This isn't a great list--it's a lot of fluff, and self-help books masquerading as business content.
There are basically two skills you really need to hone in an MBA. The first are the hard skills/knowledge on finance, accounting, (basic) stats, and (basic) economics. The second is being able to assess and analyze business models, from both strategic and operational angles. The former can be learned in MOOCs, while the latter is best approached with case studies, ideally discussed as a group. I'd honestly suggest trying to start a business/entrepreneurs book club with ~12-20 people to try to replicate that experience over reading books on your own.
What are some good publicly-accessible collections of case studies if someone wanted to start a discussion club? Someone once told me that part of the value proposition of the best business schools is the library of case studies that they amass (and sell). Is that true?
If you want good, you're unlikely to get free. We are talking about business, after all. The standard is HBR, which you can buy for what I believe is a reasonable cost: https://store.hbr.org/case-studies/
The BU libraries have a bunch of links. If someone had some knowledge of what they were looking for they could probably assemble a decent collection of relevant studies. The Harvard ones are the gold standard but, really, they're just a jumping off point for discussion if someone knows enough to capture the most important points.
The real value of an MBA is the network you create with other MBA students.
That's why a Harvard MBA is worth more than (unknown school) MBA - the top companies hire Harvard MBAs who then have a business network with other Harvard MBAs - who of course got hired at other top companies.
I'd say it can be important. I'll also say that, having gone to a top-ish business school, other than getting a (fairly ordinary) job out of campus interviews, I never otherwise benefited from network/connections and mostly didn't stay in particularly close contact with most of my classmates.
Oh, connections can be important. 3 out of the 4 jobs I've had since grad school have been through people I knew and the 4th was an on-campus interview. But none of the subsequent jobs were B-school related in any way though one was peripherally related to undergrad.
I was mostly reacting to the meme that the only reason to go to B-school is the network and in my experience that's not really true and I'd discourage someone from attending for that reason alone.
MBA programs are also often predicated on predicting the next y years based on the past x years.
This is increasingly hard for mbas to do or stay ahead of because how things are done in business isn’t the same, and changing faster than mbas are updated and taught.
Like anything it not what your education makes of you, it’s what you make of your education.
I agree some of these are fluff. However many here are great to have basic knowledge of for specific scenarios one may run into and then know where to dig deeper when needed.
Agree though to marry being a ferocious reader / learner with being a do’er is the way to go. Personally I did not grow up with an opportunity to develop an intuition about business and self-motivated action. Has taken a lot of work to move that direction over the years.
I took some of the Wharton first year MBA classes for free on Coursera. Left me incredulous that people take out huge loans for that stuff. It's Wharton, though, so the signaling alone may be worth the price.
> It's Wharton, though, so the signaling alone may be worth the price.
You’re (mostly) not paying for the content of the courses.
Reasons to go/pay (in no particular order):
1. It’s a finishing school, with all the good and bad that implies. Some of the details below fall into that category.
2. Developing your peer network. Includes classmates, professors, and alumni.
3. Access to incredible research opportunities and research resources (yes, even for MBAs).
4. Access to jobs that (mostly) only go to grads of Wharton and similar. Think consulting and IB.
5. Access to job networks of niche and often super interesting jobs via peers and professors.
6. Signaling, although this does work both ways. While it opens doors for some jobs, it makes you overqualified for others.
7. Being in an environment of driven and (mostly) competent people. The scope of “what is possible” will probably be redefined for most/many Wharton students. (This might be worded somewhat poorly… not exactly sure how to say it).
8. Related to 7, being graded on a curve against motivated and competent peers can… build character. I’m not sure what it’s like these days.
9. In the past, there were some niche concentration courses that were super interesting. I’m not sure what they are now, and I’m not sure they make it to MOOCs.
10. Wharton Follies.
To close, if someone goes to Wharton primarily for access to the classes, then I would say that they have pretty much failed Wharton, regardless of what their grades end up being. Most of the knowledge from the classes can be gained more easily and cheaply in other ways.
