There's no shortage of counsel for prospective MBAs: there are magazine rankings and their accompanying advice articles, test preparation services, even whole websites devoted to helping the aspiring MBA find schools, take tests, and figure out a career path. The interesting thing about all these resources is that they tend to focus solely on the professional motivations behind getting an MBA, namely increasing your salary, changing your career, and increasing the size and value of your network.
These are all fine motivations, but, five years out of business school, I've found that they are the least valuable lessons it taught me. In retrospect, the most valuable lessons I learned during my MBA were the philosophical lessons.
Nearly seven years ago I quit a very comfortable marketing position with HP's High Performance Server Division to pursue an MBA at the University of Texas at Austin. I spent three semesters there and one--my final semester, January-April 1999--at McGill University in Montreal (why I went there for my "foreign exchange" rather than London Business School, where I was slated to go, is a long story and perhaps the topic of another essay). I was 31 when I started at UT, 32 when I graduated and 33 when I started my first post-MBA job, as an Associate at Diamond Technology Partners (now DiamondCluster International). I'm not sure it's relevant, but if you don't know the average age of an MBA class (around 28), I was one of the old farts.
I'm now a partner in a small, Michigan-based strategy and leadership consulting firm.
From the perspective that this history produced, I've come to see three categories of MBA value:
Of course, categorizing value in this way is itself an intellectual artifact of getting an MBA, so maybe it's contrived. But for my purposes here, I think this framework (get used to that word, ye future MBA students) works.
What the components of this framework, properly balanced and understood, ultimately lead to is peace. Yep, pure, simple, human peace. The thing we're all searching for, whether we know it or not.
Let's look more closely at each of these three components.
This is the value that's most often written about, and therefore it's not all that interesting to me. Suffice it to say that as a result of getting an MBA:
Believe it or not, this has nothing to do with bragging; rather, I'm trying to illustrate a point: there are values inherent in simply having an MBA from a good school. These values are in part due to the intellectual values described below, but I think their larger part is due to the simple accomplishment of getting through a good program--including the sacrifice and prior work that are required to achieve a spot in the program and to graduate. In the final analysis, however, this purely professional value of my MBA contributed least significantly to my personal peace.
Don't get me wrong, having lots more money than you used to have is great, and I'm all for it. Being able to set aside financial concerns (which I, incidentally, was foolish to do--the subject of yet another unwritten essay), to do a job more in line with my tastes and potential, and to get to know lots of smart classmates and highly respected business people were all great benefits. Their primary contribution to my peace was in eliminating the annoying anxiety of contemplating the idea that I might never reach my fullest career potential, which was important. Dispensing with this in my first job out of Business School probably allowed me to cross a psychological hurdle, and to focus more deeply on the other two components of the framework: the intellectual and philosophical benefits. If you get an MBA, don't discount the professional values of the degree. But do view them as what they are: means to ends.
As you will learn in Business School, everything comes in threes. The three intellectual values of getting an MBA came from learning:
These may sound like they are means to the ends associated with professional values, but I believe they are in a separate category. I know of plenty of people who got into a good program and reaped the professional rewards I mentioned above who were a few bucks short of positive intellectual cashflow, if you know what I'm sayin'.
The intellectual values stand on their own because they will serve you whether you leverage the professional values or not.
You must know the basic technical skills in order to function at any desirable level of management, or to start your own company; they even come in handy in managing your personal finances. For me, the softer skills--marketing and OB, plus business ethics, which was the most significant focus of my MBA--came easier. Perhaps as a result of this, one piece of advice for the aspiring MBA in the area of technical skills is to develop a solid understanding of accounting. It really is the most foundational technical skill you can possess in almost any business situation.
I think the interpersonal skills were more important, and these were not learned in any class. Rather, they were learned in the teamwork that all worthwhile MBA programs require.
At UT, like every good MBA program I'm familiar with, you spend most of your first year (and many of your second year) classes working in a team, and more often than not it's a team whose members you didn't get to pick. First semester, it's a team whose members you've never met before in your life. In any case, it's a team encompassing 3-5 large egos (not including your own), and there is never an appointed leader.
From this experience you will learn:
The technical and interpersonal skills lead inexorably to the learning of personal skills.
Top business schools (and most programs in general) tend to rely heavily on the case method of teaching. This involves the comprehension and analysis of a long (typically 20+ pages), data-laden, written account of a difficult business situation. The goal of these cases is to teach the student how to examine a given situation and come up with the optimal action for management to take in order to attain the best outcome. Depending on the level of rigor imposed by the professor, case classes can require anywhere from a cursory reading of the case (so that you can discuss it in class) to in-depth analyses including analytical models (e.g. market penetration and financial performance).
