Dr. Peter Morone came to Vanderbilt in 2012 as a resident in neurosurgery. He went on to earn a master’s degree in clinical investigation before becoming an assistant professor and director of Vanderbilt’s Skull Base and Neuro-Innovation Laboratory. Since 2022, he has served as the director of Neurosurgical Oncology and Skull Base Surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.  

 You might be excused for thinking that Dr. Morone has already reached the pinnacle of his medical career. But that isn’t how he sees it. “You’re never really at your peak,” he says. “There is always more learning, always something more you can achieve and improve. I try to instill that into our residents, and I also wanted to apply that thinking to business education.

“We learn so much about how to take care of the human body, but one thing lacking in medical school curriculum is knowledge of business, and that is critical in order to ultimately impact patients’ lives.”

For Dr. Morone, the question was not about whether to pursue more business education but rather, which program to choose. One option for working healthcare professionals at Vanderbilt is the Master of Management in Health Care. However, he ultimately chose the Executive MBA instead, explaining: “I felt it was important to diversify in terms of interactions with people, because I’m confronted with healthcare problems all day long. I wanted to get a different perspective from people who aren’t necessarily in the healthcare industry.”

In fact, for Dr. Morone, that diversity of experience and perspectives became one of the program’s highlights. “Having a small class size is great, and everyone came from a different background,” he says. “There was one other physician, but everyone else was from various backgrounds, from engineering to law to education. When confronted with new cases or challenges, interacting with those people and hearing their opinions—and learning from them—was an amazing experience.”

Dr. Morone credits those interactions, including working on projects as part of a diverse “C-team,” with helping him reach his goal of “being able to think like a person in business and then applying that to medicine.” Looking back on the program, he says, “As a doctor, I saw decisions being made every day from a business perspective that would affect patients, and it was hard for me to understand the finances or the other variables the decision was based on. With the knowledge I’ve gained through the program, I feel more than prepared not only to understand those decisions but to help make them going forward.”