I always thought the sums people were paying for MBAs was absolutely outrageous. In tech I feel like MBAs can actually work against you and can be perceived as a red flag. I knew someone a decade ago who paid I believe $120k to Duke Fuqua for a mostly online MBA that also required travel to multiple international destinations. This was a person in their late 20s.
An MBA is a prerequisite for many high level jobs. Management consulting partner, investment banking managing director are just a few. There are paths to those roles that don’t include an MBA, but they are rare.
The reason people pay is the math works out. Spending $120k to unlock career tracks that include roles that pay $500,000 or more is a pretty straightforward cost-benefit analysis.
My spouse did an MBA at a top school and 15 years out a very large chunk of the class are CEOs of large corporations, founders of private equity firms, etc.
The value is mostly in the signaling and network. Being able to get time with half a dozen CEOs simply because you went to the same school is invaluable.
It's also true that MBAs used to be quite a bit cheaper, even accounting for inflation, and that there were almost certainly fewer opportunities for people with "just" solid STEM chops to earn much beyond mid-level professional salaries.
I’ve done part of an MBA program. I’ve only hit pause because I couldn’t make the workload work with how demanding my job is at the moment. That does mean that beyond experiencing the program itself, I spent a fair bit of time looking at MBA program curricula. What I found was a pretty significant amount of study into areas that to me seem integral to actually running a business in reality. The sort of stuff that techies love to pretend doesn’t exist, or that they can just intuit with a combination of reading a few Wikipedia articles + their largely incorrectly self-identified transferable expertise.
I don’t know if my MBA program is particularly good. Whilst it’s run by a legitimate institution it’s certainly not a particularly prestigious one. I’d expect that it is in a lot of ways very middle-of-the-road.
One thing it has done is reaffirm my pre-existing vague suspicion that, whilst there are obviously no shortage of formulaic, uninspired, and largely street-dumb MBAs out there, a lot of the hate for those with an MBA that I see in communities like Hacker News is probably misdirected hatred toward the realities of business. Especially given how many people here have grown up in a zero-interest environment where they could bounce from place to place being paid very well to sit around in beanbag chairs thinking about engineering problems whilst the money fairies without fail backed truckload after truckload of cash up to their San Francisco office loading docks.
You're conflating startups with the broader business world. Startup models are shit because there are so many unknowns and it's in the interests of the people making them to fluff them up as much as possible. In the other 99% of businesses, business models can be quite accurate and are valuable tools for decision making and evaluation. For example, public companies often issue revenue guidance and analysts do their own earnings projections based on models.
Ideally your business model is evidence (including to yourself) that you've done some hard thinking about who your customers, suppliers, and competitors are - and about some basic dynamics of your space.
It doesn't mean anyone should expect it to go that way exactly and the deviation from projection could be quite large, but it's still miles ahead of someone who's not bothered to think through it at all in most cases.
Everyone knows the forecasts don’t accurately predict the future. That’s not the point of forecasts.
The value of models is the assumptions you put in. How big is the potential market? What price do you think you can charge? How much of the market will go to competitors.
The value of forecasts is in pressure testing assumptions and opportunity.
>If it were possible to accurately forecast cost and revenue, then everyone would start a profitable business, right?
that doesn't follow: it's just as likely if you could accurately forecast cost and revenue, then you wouldn't start many businesses because you'd know they wouldn't be profitable
Both of you get to the same place: if it's possible to accurately forecast cost and revenue, then all the businesses started by people who can do that will be profitable.
And there are so few serial entrepreneurs in existence that we have the following pair of conclusions:
A. It isn't very probable (we are mostly seeing survivor bias)
B. People who can do that start exactly one business, which is sufficiently profitable that they never bother to do it again
Both of these conclusions lead to the situation that picking a serial entrepreneur to invest in is just buying a lottery ticket.
We're going to see a lot of smaller startups wind down by the end of the year: I know a few that have either wound down operations, or are in the process of an acqi-hire or asset sale to other firms. Anecdotally, I started hearing the numbers of startups in this position pick up significantly about a month ago (but I don't have a bird's eye view, I just pick up on industry news/gossip).
