MBA Sterotypes

Popular stereotypes of MBAs—the buttoned-down suit or ruthless CEO portrayed in the movies—may be entertaining but are hardly real.  

 

In fact, we know from years of experience is that there really is no such thing as a "typical" MBA.
With today’s global spread of the MBA degree and the wide variety of business schools, there are millions of MBAs who represent different nationalities and cultures, different career paths, and different backgrounds. A recent study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education showed that MBAs studying in the United States were more diverse than students in any other graduate program. So, who are MBAs? Could you be one of them?
In general, MBA candidates have determined an MBA is likely to further their personal and career goals and have found the right school and program for them. And the admissions staff at their school has decided that their experience, qualifications, and goals show a strong possibility for success as MBA grads.
There’s no magic formula for the perfect undergraduate major, set of academic achievements, pre-MBA work experience and extracurricular accomplishments, essays, interviews, or references. Nor is there a common career goal or industry in which they aspire to work. What MBAs have in common is motivation, self-knowledge, realistic career goals, and a desire to learn and grow.

Pre-MBA Work Experience

Talk to MBAs, and you're likely to meet one who has:

• Worked in investment banking (well, maybe two)
• Run a nonprofit company
• Worked in sales
• Worked as an engineer
• Been a policy analyst for a government organization
• Worked as a consultant
• Worked as a copywriter for an ad agency
• Designed websites
• Worked as a compensation analyst for a corporation
• Been an auditor
• Worked as a researcher or an economist

The MBA is right for all these people—as long as they show management talent and a track record of performance in their pre-MBA work, the two things employers look for in new MBA hires.

Academic Preparation

Because MBAs are such a diverse group, all college majors are acceptable preparation, with a few additional considerations:

• Not all schools have the same undergraduate priorities. Some may favor technical undergraduates, while others may favor language majors who are minimally bilingual. Still other schools want both.
• You will need certain quantitative and analytical preparation for most programs, such as calculus, statistics, and economics. If you did not take these courses in college, MBA programs may require you to take some courses before you enroll, so you'll be ready to do well in the core curriculum.
• Academic performance does matter, but how performance is judged will vary from school to school. Some schools will give consideration to difficult majors (such as engineering) or prioritize candidates from particularly competitive schools. The combination of your academic achievement over a period of time and your GMAT® score gives MBA admissions staff a good sense of your academic preparation for the MBA.

Join The QS World MBA Tour - Africa for Free admission to our MBA tour

MBA Outstanding Achievers

MBA Outstanding Achievers 

William (Bill) Wells Jr.

Chairman of the NBMBAA Board of Directors
William (Bill) Wells Jr., Chairman of the NBMBAA Board of Directors, is Vice President of Strategic Inclusion Solutions for InclusionINC. A recognized figure in the inclusion and diversity industry, Bill also provides expertise in the areas of organization development, change management, culture change and transformation. Bill is co-producer and workshop facilitator for the Multicultural Forum, an annual two-day diversity conference.
Throughout his career, Bill has held executive level positions in the telecommunications, insurance and educational consulting industries. He has received various awards including the Chairman’s Leadership Award - Diversity Champions, Corporate Innovation Award, Outstanding Achiever in Business & Industry and Outstanding MBA of the Year. Bill currently serves on various boards and as a mentor/coach for the purpose of enhancing the development and advancement of diverse business professionals in the corporate, non-profit and public sectors. Long Island University, MBA, 1983

South Africa

SA's Most Influential Women in Business and Government Award: Business and Professional Services
CEO Magazine honours South Africa's Most Influential Women in Business and Government. They celebrate 10 years of acknowledging South Africa's prominent women leaders.
Anne Pratt won the 2011 award for SA's Most Influential Women in Business and Government Award - Business and Professional Services Category, 29 July 2011


Nedcor Award for Outstanding Contribution to Business by an MBA student 1992
During her MBA, Anne Pratt won the Nedcor award for the full-time student who made the most outstanding contribution to business. Her thesis opinion was published in Finance Week in that year as well.

Make sure to like our Facebook page for your  FREE registration to the 2012 QS World MBA Tour - Africa

Getting ahead in your career

Finding a job is tough. Finding a good job is even tougher. When you've found that perfect job, it's important to then find opportunities to move up the workplace ladder. No matter where you are on the corporate chain of command, it's all about getting ahead. To do so, it never hurts to evaluate your career strategies from time to time, particularly as they relate to workplace rules and ethics. You spend at least a third of your life working. You might as well make those hours pleasant and enriching--for you.

