A Sigh of Relief

Taking the Plunge

This is it. After six years of procrastinating and delaying, I'm finally going to do it.

So why now, after all these years? I don't know. Maybe it's because I feel that years of teaching and taking higher degrees is not enough, that in order to be credible, I also need to be a CFA. Maybe I'm just insecure of the growing number of people around me who have at least passed Level 1 (egad my former students!). Maybe it's because, after teaching two modules of review program (Equities in 2010 and Quantitative Methods just a couple of weeks ago), I feel that now is the best time to take the exam. Maybe it's because I know this will force me to study sub-topics that I'm still unfamiliar with. Or maybe I just want that suffix because my girlfriend already has hers (CISM). Who knows?

Anyway, good luck to me and to others who will also take the exam in December. We have three months to prepare, and I think that should be enough. Feel free to email me questions about the exam, let's try to turn this into one big virtual study group.

6 Reasons Why an MBA is Good for You (Part 2)

The University of the Philippines has one of the strongest MBA programs in the country (image from Butch Dalisay's Pinoy Penman)

4. You feel like what you pick up from experience is not enough.

The MBA is the only academic program in the universe where work experience is an explicit requirement. Credible (read: "not diploma-mill") programs in the Philippines and around the world require anywhere from 1 to 3 years of experience, with a higher experience requirement for part-time or "executive" MBA's. This rule reflects the accepted wisdom that hands-on experience is critical to effective business management.

At the top of your head, I'm sure you'll have no problem coming up with names of successful entrepreneurs and business persons who didn't even go to college, much less business school. Still, many of those who've already had several years of corporate work under their belts continue to feel the need for formal training and further education to complement what they learned through experience. MBA education can only either confirm and strengthen what you think you already know, or challenge and disprove what you initially believed as truth; either way, you end up a better informed and equipped manager because of it.

5. An MBA provides opportunities for you to interact and solve problems with other people--just like in the real world.

Unlike in college, in the MBA program focus does not solely rest on theory and problems with black and white answers and pen and paper solutions; in many of the courses, students are immersed in real-world situations and problems that require practical and implementable solutions. While theory is still a very important part of the program, the process goes beyond learning and understanding these theories and delves into the realm of practical application. While the use of traditional evaluation methods like homeworks and exams still pervade the classroom (much to the disappointment of "seasoned" students), these are supplemented by group reports, presentations, and case studies where students are required to make business decisions from the point of view of a key corporate personality--the finance officer, the production manager, or even the CEO--in an environment that simulates actual corporate conditions. Most of these activities are done in groups, so students are trained to work with other people just like in actual corporate settings. So we see how, with these activities, students are provided with sufficient opportunities to develop important management skills like leadership, effective communication, public speaking, and others.

6. You're very interested in how businesses work, but you had a completely different kind of training in college.

Six years ago, I found myself wanting to know more about the ins and outs of businesses. My training and background was in engineering, and I had zero exposure to accounting, economics, and statistics, so back then, joining the MBA program was practically like starting from scratch, in terms of theory. Fortunately, that "weakness" later on turned out to be a major advantage: starting from a clean slate somehow provided more motivation to learn completely new and novel ideas. Plus, my "better than usual" background in mathematics helped me better understand and appreciate technical concepts in finance and operations management.

But it's not just me. From anecdotal evidence that I've gathered over the years, it turns out that the ones who get the most out of MBA's are those who had unrelated undergraduate degrees: the engineers and architects, the doctors, the physicists, the computer scientists, and the journalists, just to name a few. On the one hand, business management/administration undergrads would, of course, have a natural advantage because they have already studied a lot of the topics they encounter in the MBA program, but somehow this becomes not that important in the course of the program. On the other hand, students coming from unrelated backgrounds benefit from the fact that they can look at things from multiple perspectives, and this advantage, in my opinion, is more persistent: the combination of the two kinds of training (engineering and business, in my case) results in some kind of synergy or additional, intangible value that is manifested even after graduation.


Click here for Part 1.

6 Reasons Why an MBA is Good for You (Part 1)

1. The guy who's telling you you don't need it is trying to sell you something else.

Yeah, I'm talking about Josh Kaufman. I mean, how can anyone take this guy seriously? He's telling you to skip an MBA education while he's trying to sell you his book and "coaching program" at the same time. And he justifies this foolishness by comparing the cost of an MBA (from a school like Harvard, $350,000 plus foregone earnings) to the cost of his "12-week online crash course" (around $1,000), and by implying that one is worth just about the same as the other.

Who is he kidding? Sit two persons, one with an MBA from any reputable (read: "not fly-by-night") school and one who has had "training" from this douche AND who has read his book, with both persons having the same IQ, background, college GPA, and communication skills, in front of any employer: guess who the employer hires?

I can't stress this enough: never trust the opinion of anyone who's trying to sell you something.

2. Unless you have a Will Hunting-level comprehension, all those business books will eat you alive.

This Kaufman guy is really something. So it seems, one time he finds himself in a situation at work with MBA-types just as he doesn't know jack-shit about MBA stuff. So he does what any self-respecting guy does: catch up on his reading list. The Fortune article cites three books--a generic accounting text, Porter's "Competitive Strategy," and Drucker's "The Effective Executive"--that Kaufman read and which had enabled him to--this is just TOO funny, it's almost believable--"walk into a boardroom and hold my own with people who had graduated from Stanford and Wharton." Three books--one in accounting, one in strategy, and one in leadership--makes someone at par with an MBA-holder? Seriously, this guy has gotta be the biggest hack alive today, and to complete the coup, he's being promoted by "reputable" media like Fortune, for goodness sake. What is the world coming to?

But seriously, it takes way more than those three books to even barely cover the breadth (we're not even talking about depth, here) of an MBA education (and these self-help books are not the answer, either). There are five recognized functional areas of business: finance (how to raise needed capital), operations (how to make stuff), marketing (how to sell stuff), strategy (how to win), and accounting (how to make sure all your finances are in order), on top of support topics like human resources, economics, and information technology and innovation. Let's say one book adequately covers each topic (although believe me, that's more than a bit of a stretch), do you think you have what it takes to go through and understand a masters' level textbook without any help? MBA math isn't really calculus-level, but people have been known to have a hard time with finance math and even accounting arithmetic.

3. MBA professors provide milestones and feedback to your learning process.

Learning doesn't end with just reading the chapters of your textbook: you have to solve end-of-chapter questions and problems to find out if you really understood the material. Let's say you're brave enough to answer one or two problems, you check the answers at the back of the book, and you find out that one of your answers is wrong. Maybe you missed something, or you interpreted something incorrectly, you don't know. Which is precisely the point, how are you going to find out what went wrong? How are you even going to find the correct solution on your own? Remember why it's good to have teachers, and even classmates, when you're trying to learn something: to find out how far you've gone, how successfully (or unsuccessfully) you've understood the subject matter, and to be provided with objectives and milestones that will guide you through the learning process.


Click here for Part 2.