What did you learn from your MBA?

This might just be a liberal arts bias, but my impression is that an MBA is just a credential and doesn't really provide much valuable training.

For the MBA holders among us:
Do you think you learned more from your MBA than you would have during two years in industry?
Did it improve the way you think, write, or argue?

 

Lesson Learned: Go to a top school. If not, the value becomes hit or miss. I say this as I did not go to a top school, and although I learned a few things in the sense of how to better organize my thoughts and be more persuasive, I don't think I really learned anything more than what I learned in Undergrad or that I could have gained from the 2 year work experience.

FYI I've finished the first year of a 2 year MBA program and currently interning at a Oil and Gas company.

 

MBA's aren't about obtaining technical skills. The MBA classes that I took were essentially a joke--introductory at best. That being said, a good name and network is quite valuable.

“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 

I got MS'd last time I said this, but my experience was that I gained 0 knowledge during b-school.

"They are all former investment bankers that were laid off in the economic collapse that Nancy Pelosi caused. They have no marketable skills, but by God they work hard."
 

As someone who went to b-school with a pretty academic focus, I struggle with this question pretty frequently (context: finishing up my first year tomorrow). I think it is all about attitude.

First, I can definitely say that I learned quite a lot, but not in every class and not without putting in a good deal of work for it. I did undergrad finance, consulting and then a start-up, so this wasn't my first time pricing options or segmenting customers. I could have passed without learning much, but I actually did all the readings, put in real effort on the projects, etc. Basically: being a nerd paid off because I retain the stuff, but also had a cost (e.g., I did not make it to every big weekday party).

Second, don't discount the potential benefit of the "leadership"-type courses, which you may or may not consider to be "academic." I grew a ton and am much more confident and interpersonally adept. Talking to peers at other schools (and even my own school), it is clear that there are a variety of experiences. Some of it is luck, some of it is about having the attitude to take the silly "soft skills" stuff seriously (and it is easy to write it off).

Worth it? Yes. But unlike undergrad, where I felt like I had to learn to survive, it is easy to slide through b-school without learning anything. You've got to want to put in the effort to seek out the learning. And, as always, your mileage may vary.

 
Best Response
Qayin:

I would imagine the curriculum they teach to the engineers and TFAers is not going to be worthwhile for a consulting/banking/whatever type who has been doing financial modeling and market studies for 80 hours a week for the last few years.

Disclaimer: Some of this might come across as a shill for Chicago Booth. It really isn't, but that's the only school I know well enough to give an informed opinion on. I'm sure other top schools have similar opportunities. I worked for 7 years before b-school, so I had a similar concern, albeit with very different competencies. It was important for me to go somewhere with a flexible curriculum, so I didn't have to take entry level BS in the fields I felt comfortable with. In some areas, I took the basics (marketing, accounting). Others I jumped of the deep end, doing matrix-algebra based data mining (plenty of Ph.D's there) instead of stats and revenue management instead of operations. Hell, you can opt of subjects entirely. I have friends making a point of graduating from Booth without any finance coursework. If I wanted something industry-focused, I could take a tech-media-telcom course from Obama's chief economist Austan Goolsbee or a sports analytics course from Yao Ming's agent John Huizinga. Both are full-time profs that teach every year, not visiting lecturers. Or I could register for any undergrad or other graduate course at the university. Not sure I'd want to be in a curved class with many UofC Ph.D's though... Google [b-school name] + "courses" or "concentrations" and you should start getting an idea of what's out there. These can get you started (hopefully both work). http://www.chicagobooth.edu/programs/full-time/academics/curriculum http://boothportal.chicagobooth.edu/portal/server.pt/community/course_s…
 

As an msf student, I took some communications/leadership classes to balance my workload and get exposure to different skills. I thought I was great at communicating and presenting - I suck.

It was very valuable to learn from the experiences of the mba students. Now is it worth $150k to justify attending full time? That’s an individual decision. However, I would argue that qualitative skills are equally important to your success the further up the ladder you go.

 

I agree with @"brj". Each school will offer classes that are outside you're experience and will teach you a lot. Some have different curriculum requirements so you should find the one that fits your needs best. The idea that you can't learn anything in Bschool if you were a banker/consultant before is completely inaccurate.

It's worth mentioning that at bschool they expect some level of maturity and aren't going to force learning on you like undergrad. So it's up to you of you how much you learn or not.

 

Some programs have set classes that you take with your group at least for the first year (HBS model) and others let you design your own (Booth model). I would imagine that Booth would let you take PhD classes though. Probably best to get confirmation from someone at the different schools though

 

At a top program, I promise there are MBA courses that will challenge you no matter what you background is. At Booth, all the top profs like Fama, Cochrane, Murphy, Sapra, etc teach MBA and Ph.D classes. Unless you have deep theoretical knowledge of econ/finance/whatever and some serious chops in calc/stats, hanging with the Ph.D's would be incredibly difficult. That said, the classes would be open to you...

