three decades is humbling. It is also energizing. It has reminded me that expertise is not a finish line, and that asking good questions matters as much in research as it does in a discovery call.

Takeaways for experienced leaders considering an executive doctorate in business

If you are a seasoned executive wondering whether an executive doctorate in business makes sense, a few thoughts from my experience:

• Start with a question you genuinely care about, ideally one your career has handed you and conventional answers haven’t resolved.
• Expect your assumptions to be tested. The value is in learning to separate what you believe from what you can show.
• Plan for the research to serve practice, whether that means better leadership in your organization, better teaching, or better advice to others.