Getting the most out of your MBA

(NOTE: This piece, which I found in my hard-drive the other day, was first published in January 2006 in Kathmandu's The Boss monthly magazine. Readers with plans to join management schools in Nepal -- where it's hard to gather information about what to study where, why and how -- may find this useful. Tetti ho. Special thanks to MD for suggestions.)

By Ashutosh Tiwari

About four years ago, a young graduate in Kathmandu asked me what she should aim to get out of an MBA program. She explained that she was seeking advice from a variety of professionals before committing time and money to enroll in a management school in Kathmandu. I mumbled something vague, and suggested that she could use the degree to get a job as a management trainee at a bank or a company.

But I was dissatisfied with my own answer. And her earnest question stayed with me. Since then -- having advised friends to apply to MBA programs outside of Nepal, having taught economics to MBA students on a part-time basis, and having worked with MBAs in and out of Nepal -- I have had time to give the question some additional thought. Yes indeed, assuming that your goal is to lead a productive career, what should you get out of your MBA studies other than a pricey certificate at the end?

I would now suggest these four major outcomes.

Persuasive writing and speaking skills: Unless you want to work with machines on a factory floor (and there’s nothing wrong with that!), most of what people in well-paid white-collar professions do boils down to two activities: writing and speaking. Each working day, people write emails, reports and memos. They meet clients, chat with colleagues, ask questions, share ideas, voice their opinions and disagree with others’ ideas.

Given that work today is all about writing and speaking, in one form or another, those who do both persuasively are going to be at a significant advantage in a management career than those who don't. Fortunately, writing and speaking are skills that anyone with motivation to spend time practicing can be good at. To that end, spending two years at a business school can be an effective way to sharpen those skills through assignments and extracurricular activities.

Using data to make decisions: Most top Nepali MBA graduates are good at statistics and accounting, subjects that are useful to gather and tabulate data. But arranging data is not the same as interpreting it to help make strategic decisions. A firm hires managers, after all, not to collect information for the sake of collecting it, but to interpret it to make decisions that matter.

To be sure, most MBA colleges -- under pressure from their universities to appear 'academic' -- spend much time teaching students the mathematics behind data collection (which, in real life, can easily be outsourced to market research companies) and the like. That leaves them almost no time to teach students how to judge the collected data to make decisions. As a result, MBA graduates enter the work force, thinking that databases equal knowledge.

And that, to paraphrase the words of management guru Peter Drucker, is a classic case of mistaking raw materials for finished products. That is why, MBA students’eventual aim should be not to replace specialists such as statisticians or accountants, but to focus on how to interact with such professionals intelligently and effectively to help their firms grow. In times ahead, as information technologies become cheaper and widespread, torrents of data heading in any manager’s direction are likely to grow only bigger. When that happens, those MBAs who know how to apply relevant data to make decisions are likely to enjoy a
more successful management career than those who don't.

Analysis through established frameworks: Business is not rocket science. Today’s business problems, as complex as they are, are not fundamentally different from those of yesterday. Whether you produce potato chips or computer chips, the underlying issues are the same: How to come up with ideas, how to arrange capital, labor, technology and networks to turn those ideas into goods and services, how to market and sell what you produce, and how to plow back the profits to make your business grow all the more.

In an MBA program, it’s important to learn to view problems and opportunities in terms of frameworks. Some problems are related to marketing. Others, to strategy. Still others, to product development. Sure, a self-taught businessperson, running his own firm with zero exposure to MBA-level jargon, may intuitively know what needs to be done for his success, and will do just that. That’s fine.

But, in most cases, what a good MBA education should do is help you formalize much of your intuition through tested frameworks so that you can persuade colleagues and bosses of your ideas.

In other words, as an employee, your just saying, “Trust me; this will work” will not get you far in any company. But “I am applying the Porter model to tweak our pricing strategy because of these reasons” will get you the attention of your peers to take relevant actions. Yes, as you accumulate experiences, the limitations of many of these tested frameworks will become obvious to you. At that time, your maturity, creativity and judgment will surely come into play. But at the start of your career, the frameworks remain powerful analytical tools to help you solve business problems.

Aim for lifelong employability: In today’s Nepal, unless you are in civil service, nobody will offer you a secure lifelong job. That’s the reality. You will change jobs more than once for many reasons. As such, it has become urgent to learn to how to remain employable at any stage of your life by taking charge of your own career growth.

In this context, a good MBA program gives you contacts and networks, not to mention credibility, which you can dip into for information and benefits. At the least, such a program should make you appreciate that learning never ends, and that continuous skill improvement is the only way to market yourself to the top. True, most MBA programs are concerned only with getting you your first job. But you should let them know that they are shortchanging their reputation if they fail to give you basic tools to help you find your second, third or even sixth job.

Agreed, after paying exorbitant fees that most MBA colleges charge for tuition, one should expect much more from them. But for now, these four outcomes can be the starting points to help a prospective student to decide what to demand from an MBA education for success.

[First published in Kathmandu's The Boss monthly business magazine in January 2006]