The rest are default alive, but growing slowly. The rapidly scaling startup model is gone for the time being: no one is trying to double headcount or take over a market segment. (Some AI startups are an exception, but that market is nascent/unpredictable.) Default alive startups can be fodder for acquisitions from larger, established firms as well, if VCs are willing to take a cut on prior valuations. It's not clear to me where those VCs are going to find their 10x power law exits without the kind of growth and scale that used to be the norm; default alive is not a good outcome for investors.
I think “software is eating the world” has evolved into “software is eating barriers to entry.” All these fintech startups are entering a market that software already penetrated years ago--but those first gen tools are clunky, or have so much so much bureaucracy that it’s not cost efficient to work with them. What's interesting about these dev-first fintechs (Stripe, now Lithic) is that they can grow the overall market demand by stripping all that away (and not just extract market share from the first gen software companies).
Wonder what this will mean for fintech exits in general. Will VC fintech funding start to cool if exits by legacy finance companies look to be subject to higher regulatory scrutiny than previously expected?
> "The order, which takes effect Monday, bans Americans from trading the securities of dozens of Chinese companies... The order initially applied to 31 companies and has since grown to 35. Many are private firms with little connection to Wall Street, but a few have American depositary receipts listed on the NYSE. These include three large Chinese telecom carriers, as well as oil-and-gas driller Cnooc Ltd. , which was added to the blacklist in December."
In general you're better off working at a later stage startup if you want reasonable hours. I started working at a startup after it raised a Series A and then left a year after it raised its Series C; in that time I went from working 9:00am-7:30/8:00pm to 9:00am-5:30/6:00pm with the occasional late working day.
The labor of medical residents is something hospital systems exploit during normal times, but that exploitation has severely deepened during the pandemic. At the hospital my partner works at, respiratory therapists and nurses got a $10k bonus for working during COVID; the residents got nothing despite working insane hours in ICU, routinely working more than the legally mandated 90 hours per week. Just because doctors earn more later in their careers does not excuse the level of labor exploitation they are subject to during residency.
Stanford is not the only hospital system to restrict access to the vaccine from frontline residents. I can name 3 other local hospital systems in my city that have vaccinated administrative & C-suite/VP level staff before doctors, nurses, and other frontline employees. If vaccine allocation is getting messed up this early on within these closed systems, I can't help but think the next 2-3 phases will go awry as well--what checks are in place to ensure these vaccines get distributed to grocery store workers before people who are willing to pay more to get it early?
> I can name 3 other local hospital systems in my city that have vaccinated administrative & C-suite/VP level staff
I don't understand why society is putting up with this. Right now if you're not in a daily COVID-facing role (i.e. an actual front line medical worker) or in a nursing home you should not be getting the shot. This makes my blood boil. There should have been laws passed regarding ordering of the distribution with criminal penalties for line jumpers like this.
There's an article in our local paper with a happy picture of one of our state's congressional representatives (a healthy 34-year-old!) getting the shot. Like WTF? There's doctors and nurses who are treating covid patients who can't get it yet. Why the heck does Congress get priority over them?
Not only do these people have no shame, half of them even have the nerve to brag about it to the rest of us plebes who will have to wait months or more to get it.
Now you see why social media is so powerful. People just bitch and do nothing about this stuff, it's the perfect tool for pacification. Right now I'm bitching but next I'm going to go play video games, so you can see how it works even when you know it's there.
Did it make a difference? They apologized after using many of the vaccines and promised "to make a change". The promise is incredibly vague and won't likely come into effect until after most of the vaccines have been given out. It means nothing
There is a massive pushback against taking the vaccine going on right now. People coming up with a litany of different reasons not to take it. One of those reasons is a lack of trust in the government. If that smiling 34 year old has a lot of constituents telling him they are scared to take it because it might not be safe it becomes his duty to stand up and take it as early as possible with a smile on his face.
What ever happened to starting out with assuming good intentions?
