The 30 Day MBA (3 page)

Operations

This discipline is concerned with how products and services are got ready for market (production), delivered or executed, and the management in-formation system designed to track performance.

Organizational behaviour

Organizing, inspiring, motivating, rewarding and managing both individuals and teams is the enduring challenge in organizations as they grow and develop. Often people are the defining advantage that one organization has and can sustain over its competitors.

Quantitative and qualitative analysis

This is where it all began. Frederick Winslow Taylor, author of
The Principles
of Scientific Management
(1911), set out to ‘measure each and every task and establish a system of work'. The first person to have on his business card the title ‘Consultant to Business', he was the pioneer of the school of ‘getting at the facts'. This is also where many business schools started out. Cranfield School of Management was born out of the Work Study Department, itself part of the School of Production.

Strategy

This is the unifying discipline, often called business strategy. It deals with the core purpose of an enterprise and how it should respond to the challenges of a fast-changing environment. It centres not just on how strategy is shaped, for example using Porter's Five Forces, but on the recognition that no organization can be truly great in the absence of shared goals, values and a sense of purpose – a shared picture of the future of the enterprise.

Electives

All MBA programmes include a compulsory elective content. LBS, for example, states: ‘You are required to complete six to eight electives from the School's varied and extensive elective portfolio.' The number of electives on offer varies from school to school. Wharton offers 200, claiming to have ‘the most electives of any business school'. The purpose of offering electives is to provide some flexibility of choice for students, to allow the business school to respond quickly to topical subjects and to give academics a vehicle to expose their own areas of research.

In this edition four electives are on offer. Business Communications, which is on offer at IE Madrid and is a subject extensively researched at Harvard; Business Planning at Wharton, where one of the world's most famous business planning competitions has been run since 1998; Mergers and Acquisitions at Haas at Berkeley, London Business School and Cass; and Introduction to International Global Business, which is one of Columbia's many electives in this general subject area.

Business Gurus

During the course of their stay at business school, students will be introduced to the stars of the knowledge circuit – the Gurus – whose insights into aspects of business have led to new thinking and have had a lasting effect on business management. In this edition you will find reference to many of the most important of these – Ansoff, Deming, Drucker, Hamel, Herzberg, Kaplan, Kotler, Marshall, Maslow, Mayo, McGregor, Peters and Porter – throughout the book.

Personal development (and lifetime learning)

Techniques for improving career prospects are an increasingly important aspect of MBA curricula. This is hardly surprising, as the success of acquiring MBA skills is measured, in part at least, by increases in salary and improved job prospects and satisfaction. Business schools offer some of these topics during the programme but many form part of their repeat business portfolio. This area is one that should be constantly revisited and in this book it appears throughout in links to subject learning provided by individual business schools.

Where can you get MBA skills and knowledge?

The most obvious answer to this question is – at a business school. There you will find talented teachers (some!), eager, self-motivated, like-minded students and a wealth of teaching resources, including books, journals, case studies and library facilities.
Whilst it is true that much of the useful knowledge, theory and practice of business is generated and disseminated from business schools, you don't actually have to go there yourself. You can get all that expertise on tap, mostly for free – and even hear the best professors from the very best business schools deliver their keynote lectures and research. This book shows you how.

A brief history of business schools

The claim to being the world's first business school is, like everything else in business, hotly disputed. The honour is usually said to rest with Wharton, founded in 1881 by Joseph Wharton, a self-taught businessman. A miner, he made his fortune through the American Nickel Company and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, later to become the subject of the earliest business case studies. The school is based in an urban campus at Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania.

It wasn't until 1900 that Tuck School of Business, part of Dartmouth College, began conferring advanced degrees in management sciences. In 1908 the Harvard Business School opened, with a faculty of 15 and some 80 students, and two years later it was offering a Management Masters pro-gramme. By 1922 Harvard was running a doctoral programme pioneering research into business methods.

Today, over a thousand business schools around the globe offer MBA programmes, minting some 100,000 new graduates each year. It wasn't until the late 1950s that the first business schools in the UK opened their doors – with LBS (London Business School), Cranfield and the Manchester Business School in the vanguard. In mainland Europe it took a further two decades for business schools to establish a niche in the market. The harmonization of university education in Europe, under the Bologna Accord in 2010, has already created some 300 new management master's degrees. It is unlikely that the quality of education delivered will keep pace with the rise in quantity.

But despite these impressive numbers, they represent barely a drop in the management ocean. For every manager or executive with an MBA there are over 200 with no formal business qualification. That an MBA from one of the top business schools delivers value to most of those who take it and to the organizations for which they work is beyond reasonable doubt. One of the measures any self-respecting business school boasts is the salary rise its alumni achieve in the three years after graduation; typically between 50 and 70 per cent.

However, Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Antai College of Economics & Management (ACEM), where the average MBA could expect a salary hike of 177 per cent over three years, is a whole lot different from those coming out of Vlerick Leuven Gent who netted just 50 per cent. Outside of the top 100 business schools, many graduates will see no hike in pay and even perhaps find it hard to get a job.

So should you go to business school?

So could and should everyone put up the £100,000 (US $158,000/€114,000) or so required in fees and salary forgone, muster the appropriate GMAT score and take an MBA at a top school? It takes a brave person to give up a job and become a student, perhaps only a few years into their career, with unpaid loans and mortgages looming large.

