The 30 Day MBA Read Free Page A

job.
    So should you go to business school?
    So could and should everyone put up the £100,000 (US $158,000/€114,000) or so required in fees and salary forgone, muster the appropriate GMAT score and take an MBA at a top school? It takes a brave person to give up a job and become a student, perhaps only a few years into their career, with unpaid loans and mortgages looming large.
    Then there is the agonizing choice of which school to pick, assuming money is no option. Well, according to Della Bradshaw, Business Education Editor of the Financial Times in London and for the past ten years overseer of the newspaper’s business school ranking system, perhaps North American business schools are no longer top of the pile. When the FT began ranking MBA programmes in 1999, 20 of the top 25 schools were from the UnitedStates, with the remaining five from Europe; however, in 2012 just 13 of the top 25 were US business schools. The other 12 were drawn from four European countries (the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland and France), China, India and Singapore. A recognized weakness of the North American business schools is their inability to penetrate the hold that European and Asian schools have on international students and faculty – vital ingredients in an increasingly global business environment.
    Next there is the problem of deciding how good a school really is. Whilst the FT puts the London Business School top, the Economist gives the crown to IESE in Spain, the Wall Street Journal plumps for Dartmouth’s Tuck School, Business Week goes for the University of Chicago (Booth) and Forbes has Stanford as number one.
    Luckily you don’t have to make that decision – you can have your cake and eat it. You certainly need MBA knowledge if you are dissatisfied with your progress, but you don’t need to go to a business school to get it.
    In the following chapters you will get a flavour of how all the top business schools teach, in the areas in which they excel. Download their teaching notes, read up on their latest research and see their faculty teach. A better strategy than just attending one business school – however great.
    Using this book and your own resources
    Very few people study at a business school and even fewer study at a top school. The growth in MBA numbers comes almost exclusively from those taking an online MBA; part-time executive MBAs, and MBA ‘lite’ programmes such as those run at Kellogg School of Management – the best of an MBA, taking 20 days spread out over nine months, with perhaps another ten days of preparation. Ergo – The 30 Day MBA.
    If you decide, as do most students of business, that business school is not the only way to acquire an MBA skill set, or perhaps it is not right for you now for reasons of cost, time or convenience, or if you can’t get into a top school for any other reason, then you can fall back on your own resources.
    Each chapter in the book covers the essential elements of one of the core disciplines in a top MBA programme. There are links to external readings and resources, online library and information sources, case examples and links to online self-assessment tests so you can keep track of your learning achievements.
    For many of the topics there are direct links to the free teaching resources of the world’s best business schools. You can watch and listen as Professor Porter explains how his Five Forces strategy model works, exactly as he might have taught it in his Harvard lecture theatre. There are also links in the book to hundreds of hours of free video lectures given by other distinguished business school professors, from top schools including LBS (London Business School), Imperial, Oxford and Aston. You can download Duke University’s top-ranking Fuqua School of Business’s lecture materialon forecasting, or link into Cranfield School of Management’s Research Paper Series and see the latest insights into