 

Tossing in another vote for actually learning something during my MBA. My bullet points: 1) I learned more from theoreticians and academics than any of the practioners who taught me. You can pick up all the "this is how it's done in the real world" stuff when you start your job. You may even have that knowledge. But the academics give you great insight into what are the underlying forces that drive that behavior, does that behavior make sense, might there be better ways to do things, what are the challenges that keep things from being done the way a sound model would predict etc. I think that the ex-bankers actually benefit the most from this stuff, because they come in thinking they understand finance pretty well, only to occasionally have their mind blown by how small their window on the world really was. 2) Tons of opportunities to cross register for PhD classes, classes in the college, law classes. Lots of people do this 3) Don't discount the implicit learning that takes place. B-school is an opportunity to work with different types of people with different knowledge sets and backgrounds, all in a pretty low-risk environment. You might not be able to list out what you learned that makes you a better leader or group manager, but I think most people come away being better at these things because of their b-school experience. 4) I think at the end of the day, the experience is what you make of it, which has a lot to do with your motivations. If your MBA goal is to re-brand, network, and career change, and that is what you devote your time to, maybe you won't learn as much. If you make an explicit goal to walk away a better educated person, then you will.

 

@snakeoil Which makes sense, schools attract people who like what they offer. Booth's selling point, at-least partially, is it quantitatively heavy classes and flexible curriculum. Booth probably focuses on its curriculum more than any other school I can think of, except maybe UVA, so it should come as no surprise Boothies like the academic experience.

 

@snakeoil I'm in the same boat. I had the intense finance undergrad experience at Stern. It was a 4 year program, so I've taken most business school classes already. Haven gone through banking interviews back in the day, I know how little of what we learn is useful for the job (and the little that is useful, is the soft skills). I wanted a fun school with the opposite culture of Stern, along with strong recruiting in consulting (industry I want to go into).

I literally didn't even know if Kellogg was case study based or not until after I got in, because academics was such a low importance item. My order, was 1) consulting recruiting 2) culture 3) rank 4) compensation 5) lack of stern-like finance people 6) scholarship 7) location... I don't even know where I'd put academics since I cared so little.

But that's the point I'm highlighting: schools attract people who want what they have to offer. Booth attracts people who want the academic experience, so if you're someone who doesn't want that, it probably won't be as positive of an experience as the people in this thread had.

 

You know how I tend to look at schools? A casual LinkedIn search.

And let me tell you, I have NOT been impressed with the profiles of FT Stern MBA's. In addition, I have worked with Stern UG's during my summer internships - and I was left with a similar impression.

Now of course, my sample size is very limited, and I'm sure there are tons of Stern UG's and MBA's who do exceptionally well like you, but when I hear Stern, I always think mechanical assembly line for low quality mass production.

 

What they teach may be similar if not identical (using the same case studies), but what you learn will be different - and at times drastically.

The difference is the context that comes with experience which MBAs have. For example, the takeaways you get from a case in a marketing class can be deeper and more profound because it's not purely an academic exercise - it's rooted in the experiences of those in the classroom, even if they have no exposure to the company/industry in the case (example: a software engineer may have no experience as a brand manager at P&G that is being discussed in the case, but the engineer has worked on enough project teams at work to draw parallels about how his/her team experience may be relevant in understanding how decisions are made within a company that go beyond just the theoretical concepts/formulas being taught in class). Simply put, it's the collective years of experience that the MBA students have in that classroom which can yield more practical and even deeper insights into the realities of actually executing what is being mentioned in the case - in ways that an undergrad cannot fully appreciate simply because they don't have that experience.

Also, the learning process is different. In undergrad biz programs, they tend to be more lecture based. MBA programs are more team-based, discussion oriented, case method learning.

An undergrad can learn how to do a DCF in finance class, but the MBA student who also learns that has the benefit of work experience (not necessarily in finance) to know how to better use that DCF when making decisions - they can see the greys that an undergrad may only see in black-and-white.

Which comes back to the chief difference between undergrad biz vs. MBA. The undergrad degree is focused more on teaching raw analytical concepts and tools to prepare you for entry level positions. The MBA is more focused on teaching grads how to make better decisions based on these very concepts and tools (since the post-MBA jobs while still relatively junior are up the chain of command).

Alex Chu www.mbaapply.com
 

MBA is only good if you are going to a top-5 program or are able to do it part time. For most people, the biggest benefit is the network and the "good excuse" of not working for a couple of years. I don't think the education is any different than undergrad, but you may be able to apply it/ contextually understanding the concepts since you have actual work experience by that time.

Before committing, you should really do a cost-benefit to figure out if its worth the money/ worth the loss of income for two years/ have a strong understanding of what your exit op is going to be.

 

I had a finance (M&A analyst) background before and the MBA experience was invaluable. You learn a lot, especially from your peers. People who say they worked in finance and didn't learn anything during their MBA experiences didn't got to a good enough school and wasted their theme there. To mimic the people above, it's only worth it (in my opinion) if you to to a top school though because the recruiting is very different. If you're shooting for a top PE, IB, HF/IM, or Consulting then the school rank/prestige matters. If that isn't you goal then you can expand your selection of schools.

