In the Country of the MBAs

Your opportunity to distinguish yourself starts with being more willing than other MBA students to learn as you go, and with being more attuned to the high stakes of every decision you make.

Everyone else will be unconsciously following the dictates of some dead economist. In the country of the MBAs, you’ll have to strive to cultivate your judgment and figure out which ideas are worth … [ Read more ]

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz

Erich C. Dierdoff and Robert S. Rubin of DePaul University conducted a big study to check the relevance of the typical MBA education. The three competencies rated most important in the real world were managing human capital, managing decision-making processes, and managing strategy and innovation. But the researchers found that those three topics were the least represented in required MBA courses: Only 29% of … [ Read more ]

The Real Payoff From an MBA Is Different for Men and Women

Women with MBAs face a gender-based pay divide that starts as soon as they graduate, and plagues them throughout their careers.

Smartly

Smartly bills itself as the fastest way to master everything you’re
expected to know at the start of your MBA. The course curriculum and material was created in collaboration with experts from Harvard and INSEAD and includes microeconomics, accounting, statistics, and finance. Smartly courses face you with real-world examples and problems to cement your understanding of the course material.

Editor’s Note: this service was launched in … [ Read more ]

How Business Schools Must Evolve

Business education must enable students to reconcile enterprises with the changing realities of the global marketplace.

Gary Cokins

You can get an MBA to learn about the discipline of management. I received one from Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Its curriculum taught me about management, but I can candidly say that it did not teach me how to manage. There is a difference. Management involves strategy, analysis, and decisions from choices. How to manage involves people.

Why are MBAs Not Teaching About Project Management?

Senior executives seem to neither understand project management nor regard it as an important means of business strategy execution. Only a few top business school’s Masters of Business Administration (MBAs) teach project management as part of their core course curriculum. I have spent the last 10 years trying to understand why.

How Business Schools Create Irresponsible Leaders

Most business schools have spent the past decade making their programs global in scope, which tends to mean sending students to foreign lands for immersion programs. The model they’re using, however, creates leaders that are dangerously out of touch with the context in which they’re running businesses.

MBA Tips: How to Prepare Harvard Business School Cases

While reading and preparing cases is a significant part of any business school experience, there isn’t always a concrete result to your work. You could easily invest hours preparing a case and have nothing to say about it during the class discussion. It’s because of this ambiguous return on investment that many people choose not to read the scheduled case before a class … [ Read more ]

108 Tips for New MBA Students

After going through two years of business school, it’s still questionable how much of my coursework and class notes will apply to my real world job. But one thing I do know is that I can use my experiences to help those who are in the exact same position I was two years ago. First and foremost this post is a documentation exercise; … [ Read more ]

Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads

For decades, MBA graduates from top-tier schools set the standard for cutting-edge business knowledge and skills. Now the business world has changed, say the authors of Rethinking the MBA, and MBA programs must change with it. Increasingly, managers and recruiters are questioning conventional business education.

Their concerns? Among other things, MBA programs aren’t giving students the heightened cultural awareness and global perspectives they need. Newly minted … [ Read more ]

The Leadership Test Comes to B-School

The Graduate Management Admission Council, which markets the GMAT business school entrance exam, today launched a new online assessment tool designed to improve leadership and other “soft” skills. It comes with access to advice from executive coaches and an online library of content that allows users to develop skills at their own pace. It costs $99 for three years.

MBAs Without Borders: Have Degree, Will Travel

Dozens of MBAs seeking short-term international work assignments have found jobs through MBAs Without Borders, which places B-school graduates in the developing world to work on projects that range from public health to oil and gas extraction.

A Job Source for the Wandering MBA

Daniel Mullaney’s MBA Project Search offers B-school grads a glimpse into the freelance and consulting worlds outside the confines of their school’s career services office.

David Hurst

We now know that the shareholders and the financial industry won that battle for corporate control. In the business schools, the finance function emerged as top dog and the economists began to apply the teachings of their discipline to the firm via organizational economics (agency theory and transaction cost economics). The resulting shareholder value model of the firm has dominated for the last thirty years … [ Read more ]

Need a Deal on Consulting? Hire B-School Students

When Project Runway winner Chloe Dao’s national spotlight faded, she needed help, but couldn’t afford a consultant.

Why MBA Entrepreneurs Are Happier Than Their Peers

Most MBAs may look for a structured career path, but a surprising number – more than 20% of Wharton MBAs surveyed — became entrepreneurs and found themselves happier than their peers because of it.

Welcome to pre-MBA boot camp

Strong in marketing but weak in accounting and finance? A new online MBA prep course aims to help.

Making the Most of Your MBA

A few tips on how to take advantage of your MBA experience

Dick Cross

There is not a business school I know about that teaches a course called, “How to Run a Business.” We study tangential parts of the job in great detail—like accounting, production, management and leadership—but not the whole of it.