In addition to the technical skills you must exercise on case analyses for more demanding profs, the case method activates the most primal of human learning methods: pattern matching.
We are wired at birth to comprehend things by observing them, analyzing them in some way, and imitating them. From learning to walk and talk to learning to read and write and do basic math to learning to appreciate philosophy or literature or physics, we learn most readily by observation; specifically, by observing others--through written or pictorial descriptions or in person or in some combination--solve problems similar to those we wish to solve.
The case method capitalizes on this in a way geared toward the learning level of a graduate student at a given university by presenting a problem--the theory behind which you've hopefully already learned--and asking you to solve it. In the class discussion, you articulate your proposed solution and debate it with the prof and fellow students; in this way, you learn from different perspectives which may contradict, compliment, or flat out coincide with yours. A good prof steers the conversation toward a solution that is the product of the aggregate thinking of the entire class, and therefore more optimal than any single person--including the prof--could have come up with on her own.
Basic analytical capabilities are, of course, prerequisites to entering an MBA program. The case method (and other more traditional teaching methods) used in MBA classes require you to optimize these capabilities. By "optimize" I mean not only that you must become better and more efficient at analyzing, but that the analytical process must become at least partially intuitive. In the post-MBA world (and in many situations during your MBA), you will not have time to thoroughly analyze everything that seems to require it; you have to become very efficient at knowing what deserves your analytical attention, to what degree you should analyze, and when it's time to cut bait and go with your gut.
Many people think only of math-related skills when they think of analytics, and of course, a lot of the analytical skills you'll optimize during your MBA are math related, e.g. economics, accounting, finance, statistics, and many marketing concepts. However, analytical skills also apply to "softer" areas, such as understanding an organizational culture or a person's psychology. Focus equally on optimizing both your left- and right-brain analytical processes and you will cut hundreds of hours of work per year from your post-MBA life.
Self-control both contributes to analytical optimization and stands as a value on its own.
Preparing for the case involves allocating your most "scarce resource" (another phrase you'll see again, MBA seeker)--time--to preparation while balancing other class, professional (even if you aren't working, most weeks you're working on networking, interview prep, and interviewing), and personal commitments. This allocation requires extreme self discipline in carving up your available time based on the demands placed on it. It's also somewhat intertwined with optimizing your analytical process; the time chunks that you carve out for performing analyses will be rigidly limited, therefore you need to be efficient with those analyses. Conversely, the more efficient you get at performing analyses, the more time you can allocate to other pursuits.
In class--especially in case classes--you will learn the art of discussion, a key component of which is self-control. A good prof will teach you to speak only when you have something relevant to add to the discussion, and to state your point clearly, rationally, and eloquently. This requires a high degree of sensitivity to what others are saying, an ability to subtly steer a conversation toward what you think are the salient points, and a degree of self-control that facilitates both of these qualities.
The third and most important value of the MBA is the philosophical value, which derives from synthesizing the degree's intellectual and professional lessons into a lifetime of experiences.
You begin an MBA program with a certain set of experiences--personal and professional--and a certain set of expectations--usually primarily professional. Your constant evaluation of these experiences and expectations in the context of what you learn during your MBA and in your life afterward alters slowly, over time, your philosophy of life. Assuming you devote enough attention to this evaluation, it irresistibly pulls you toward self-actualization. You come to know yourself. You develop--consciously or unconsciously--a philosophy for living life as a human being.
Perhaps as a sign of metaphoric karma, there is no list of three points for the philosophical value of an MBA. It is, as they say, what it is.
The deepest value of an MBA, as I said at the beginning of this piece, is peace.
The professional values I described contribute to peace in perhaps the simplest way: they relieve your anxiety about issues that you shouldn't worry that much about, but which as a human you are conditioned to worry about.
The intellectual values equip you with the more important technical, interpersonal, and personal knowledges required to lead, to be successful, and to understand the perspectives of others vis a vis your own.
The philosophical values leverage these two learnings to provide self-actualization. Ultimately this allows you to discover the true meaning of your life--your life's purpose--and the best path by which to pursue it. The professional and intellectual values then provide the basic tools you'll need to be satisfied with your performance in this pursuit.
And such satisfaction is the essence of peace.
[For a similarly-themed--though not as focused on MBA-seekers--piece I wrote near the end of my time at UT/McGill, check out my Texas Business Weekly swansong column.]
Copyright © 2004 Vince Cavasin. All rights reserved.