 

James Raybould provided this answer:

  1. People matter most. The majority of students at top business schools come from consulting, banking, PE/investment firms and other industries where the lens is almost always at the company level; and this makes sense since they're often advising on major corporate decisions or buying/investing in companies.

    However, every single guest speaker and most professors stressed over-and-over again that at companies themselves, specific people make & carry out decisions, not some "invisible hand" of a faceless company. Therefore to excel within a company, constructs like ensuring clear alignment around priorities and accountability around execution become far more important than expert strategic thinking or financial planning. And skills such as empathy and listening become far more pivotal to success than model-building or SWAT analysis. This means that "easier" classes around leadership and organizational behavior have proven much more useful than the more "rigorous" ones around advanced finance or operations management...

  2. Relationships really matter. From marketing the size of each school's alumni base to orchestrating cozy "learning teams" and encouraging so many clubs and conferences, business school constantly reenforces that relationships really matter. This directly connects to the idea above that people really matter, but is specifically focused on establishing a small network of trusted relationships, as well as a far larger network of less well-known connections.

    I graduated fairly recently - class of '08 - but on an almost weekly basis I'm in touch with my classmates, making or requesting an introduction, discussing a problem, or, probably most frequently, helping each other recruit for specific open roles. These relationships - plus many made outside of business school - really matter to my professional success. And, specific to my own career choices, I don't think I'd be so motivated to work at LinkedIn (where clearly we really really believe that relationships matter) if not for learning this crucial lesson during business school...

  3. Ambition with focused execution really matters. In two years, you learn about 100s of business leaders, the majority of whom succeeded in a pretty major way. One of the key repeated lessons is almost always that the mega-star founders and CEOs are often massively imbalanced across their lives; and the more successful, the more myopic, ultra-focused, and poorly "adjusted" the business leader. It's not quite "choose whether to be a massively successful A-hole or be a merely successful, 'better' person" but it's clear there are major, major trade-offs to an all-consuming drive to succeed in the business world. Perhaps seems obvious, but it's a whole lot more obvious after seeing similar stories play out so many times across varied industries and geographies...

  4. Clear communication really matters. Case study classes [where each class is discussing a specific business situation] require smoothly jumping into an ongoing conversation to make a point very clearly in 30 seconds, 60 seconds tops. Some students excelled at this, and some really struggled to be both concise and insightful. Business school accelerates the key learning that shorter and simpler comunication beats longer and more complex almost every time...

  5. Theory can really matter. Speaking specifically about my experience, learning about Clayton Christensen's disruption theory and Tom Eisenmann's work on platform & network theory are fundamental to the decisions that LinkedIn and many other SV companies make. Having constructs and questions to frame specific choices - as well as understanding similar prior situations, actions, and outcomes - can add really valuable clarity. 

    Therefore the most immediately practical lesson I can share from business school is to recommend almost anybody read "The Innovator's Solution" (http://amzn.to/LaaBTR - it's better than the more well-known "The Innovator's Dilemma") and all tech employees delve into the goldmine of phenomenal content at the "Launching Tech Ventures" blog (http://launchingtechventures.blo...)...
 

I've only been to LBS, so I can't comment on other schools, but there is a huge emphasis on student leadership here. Almost everything on campus (the clubs, professional/cultural treks, conferences, competitions, etc) is student run. I don't know if business schools teach leadership per se, but at LBS, there were certainly a number of opportunities to practice leadership and learn from experience. Whether the students take advantage of them or not is their choice.

In terms of a secret sauce, Henry Mintzberg's book "Simply Managing" has some good thoughts on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Simply-Managing-What-Managers-Better/dp/1609949234

 

Thanks! London is a much more international city than anywhere in the US (even NYC), which has a strong influence on the experience. Your classmates come from all over the globe (South America, Asia, Africa, etc). British culture is also shockingly foreign considering both countries speak the same language. If you want to do business internationally, I think a school such as LBS is a great decision. If you want to work in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street, US schools probably have an advantage.

 

I also just completed my MBA. I agree with your thoughts about the unspoken elements of B-school and found there were plenty of opportunities to showcase leadership skills and time management skills. For me, I thought time management was probably the biggest takeaway from the program. Nice write up.

 

Why are they mutually exclusive? Is it that far fetched to say you are going to an MBA to learn the content to enable a career switch? I don't think so. In fact I think it's career switchers who most need the content.

 
Boothorbust:
Why are they mutually exclusive? Is it that far fetched to say you are going to an MBA to learn the content to enable a career switch? I don't think so. In fact I think it's career switchers who most need the content.

That might be true. I work in consulting, and we'll often hire people with no MBA and no business background, though - with the belief we can teach them the "business stuff" they need to know to be successful.

 

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