Then there is the agonizing choice of which school to pick, assuming money is no option. Well, according to Della Bradshaw, Business Education Editor of the
Financial Times
in London and for the past ten years overseer of the newspaper's business school ranking system, perhaps North American business schools are no longer top of the pile. When the
FT
began ranking MBA programmes in 1999, 20 of the top 25 schools were from the United
States, with the remaining five from Europe; however, in 2012 just 13 of the top 25 were US business schools. The other 12 were drawn from four European countries (the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland and France), China, India and Singapore. A recognized weakness of the North American business schools is their inability to penetrate the hold that European and Asian schools have on international students and faculty – vital ingredients in an increasingly global business environment.

Next there is the problem of deciding how good a school really is. Whilst the
FT
puts the London Business School top, the
Economist
gives the crown to IESE in Spain, the
Wall Street Journal
plumps for Dartmouth's Tuck School,
Business Week
goes for the University of Chicago (Booth) and
Forbes
has Stanford as number one.

Luckily you don't have to make that decision – you can have your cake and eat it. You certainly need MBA knowledge if you are dissatisfied with your progress, but you don't need to go to a business school to get it.

In the following chapters you will get a flavour of how all the top business schools teach, in the areas in which they excel. Download their teaching notes, read up on their latest research and see their faculty teach. A better strategy than just attending one business school – however great.

Using this book and your own resources

Very few people study at a business school and even fewer study at a top school. The growth in MBA numbers comes almost exclusively from those taking an online MBA; part-time executive MBAs, and MBA ‘lite' programmes such as those run at Kellogg School of Management – the best of an MBA, taking 20 days spread out over nine months, with perhaps another ten days of preparation. Ergo –
The 30 Day MBA.

If you decide, as do most students of business, that business school is not the only way to acquire an MBA skill set, or perhaps it is not right for you now for reasons of cost, time or convenience, or if you can't get into a top school for any other reason, then you can fall back on your own resources.

Each chapter in the book covers the essential elements of one of the core disciplines in a top MBA programme. There are links to external readings and resources, online library and information sources, case examples and links to online self-assessment tests so you can keep track of your learning achievements.

For many of the topics there are direct links to the
free
teaching resources of the world's best business schools. You can watch and listen as Professor Porter explains how his Five Forces strategy model works, exactly as he might have taught it in his Harvard lecture theatre. There are also links in the book to hundreds of hours of
free
video lectures given by other distinguished business school professors, from top schools including LBS (London Business School), Imperial, Oxford and Aston. You can download Duke University's top-ranking Fuqua School of Business's lecture material
on forecasting, or link into Cranfield School of Management's Research Paper Series and see the latest insights into business and the management of organizations.

You certainly don't need to spend a fortune in time or money to gain MBA knowledge and skill. There is no aspect of business school teaching and virtually no world-class professor that you can't listen to for free to complement the content of this book. But you do need willpower! If you do decide that business school is right for you, the appendix will help you choose the right one for you, and the book will be a sound preparation for the programme and a worthwhile resource when you start revising for the exams.

How this book is organized and how to use it

All business disciplines claim, some with more justification than others, that theirs is the overarching subject or starting point. The marketers claim the customer as king; human resources specialists persist in believing that nothing happens without people; strategists insist that competitive ad-vantage is fundamental to enduring success; entrepreneurs say that they are in at the birth of all ventures; accountants see the only truth being in numbers; even quantitative analysis has history on its side as being a founding subject in management theory.

To sidestep the argument, in part at least, this book is organized alpha-betically, in three groupings. Accounting, finance, marketing and organ-izational behaviour are together at the start of the book. These contain the basic tools that an MBA will use or need to refer to more or less every working day. Strategy comes at the end of the book as the coordinating discipline. It could just as easily come at the beginning, but to understand strategy you need a reasonable grasp of the four first disciplines. The five bookend disciplines are in something of a chicken and egg situation. You can't have any one of these without the other, but where it all begins is more academic than useful as a point for debate.

The remaining disciplines are covered, also in alphabetical order, in the middle of the book. Ideally you should read the first four chapters and the chapter on strategy first. These will take about half of your 30 days. If you are an accountant, have taken a business or economics degree, or have a marketing or human resources professional qualification, that time will be scaled back. Then if you have an immediate strategic issue at work, perhaps concerned with an acquisition, divestment, entering a new market or changing direction, go straight to the chapter on strategy. While reading that, you will almost certainly need to refresh yourself on some aspects of the first four chapters. This chapter will probably need a further three or four days to assimilate. The middle chapters and the electives you can read in order of personal preference, or alphabetically as set out. That should take up the remaining 10 days or so of your schedule. By way of a bonus
you will find that a number of the tools and concepts straddle disciplines. For example, while Maslow's hierarchy of needs is covered in the marketing chapter, it is equally applicable in dealing with employees or negotiating with suppliers. Break-even analysis is equally applicable in accounting, marketing and economics.

This weighting corresponds closely to the emphasis you will find put on these subjects at top business schools. Also, as at school, you should tackle the subjects in bursts of an hour or so and certainly not in whole days and weeks. You need to take time to assimilate the subject and try the concepts out in live situations. So, for example, you could spend a couple of hours reading the section on balance sheets, then get your own company's balance sheet and check out your understanding of it. If you need any further clarification you could talk in an informed way with your company's accountant.