Don't wait for your boss to notice you: take matters into your own hands and put yourself out there.

Here are our 9 ways to get noticed, get on and get your talents recognized:

Understand your boss:  Understand the way your boss works so that you're both on the same wavelength and you're in a better position to meet his expectations and win him over.You need to identify his managerial style and adapt to it. DO NOT Suck up to your boss. Trying to be best buddies is not the way to go.

Speak up in meetings: Make yourself seen and heard, put your ideas and qualities forward. Don't just sit there listening and trying to look intelligent, show you've got a contribution to make and show you're capable of speaking in front of others.

Look the part: Go to work well-rested and presentable. Never show up looking like you just rolled out of bed. Show that you care about the company image & showing that you care about your appearance is also a mark of respect towards your colleagues.

Increase our skills base - Studying for something like an MBA will most definitely improve your chances of promotion. The QS World MBA Tour - Africa is scheduled to take place early 2012, its free to attend, and offers a showcases all the major MBA players in Africa. Well worth a visit to decide if this path is for you. Keep an eye on their Facebook page for event dates.

Get organised: Demonstrate that you're professional and responsive. Quick and efficient are the keywords to bear in mind.

Keep a level head: Highlight your resistance to stress and pressure, and to demonstrate your management potential. If you show that you’re able to handle challenging tasks, you’ll become a more valuable employee, and a more valuable employee gets more perks.

Communicate: Communicate with and inform others, showing your superiors that they can trust you. Being open with people shows you're good-natured and responsible.

Share your ideas: Promote your sense of initiative and your abilities. Show your boss that you're a teamplayer rather than just an amazing individual! Help your team make progress and improve the way the company is run.

Get involved: Get to know people at work & start to fit in. Establishing good relationships with your colleagues is also a good way of keeping up to speed with what's going on. The more people you develop positive relationships with (both up and down the hierarchy), the better off you’ll be.

So, earn a gold star on the job and start your way up the ladder. You already know the way.

So you want to do a MBA?

So you want to do a MBA? But is an MBA – rather than, say, a specialist Masters – the best means to reinvent yourself? Well, it depends, say business schools. Because MBAs don't look at candidates until they have several years of experience, students might appear less agile and more pigeon-holed within a particular sector. "A previous career can act as a millstone if you don't have anything else to offer," says Witt. "But the beauty of an MBA is that it transforms people from one-track backgrounds and gives them passion to talk and act in new ways."


Older candidates, often taking executive MBAs over two years or more and more likely than not sponsored by their company, are probably looking to accelerate rather than switch their career. In many ways the MBA came about in the first place for career changers. It remains a very effective way to change direction. If you come from a strong technical background, say, it will balance your portfolio.



Deciding

• Be sure an MBA is the best route to where you're going - don't embark on a trip until your destination is clear.
• Make your own decision, using a blend of logic and intuition.
• Be a discerning customer - ask hard questions about which programmes best meet your own specific needs.

Arriving

• Learn to market yourself - don't launch the campaign until you're ready.
• Be sure your support system is in order - at home and at work.
• Review your skills - technical, quantitative, written and oral. If you're not really ready to do well yet, take an extra year to polish those skills.
• Measure your confidence level - if it's weak, consider counseling to learn how to manage your anxieties and self-doubts.
• Get your life in good shape before you begin - paying attention to nutrition, exercise, relationships, and all the other things you'll need to sustain you.

Thriving

• Ascertain your own most effective learning style (from your own self-assessment or more formalised measurements, such as the Learning Styles Inventory or the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory) and design routines and study regimens that best fit your style.
• Find a group of friends/colleagues right away; collaboration is the key to succeeding and staying healthy through one of the most demanding experiences you'll ever have.

Book Review: Business Exposed

During my MBA, students were forever keen to sign up for finance MBA electives believing these would make them stronger managers. However, the older, more experienced executive MBAs would instead sign up for the organizational behaviour classes. Being not too keen on finance myself, I joined them.

They had realized something that the younger MBA students hadn’t yet figured out; that business is not just about numbers, it is ultimately about people and the more you understand how to motivate and manage people, the better.

Freek Vermeulen’s book explores just that. An associate professor of Strategic and International Management at London Business School, Vermeulen points out at the beginning of the book, “This isn’t a business book…it is a book about business.”

Rather than being a how-to book, setting out what to do if you want to make it big in business, Business Exposed takes the reader on a whirlwind tour, exposing the surprising and sometimes appalling realities of how business decisions are actually made.

