Economist offer MBA Advice

The Economist have produced an online special about MBA's which contains loads of useful background for anyone thinking of taking an MBA. It also contains a piece on Jeffrey Pfeffer who has come to the conclusion that MBA's aren't worth very much.

Now this is an opinion you can hear in any bar, but Pfeffer isn't some tanked up middle manager (well he might be but...) he's a professor at Stanford and something of an expert on working practices. So expert in fact that his book 'The Human Equation' is forming the bedrock of my people and organisations course. His big argument is that MBA's don't seem to progress faster in their careers than other non MBA executives. Evidence from this is drawn mostly from consultancies and banks who conduct internal surveys about career progress.

Now I've not read the full piece on account of it being available only in a shiny new journal who presumably wanted a nice controversial piece to get themselves some press when they launched, but if that's the best evidence he's got I don't buy it. You see, if you walk out of business school and into Accentus or KPMG, or Goldman Sachs you're walking away from most of what you were taught. Your new found knowledge of marketing and brands isn't going to help you broker mergers anymore than your financial insight is going to help you design a new ERP system for someone. The best place to learn to be a consultant is in a consultancy and the best place to learn to be a banker is in a bank...

So what am I doing here? Well there are a bunch of answers, I could be learning to be an entrpreneur which is something I'd rather not learn through trial and error. I could be learning to be a CEO which will require an understanding of all of a company and a load of disciplines, something It'll take decades to learn through hands on experience. You see the point I'm making (badly) is that this is a generalist subject and most graduates then waste their breadth of education by plunging into a narrow career path where breadth of vision and understanding comes a distant second to being very good at whatever it is you spend 80% of your time doing.

But like I said earlier. I didn't come here to walk into a mediocre job at a big five consultancy or a big desk in a large bank. Of course, I'm still not sure what it is I am trying to learn but there you go...

Finance gets ridiculous

Only at Oxford would they expect you to get your head round three nobel prize winning theories about finance in a single lecture. Did I succeed? Of course not, that's why I'm about to spend most of the weekend with a finance text book.

Strategy gets serious

After last weeks moaning about strategy Thursday was a much needed restoration of faith. The course is being taught by two professors and in place of last weeks reductionist Porter view of the world which gets everything onto one diagram so you can sell it to time pressed managers came some rather more sophisticated models. David Faulkner introduced us to consumer and producer matrices, which is nice because he came up with the things in the first place and they're damn complicated.

It was also the most 'oxford' lecture I've been to so far. He started by admitting he was likely to forget to cold call, and in any case couldn't read the names of people at the back of the class so what would be the point? Then we got a clearly constructed lecture that cruised along at pace and left us all with the impression that an awful lot of knowledge had just been dumped directly into our heads. Good stuff, especially as strategy is the subject I'm most interested in.

Changes at Amazon

Adam has pointed out the new Supertabs at Amazon. First reaction, "Oh my god, yet more really bad invasive advertising". Then I realised it wasn't, I've just developed a knee jerk reaction that assumes any large logo on a screen has been put there to annoy users in the name of advertising. This I quite like, it doesn't break the medium, it tells me where I am and it makes sense.

So does Amazon's creation of virtual 'concessions' selling other people's products to their own audience, smart man that Bezos guy.

Oh my god my head hurts

Hadn't previously realised just how much alcohol could be imbibed in the name of Halloween. Fortunately no lectures for me today. I feel a quiet Friday night coming on.

Hitching a ride on the cluetrain

Way back in the day it was suggested that markets were conversations. So radical was this idea that the authors nailed their 95 theses to the newborn world wide web and invited the world to talk to them. Fortunately they did this at a time when such ideas were fashionable - if not understood - and so avoided the brutal execution that may have been their fate in earlier times. Instead they were encouraged to inscribe their ideas on the carcasses of millions of dead trees. Rather surprisingly people read it. I wasn't one of them - after reading the theses I was far too busy talking.

All of which is a long way of introducing the following

$200 000 gets you 40 million banner impressions * 0.2% conversion rate = 80 000 page impressions

Leaving aside the difficulty of finding 40m page impressions to put your banners on, a place that will sell at $5 per thousand or a banner that will perform as well as a 0.2% click through rate $200 000 is still a lot of money. A great deal more money in fact than Nick from Magdalen could have raised to publicise his views on digital music. One conversation on Slashdot though and he's got 80 000 people wandering around his website, every last one of them interested in the same subjects he is. So the moral of this little story is that if you're a marketeer looking to take out some online advertising, THINK, would it be easier to just say something your audience is interested in hearing?

Anyone would think there was something in this conversation thing.

Of course the chaps with the theses weren't the only ones

Soul of a new institution

Well, its been an interesting few days, what with being on the edges of a Slashdotting and right in the middle of an NTK'ing - traffic soaring to a healthy 3000 visitors on Sunday. I hope you all found it interesting. Anyway, three days is plenty long enough without a comment, so back to the blogging...

Today was trundling along quite nicely, but at lunchtime a theme emerged. The theme was "What is Said Business School all about?" and all and sundry had opinions. Those of us who know a bit about other business schools quickly worked out that whatever we're about we're different. The class profile here is much less traditional, fewer investment bankers, consultants and accountants, more marketeers, salesmen, entrepreneurs and random mavericks. We're also I think much more international than most business schools, 143 people and 31 nationalities is good going. Other folk pointed out that life here is both more academic (more whys and less whats when it comes to questions) while others pointed to the new / summer business projects as evidence that we're supposed to be practical, hands on and entrpreneurial.

The truth is of course that we don't know. When I came here for interview I said that I wanted a chance to make my mark on a young school, and I very much think that the future identity of SBS is up for grabs. The theme continued into our financial accounting class when our professor led a discussion of why we actually study financial reports. It's about being good citizens he said, never mind when you're a CEO what you need to take away from here is an understanding of where all these numbers come from and what they mean, since they have so large an impact on the world that not to understand them would render you ignorant. Too few people - even analysts - actually know what the numbers mean, so its important that we learn to develop our critical faculties and understanding of what lies behind them. Oxford it seems wants to develop some higher purpose for its business school, and that's fine with me.

Update Seems the debate got Registered too, must be the most coverage the Union's had in years. Wonder if they've even noticed.