There's been plenty of healthcare workers splashed all over the news taking it already. More importantly, we're a long long way away from the general public even getting to decide to take it or not. If hesitation is still a concern in March/April, then congress could have done the PR stunt at that point.
Right now there's a huge shortage of vaccines compared to the number of people who are both eligible and willing. No need to worry about the unwilling at this point since there's not enough to go around anyway.
Congress took it because they think they're more important than the rest of us, and apparently they think they're even more important than the frontline workers who are still waiting.
Ehh, I completely and truly agree with you/feel the same way, but because I'm feeling a bit cynical right now, I have to say - the congressional representative getting it can be passed off as encouragement for his constituents to willingly get vaccinated in a time where there's quite a vocal bit of people who think Bill Gates is going to be swimming through their veins in a tiny submarine if they get it.
Now - could he have just vocally stated "I am your congressional rep - I have full trust in the vaccine and encourage you all to receive it as I wait for my time in the line of priority"
I agree that healthcare workers, firefighters and police should be the first ones to get the shots - and directly after them, politicians should, and that mandatory. Get the shot or lose your seat.
There are large parts of the population who say they won't get vaccinated because they're afraid that politicians exploit them as "guinea pigs" (especially the PoC community has a really bad history, e.g. Tuskegee syphilis study). Time to turn the usual situation around.
I like your list. I really hope to see a program where 'front-line workers' (i.e. grocery store workers/etc as opposed to 'first responders') are given priority -and- financial assistance to receive the vaccine if they so choose to.
> -and- financial assistance to receive the vaccine if they so choose to.
A decent government should fund vaccinations out of taxpayer money. It's simply way more cost-effective than having people around who want but can't afford vaccination and then society has to pay many orders of magnitude more for treating the illness...
My wife is one of these trainees left out by this "algorithm." She's an intensive care fellow and was caught up in this mess yesterday. It's really hard to witness considering how much I worry about her everyday she's on service.
My understanding is the training is capped at 80 hours/week, but they average that over the month. They definitely work more than that some weeks, but it's usually because it's not scheduled hours; it's shifts that run long because of emergencies or codes or whatever. When she was a resident and had to write patient notes, that definitely took extra hours each night after her shifts. It's brutal.
And for what it's worth, not all doctors make great money after training. In pediatrics, salaries are generally half what adult doctors make. For a lot of subspecialties, that's on par with average software engineering salaries, even after about 14 years of education and training.
I can name 3 other local hospital systems in my city that have vaccinated administrative & C-suite/VP level staff before doctors, nurses, and other frontline employees.
Agree with your point about 409(a) disclosures. As an ex-employee with outstanding options in two tech startups I find it crazy that nothing requires firms to annually disclose this information to options holders. And while I was working at these companies there was no mention of the #of shares outstanding and the % allocated to employees—even if you knew your personal percentage stake, you didn’t know how much was diluted with each subsequent round.
Salesforce is already a monopoly if you go by volume of revenue earned from CRM. No one other than small/niche SaaS businesses competes directly for CRM business, and any new CRM startups can't get venture funding because it's considered an untouchable space by VCs. Every other large player they compete with in the CRM space (Hubspot, Zendesk, Oracle) offers a CRM as a side product to their main line of business.
This transaction shouldn't be the catalyst for regulatory action; regulators should have already taken action.
Why is it considered an untouchable space? Because CRM is so dominant? I don't understand what about the space would make it so capital intensive to compete against CRM in. They're internal tech is known to be very legacy and not cutting edge. A tech-competent startup could outmaneuver them. They're an Oracle 2.0, who at the time was also deemed unassailable, until Cloud and OSS databases ate their lunch.
There are basically two skills you really need to hone in an MBA. The first are the hard skills/knowledge on finance, accounting, (basic) stats, and (basic) economics. The second is being able to assess and analyze business models, from both strategic and operational angles. The former can be learned in MOOCs, while the latter is best approached with case studies, ideally discussed as a group. I'd honestly suggest trying to start a business/entrepreneurs book club with ~12-20 people to try to replicate that experience over reading books on your own.