How do you get the most from your MBA opportunity?
Do you have an MBA? Did you spend a year or maybe three or maybe five pulling together a crazy schedule of work and study and perhaps even life to get those three letters embossed on your business card? It wasn’t easy was it!
I am often asked by entrepreneurs “what value is an MBA?”. Should I do one? Does it make me a better entrepreneur?
It’s a hard question to answer, so I try to give my perspective as someone who was building a company at the same time as doing a part time MBA.
My trigger to go was that the company was growing beyond my skills and knowledge. If I remember correctly we were trading at about 300K per month when I started the MBA. I had no idea about organisational development, ratio analysis, weighted average cost of capital, porters five forces or any particular model for the valuation of the company. I knew a different kind of CEO was going to be needed soon on our journey and I went to the MBA to find out enough to know how to hire one, or to find out so much as to be able to be the next phase CEO myself.
Indeed I learnt a great deal of new stuff. Knowledge, models, theory and ideas that could be put into the company and I regularly wrote board papers which reflected these new insights into the company progress. This was valuable indeed, but it lacked a certain clarity of what we should do with it. The practical stuff. The way it can be made to work in an imperfect world.
I enjoyed the class discussions and these brought a lot of colour to the content. So many different backgrounds and skills within the cohort was sometimes baffling, but always enriching.
On top of the new knowledge I learned a lot more about how the overall business system held together. How the levers worked and how they interconnected. I started to think in chains of related activity, rather than in isolated functions.
Experience in how to collaborate differently was super useful along with how to cluster with different groups to achieve a short term project, presentation or paper.
Although I had a supervisor for my dissertation I really lacked any kind of day to day mentoring and coaching. Someone of credibility and authority within a business context that I could bounce ideas around with and learn how to apply the knowledge. To try stuff out and learn a bit more through doing. So much of the business school was theoretical, or research led, or from a different era to the IT Consultancy world, it wasn’t connected so closely to the reality in which my business was working.
So, now a few years and a couple of exits later, I find myself on the corporate advisory board for the very business school from which I graduated and we are looking at how to build the mentoring and coaching part of the MBA. I am so glad to be part of this as it joins several parts of my world together including my passion for helping others to find their careers. So very grateful to be included in the design of this system.
Our first trial is in two parts:
- ‘Close’ mentoring — finding students who graduated a year or two ago and setting them up with a current student to help them make the most of the systems at the University and get the best outcomes for themselves.
- ‘Destination’ mentoring — pairing up students with seasoned, actively engaged business people who are currently doing things in SMEs, startups, scale ups and corporates. These are experienced coaches and mentors who can help join the dots into a real world context.
This is all going together on an opt in basis. As a student you can self schedule time with the mentors whenever you want, subject to their availability. You tell them what you are looking for, and pick out a mentor from the pack that makes the most sense to you. If you don’t see a good fit straight away there are a few mentors who are ‘general systems thinkers’ and with them you can work out what / who you need for the next phase.
Why opt in? Well it’s all about lightbulbs! The old joke is ‘how many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? The answer: Only one, but the lightbulb has to WANT to change. Working with lightbulbs gets you somewhere fast!
What’s the win? How will we measure success? Certainly it will at first be by take up and participation. If no one uses the program it can’t achieve anything and that tells its own story. For the business school of course the primary win will be graduation. We want to optimise the % of graduation and the height of graduation and to keep raising the bar.
But the real win, will be in the destinations. Where do these students take their new knowledge and skills and what is their impact on the world beyond salary and job title? How do they take themselves into the key challenges of tomorrow and make a real difference?
Is a Business School education the answer to everything? For sure it is not! And when I am hiring people I have learned to look for the lightbulbs first, over any and all qualifications. But a lightbulb with an MBA, and a great mentor who has rounded them out and helped them see how to apply themselves into the work? Now that’s something very special indeed.
