The 30 Day MBA Read Free

many of the most important of these – Ansoff, Deming, Drucker, Hamel, Herzberg, Kaplan, Kotler, Marshall, Maslow, Mayo, McGregor, Peters and Porter – throughout the book.
    Personal development (and lifetime learning)
    Techniques for improving career prospects are an increasingly important aspect of MBA curricula. This is hardly surprising, as the success of acquiring MBA skills is measured, in part at least, by increases in salary and improved job prospects and satisfaction. Business schools offer some of these topics during the programme but many form part of their repeat business portfolio. This area is one that should be constantly revisited and in this book it appears throughout in links to subject learning provided by individual business schools.
    Where can you get MBA skills and knowledge?
    The most obvious answer to this question is – at a business school. There you will find talented teachers (some!), eager, self-motivated, like-minded students and a wealth of teaching resources, including books, journals, case studies and library facilities. Whilst it is true that much of the useful knowledge, theory and practice of business is generated and disseminated from business schools, you don’t actually have to go there yourself. You can get all that expertise on tap, mostly for free – and even hear the best professors from the very best business schools deliver their keynote lectures and research. This book shows you how.
    A brief history of business schools
    The claim to being the world’s first business school is, like everything else in business, hotly disputed. The honour is usually said to rest with Wharton, founded in 1881 by Joseph Wharton, a self-taught businessman. A miner, he made his fortune through the American Nickel Company and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, later to become the subject of the earliest business case studies. The school is based in an urban campus at Philadelphia’s University of Pennsylvania.
    It wasn’t until 1900 that Tuck School of Business, part of Dartmouth College, began conferring advanced degrees in management sciences. In 1908 the Harvard Business School opened, with a faculty of 15 and some 80 students, and two years later it was offering a Management Masters pro-gramme. By 1922 Harvard was running a doctoral programme pioneering research into business methods.
    Today, over a thousand business schools around the globe offer MBA programmes, minting some 100,000 new graduates each year. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the first business schools in the UK opened their doors – with LBS (London Business School), Cranfield and the Manchester Business School in the vanguard. In mainland Europe it took a further two decades for business schools to establish a niche in the market. The harmonization of university education in Europe, under the Bologna Accord in 2010, has already created some 300 new management master’s degrees. It is unlikely that the quality of education delivered will keep pace with the rise in quantity.
    But despite these impressive numbers, they represent barely a drop in the management ocean. For every manager or executive with an MBA there are over 200 with no formal business qualification. That an MBA from one of the top business schools delivers value to most of those who take it and to the organizations for which they work is beyond reasonable doubt. One of the measures any self-respecting business school boasts is the salary rise its alumni achieve in the three years after graduation; typically between 50 and 70 per cent.
    However, Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Antai College of Economics & Management (ACEM), where the average MBA could expect a salary hike of 177 per cent over three years, is a whole lot different from those coming out of Vlerick Leuven Gent who netted just 50 per cent. Outside of the top 100 business schools, many graduates will see no hike in pay and even perhaps find it hard to get a