“Because the world of business isn’t always what it pretends to be, things aren’t as rational, well-organized and well-oiled as we’re told they are.”

Vermeulen explores this and many other topics relating to business, questioning popular management decisions from adopting management tools that claim to increase efficiency, to downsizing as a way of saving money. Each story is short, easy to follow, with strong messages that are backed up with research and insights developed through his experiences.

Much of what he brings out in these stories is about how managers and CEOs make decisions on a day to day basis that often have nothing to do with facts or proven methods, such as the tools learnt in finance class. Rather, successful managers and CEOs make these decisions based on gut feeling, fear of being excluded and other very human traits. The result, according to Vermeulen, is that a lot of businesses simply imitate each other and don’t question the status quo for fear of taking risks.

Monkey management 

To illustrate his point, Vermeulen starts his book off with a story about monkeys. Five monkeys are placed in a locked cage with a banana hanging from the ceiling and a ladder placed right underneath it.

Understandably, one monkey runs straight for the ladder and is, along with the other four monkeys in the cage, instantly sprayed with ice cold water. This happens every time a monkey tries to climb the ladder so they stop trying.

Slowly over time, one by one the monkeys are replaced with new monkeys. Each time a new monkey enters the cage they go straight to the ladder. However before they can get to the ladder they are prevented by the other monkeys who know that they will be sprayed with ice-cold water. Soon none of the original monkeys are left in the cage, but still none of them will touch the ladder. None of them know why, or even try anymore.

This behaviour is not reserved just to monkeys in a cage.

In 1712, British newspapers came to be taxed on the number of pages published. To save money, editors decided to make the large pages that we find in broadsheet newspapers today (and which can be very tricky to read, especially in tight spots like trains or buses).

This tax was eliminated in 1855, but despite being considerably more expensive to print the large pages, the format persisted. Why? No one else changed for fear that that wasn’t what the customer wanted, until a few years ago when the free newspaper entered the industry using a smaller page format. Following this the other London newspapers soon followed, seeing sales figures surge.

 21st century management

With the use of case studies, the author tells us how whenever given the chance to quiz executives about their management practices and why they chose to pursue them, the answer was often along the lines of “everybody in our business does it this way, and everybody has always been doing it like this; if this wasn’t the best way to do things, I am sure it would have disappeared by now.”

Although sometimes a little US-centric, the book contains a wealth of short, easy to read stories such as these. Presented in a light-hearted way, it succeeds in bringing up some really important flaws in the way business works. The book is packed with interesting information and shows that a lot of what we assume to be fact in business is actually myth, and a lot of myth is actually fact.

For that reason it is an interesting read for business school students or anyone interested in going into business. It does something that perhaps business education in schools doesn’t do enough of; encourage future managers to question age old methods that are no longer significant to the 21st century.

-          Giselle Weybrecht, author of The Sustainable MBA

MBA Module on B-BBEE to enhance transformation

In a landmark higher education initiative, the National Empowerment Fund (NEF) and the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) have signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) which will introduce an academic module on Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) in order to lead and enhance thought leadership on economic transformation in South Africa. 

A leading institution of higher learning, GIBS is the business school of the University of Pretoria and the NEF is a development financier mandated by the Department of Trade and Industry to drive the implementation of Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment.

In accordance with the MOA, the NEF will make an initial endowment of R1.2 million to GIBS which will be used by the business school to introduce an elective module on B-BBEE as part of its MBA curriculum from 2011. It is the intention of both parties that the module will be integrated into the core curriculum of the GIBS MBA programmes in future.

The endowment will also help to ensure that B-BBEE issues and their effect on society are researched by leading GIBS faculty. GIBS will offer a series of forums, workshops, seminars and an annual conference to generate interest in B-BBEE among stakeholders.

Sam Tsima has been appointed as Programme Manager: Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment.

Commenting at the signing of the MOA Professor Nick Binedell, director of GIBS, said: “At GIBS we clearly understand B-BBEE as a specific policy to advance economic transformation and enhance the economic participation of black people in the South African economy. The developing economy has to be built on full participation by all its people and communities. The MBA programme is the right qualification within which to locate a module on B-BBEE and our partnership with the NEF is a confirmation of our commitment to this policy.”

-           Press release

Meet with the admissions staff of Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg (29 March) and Nairobi (31 March) at the QS MBA World Tour. Register for free online:

http://www.topmba.com/mba-tour/Johannesburg?partnerid=4511

http://www.topmba.com/mba-tour/Nairobi?partnerid=4517