Repurpose Education

By George ILIEV Last week I took part in a Financial Times discussion on the value of business school education and the MBA degree. One question kept coming up in the session: “ Can I get the benefits of an MBA without doing an MBA: skills, networks, stamp of approval? ” Here is my response on the meta-processes involved in the decision to do an MBA and how an MBA enhances one's career. The decision to do an MBA is to a large degree about three subtle processes: self-selection, selection and signalling. 1. SELF-SELECTION Driven and competitive people self-select. By merely deciding to do an MBA, you join a small segment of the business world who have gone down the MBA route. 2. SELECTION The top schools select from the shortlist of self-selected applicants. Harvard Business School admits 1 out of 10 applicants for its full-time MBA. Emory University (Atlanta) admits 3 out of 10 applicants. 3. SIGNALLING By completing an MBA, you signal to the market that yo...

Biz School Best Practice: Key Takeaways, PART 5 By George ILIEV, #RepurposeEducation Life hacks are shortcuts that increase productivity and efficiency: the cornerstone of business as well as business education. They are recipes for success when success can be boiled down to a single, sometimes counter-intuitive and often overlooked factor. (See PART 4 on the challenges of benchmarking when success is usually based on multiple factors). Below is my Top-10 list of life hacks for business school professionals and students: Make up your bed first thing in the morning to start on a productive note, advises US Admiral William McRaven. Pick some more low-hanging fruit (easy tasks) to give you impetus and to reward yourself. Watch a Youtube video if you need to learn how to do something that you haven't done before. (In the social media era this is similar to the simplistic advice of self-help guru Tony Robbins: "follow a recipe to achieve best baking results.") Once yo...

Biz School Best Practice: Key Takeaways, PART 4 By George ILIEV, #RepurposeEducation Benchmarking  sounds like the simplest thing in the world. All it requires is a willingness to learn from the positive experience and achievements of others. Yet complexity gets in the way of deducing the right lessons from best practice. The opposite of benchmarking is " learning from failure ". Military schools often teach failure cases, while business schools predominantly teach success cases. This is driven by the military school principle: " you learn the right lessons from failure but the wrong lessons from success ." The simple rationale behind this saying is that there are usually a small (finite) number of factors contributing to a failure and these can be identified; while there is often an infinite number of factors contributing to success. Failure is often hidden from view - like a reef that sinks ships -  as failed people and companies do not want to flaunt the ...

Biz School Best Practice: Key Takeaways, PART 3 By George ILIEV, #RepurposeEducation The best marketing and recruiting strategy for a business school is to be distinctive in at least one dimension that matters: to stand out above the others with an industry or business function specialisation. A rule of thumb in achieving business school distinctiveness is to aim to develop it in a specific industry or a well-defined functional area, e.g. aerospace, healthcare, social entrepreneurship or digital marketing. These areas are a lot more impactful than seeking distinctiveness in fuzzier areas such as pedagogy. Schools often view as a pedagogical innovation the use of local case studies or teaching with live company cases but these are hardly unique nowadays. Anything that can realistically make it into the headlines of the business media can be a source of distinctiveness: if it is interesting enough for a newspaper headline, it will be distinctive enough. Aligning faculty behind a d...

Biz School Best Practice: Key Takeaways, PART 2 By George ILIEV, #RepurposeEducation Self-awareness is the foundation for developing all soft skills (leadership, communication, negotiation) and should be the starting point in teaching Organisational Behaviour, Leadership, and Human Resources Management at business schools.  1. DIAGNOSTIC TESTS There are 2 useful self-diagnostic tests for this: A) The Big Five Personality Traits test, centred on measuring five factors: Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism (combined in the acronym OCEAN). B) The Nine Belbin Team Roles , divided into Thinking-oriented, Action-oriented and People-oriented roles. -- C) In the past the Myers-Briggs test used to be considered standard. However, it has been dismissed as unscientific in the last decade, as there are multiple issues around how it identifies and measures Extroversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving...

Biz School Best Practice: Key Takeaways, PART 1 By George ILIEV, #RepurposeEducation Every course and every class should end with an easily identifiable Tweet-sized takeaway: a maxim of up to 2 sentences or a framework in the shape of a 2x2 matrix. Examples: A) Management: What is the purpose of a company's existence: to serve its customers. (not its shareholders). B) Corporate Finance: What keeps a company afloat is positive cash flow, not profit. C) Product Development: The BCG Matrix sequence of success is Question Mark, Star, Cash Cow, Dog. Why takeaways? Because they are simple. When was the last time you had a take-out Chateaubriand steak? How about a take-out burger (or salad, for that matter)? Take-out / Take-away meals (Image Source: Wikipedia ) Have some feedback or a comment? Write it below.