In the latest of her diaries from Stanford's MBA programme, Temi Olatunde finds Schumpeter's gale blowing through the streets of Lagos
THIS summer the curtains dropped on the first act of my Stanford MBA. During the intermission, before reconvening for the second year, it was time for my class to disperse across the word on an array of internships. It was the point at which we stopped being mere actors, rehearsing case-studies in the classroom, to see if we could apply the lessons we had learned in the real world.
Internship placement is an integral part of most MBA programmes and typically lasts around 10 weeks. At Stanford, some students followed well-trodden paths, heading to banks, consultants and other corporates. Others pursued not-for-profit opportunities, while few more worked at start-ups in the Bay area. I took the plunge into private equity in Africa—a continent increasingly on investors’ radars. It was an opportunity to test my skills in a dynamic and complex market. But it was also daunting. Changing job functions is challenging enough; swapping continents at the same time is a real test.
by A.P | NEPAL
When Adam Pervez left IE Business School he embarked on a world tour, vowing to leave each place he visited better than he found it
IF I learned one thing well in business school it wasn’t finance, accounting or marketing, it was problem solving. Which was just as well because one day, while sitting in my apartment in Denmark, I realised I had a problem that needed to be solved. Progressive to a fault, Denmark is a place one can live without having to worry about anything. It is consistently rated the happiest nation on earth. But, staring out my window at the 4pm winter darkness, something was wrong: I wasn’t happy.
It was not the type of problem I had expected. I had, after all, graduated with an MBA into the worst job market in living memory. But it was the biggest challenge I had yet faced. I needed to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life. So I took the problem solving skills I had learned and looked within, asking myself those questions I had been avoiding. I realised a life based on my passions of travelling, writing, helping others, learning, teaching and telling stories was not only possible, it was necessary. It was my first step toward an ideal life, beyond the fringe of traditional post-MBA career paths.
by R.T. | CHICAGO
When Ricardo Taveira, a Brazilian student at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, heads home he finds a tension between local entrepreneurs and returning MBAs
“IT IS these guys coming out of MBAs, that go to some foreign country saying they can do ‘entrepreneurship’ by just copying a business from abroad. There’s no real passion here—no real sense of purpose. That’s not who we are. And that’s not who we work with. ”
By the time my summer internship reached its halfway point, I had already heard variations of this quote from three partners at two different venture capital (VC) funds. I had expected my native Brazil to have a more welcoming and vibrant entrepreneurial scene—particularly compared with America, where the presidential campaign had turned into a slanging match about Mitt Romney’s “vulture capitalist” past. But what I found was a recurring, scathing indictment of MBA students.
by J.B. | LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND
Joan Beets, an MBA student at IMD business school in Switzerland, survives the feared integrative exercise
IT DOESN’T take long after matriculation before students start to hear whispers about IMD's two infamous “integrative exercises”. Tales are told of assignments that deprive you of sleep and break you down until there is nothing left. It works like this: each group of students receives an enormous pile of information based on a real case. The challenge is to come up with a single proposal or solution by integrating knowledge from various parts of the MBA programme, such as finance, strategy and organisational behaviour. In no more than 48 hours.
However, having gone through them, I can say they really aren’t that bad. True, I only had four hours of sleep in 48 hours during the first exercise; but I did manage to sneak five hours a night for the second. And my group didn’t fall to pieces. We came close one time, but we held together and managed to get to the finishing line.
In the latest of her dispatches from IMD business school Joan Beets reports from South Africa and a project to help the country's entrepreneurs
THE journey from IMD business school in Switzerland to South Africa is well flown. Since 2002 the school has sent all of its MBAs on what it calls the "Discovery Expedition"—a study trip to an emerging economy to work with local businesses. For five of the last six years students have headed to the rainbow nation.
No sooner had we touched down at O.R. Tambo airport than we were getting to grips with our brief. My team was asked to look at ways in which government agencies in Gauteng province could better help the country's blacks create small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs). Currently this is done through business incubators and a policy of positive discrimination called Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment. It was no small task. Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria, is the country’s most populous. We had five days.
Mayank Sharma, a student at IESE business school in Spain, reckons the MBA is having a good crisis
DURING the last class of the first year, our entrepreneurship professor asked us to describe where we would be in five years’ time. This might not seem a Herculean task; outlining short- and long-term goals is part of every business-school application. But doing this in the midst of a global recession was a sobering lesson in uncertainty.
Students often wonder whether their decision to step out of the corporate world and embark on an expensive MBA was wise. Until recently, the hardest part of an MBA was getting accepted by a top business school. Once on campus there were numerous opportunities to discover your interests. Most students were spoilt for career choice. Typically, they would go for lucrative jobs with financial-services firms or management consultants, before tackling their long-term goals. This is no longer the case. Both sectors have cut hiring dramatically. However, it is in times like these that you realise the true value of an MBA. Business school is not just about finding a job; it’s also a process of self-discovery and character building.
Who said management was easy? Andrew Pollen, an MBA student at ESADE in Spain, tests his skills as an intern at a start-up
IT IS 10am and my colleagues saunter downstairs to the living room we use for our daily status meetings. Some folks are making coffee and oatmeal. Others are returning from a jog. In the corner, someone has been up all night sketching a storyboard for a Kickstarter video we plan to film.
I am interning at Fair Observer, a bootstrapping startup. The company is working on a crowd-sourced journalism platform, which will allow the world to report on itself. The touble is that the crowd has not yet arrived. The company has neither the capital to implement a full version of the platform, nor the revenue to interest conventional investors. So it has joined up with German Silicon Valley Accelerator, a programme that helps German startups get a foothold in the Valley, and brought in a team of unpaid interns.
Mike Vincent, a student at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, gives his advice to MBAs preparing to matriculate this autumn
ONE year ago, I was preparing to move back to America to begin business school. I was in Peru working as a volunteer at a street-children centre, having quit my consulting job. I was researching a social enterprise that I planned to launch at business school. My time there confirmed that I was heading in the right direction, and that business school would be the next best step for me.
I chose UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business partly because I wanted to return to the San Francisco Bay Area. But I was also attracted to its innovative, entrepreneurial ecosystem. I had thought I was fully prepared for the change. However, since submitting my application, I had not given much thought about how to get the best out my two years at Haas.
Joan Beets, a student at IMD in Switzerland, finally gets to apply all that theory at a real company
AFTER months in the classroom, this May it was finally time to put into practice what we had learnt so far on the IMD MBA programme. This is when we began our International Consulting Projects (ICPs); real assignments for real companies. We had 15 to choose from. All of us picked four preferred ICPs and waited for the wheel of fortune to be spun. I was relieved when it span in my favour.
My new team consisted of two fellow Dutchies, a German, an Italian, a Canadian and a Korean. The project was to come up with a strategy for a global service-provider that had decided to enter Germany. The question we had to answer within four weeks was where and how they should do it. We were assigned a professor and, as the Germans would say, Jetzt geht's los!
As ESADE moves into a shiny new campus, Andrew Pollen says that the school shouldn't see it is a cure-all
WE ARE moving. Adiós to ESADE's cramped and ageing conditions in Barcelona's Pedralbes neighborhood; Bienvenidos to sparkling new classrooms and meeting spaces at the Creapolis campus in Sant Cugat, a sleeper town outside of Barcelona.
The move has certain advantages beyond the new space. Business clubs and recruiting will benefit from being with other international Masters programmes, which are already located in Sant Cugat. Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the E-Garage, a new space designed to allow students the resources and environment to start new business ideas. And although it feels like being in the sticks, Creapolis is, in fact, closer to many amenities such as restaurants, a cinema, and a gym than the Barcelona campus.
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