How an MBA with an international outlook led to a bold decision
The following contribution is from the Financial Times and is written by Patricia Nilsson, who is a Frankfurt correspondent and writes about German industry for the FT. She was previously a consumer industries reporter, covering a wide range of businesses including retail, media, tobacco and cannabis. Her podcast Hot Money delves into the murky business of online pornography and is the FT’s first investigative audio series.
Student story: A globally focused degree opened up opportunities abroad for Julie Kurtian
It all started in the countryside outside Bordeaux, where I was raised by a single mother in a working-class home. My mother used to tell me that as a child I wanted to be the master of the world or an inventor.
I was always questioning things, trying to understand why things work the way they do. This kind of thinking stayed with me throughout my life.
After a degree in entrepreneurship at the University of Bordeaux and a few years of working at Carrefour, the supermarket group, I followed my wife, who is a cancer researcher, to Singapore.
It was a struggle. Back then, being queer in Singapore was a challenge because it wasn’t always easy to be fully accepted or to live openly. (Queer is used to designate those people who are not heterosexual. In reality, it is those people who refuse to be classified by their sexual practices or their gender, they want to live without being labelled, by not identifying themselves, it doesn’t limit their experience as a person.)
I moved to the other side of the world on a tourist visa: not only did I have to find a job, but I had to find an employer who would sponsor my [work] visa.
But I believe in the importance of encounters between people, and there were a lot of interesting people in Singapore. Eventually, I met a crazy Australian who was building a chain of beautiful grocery stores called Little Farms and I started helping him. He became my mentor and was the one who first told me: “If you are thinking of moving to the US, you should do an MBA – it will help you a lot.” Since my wife is a scientist, moving to the US was always part of the long-term plan.
So when my wife came back to France to finish her PhD, it was the perfect opportunity for me to do an MBA. I chose Kedge Business School, partly because it has a campus in Bordeaux, where I live when I am in France.
It also has great electives, from public speaking to negotiations, and the best thing is that you can do as many as you want. It was great for me – not only did I learn a lot, but I also met a lot of people.
The Kedge team was very responsive and supportive. Doing an MBA was the most expensive thing I had ever done in my life at the time (if you add everything up, it was almost €60,000), so when you do something like that, it is important to have a team that supports you.
With an MBA, you really touch everything. I had operational experience, international experience, and an entrepreneurial mindset. But with the MBA I was gaining visibility into things that were new to me, such as horizontal marketing.
My favorite parts of the course were the international seminars. I chose to go to the US twice, once to Florida and the second time to Portland, where we studied together with students from other cities.
There were about 60 students in my class and I would say about a third of them were international. When I moved to Singapore, I learned about other mindsets in life but also in work, and I really wanted to have more of that experience.
I was 28 when I started the course, which was quite young. Many of the people I was learning with were over 40 and had had different experiences.
I once remember working on a project with a professional dancer, a boat captain, and a senior executive at a car manufacturing company.
The experience was very enriching; otherwise, I would never have met or worked with these people
Two weeks after handing in my MBA final project, I landed in New York, where I had never been before and didn’t know anyone. With the Singapore experience in mind, I started trying to meet new people.
To make it easier for myself, I started with the French community
Soon after, I met the team that was trying to set up a corporate catering company called Fraîche. They needed help and I believed in the project, so I joined them. Pretty soon, I was working hard in New York.
I would say that the main thing the MBA gave me was the sense of youthful confidence, which is often lost as you become an adult. On the MBA, I studied and worked alongside senior executives in their 50s and realized that they were often not necessarily smarter than me and, more importantly, I realized that they had the same fears as me.
It really helped me put things into perspective. That confidence boost is still with me.
How has an MBA changed your way of thinking?
The following contribution is from Quora and is written by Angela Guido, who is an MBA in Economics from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
I came to business school as a philosopher and professor, so the MBA blew me away. I like to tell people that an MBA is an education in the language of business.
You learn some great concrete skills, but much more importantly, you become fluent in a new language.
That language is spoken in literally every country in the world
And it includes accounting, econometrics, corporate finance, competitive strategy, marketing, and a whole host of other subvocabularies of the business lexicon.
While I am still a philosopher and professor at heart, I would say that this education gave me the ability (and confidence!) to think and communicate in business at a much higher level.
Suddenly, the world made a whole new sense
For example, when you go to the grocery store: how it’s organized, where each item is placed, the specific things that appeal to you at the checkout — these are all conscious strategic decisions the grocery store makes to maximize the amount of money you spend on each visit.
The breakfast aisle came to fascinate me more.
Have you ever noticed that the number of breakfast cereal brands increases year after year?
Outside of the US, you can find 10 types of cereal at the top of the breakfast aisle. In the US, there are over 100. Did you know that the vast majority of them are made by just two companies?
Why? Do we really need 7 different types of oat circles?
It turns out that it’s all about competitive strategy: the two big cereal companies proliferate their products to consume the entire growing length of the cereal aisle to push out competitors.
They don’t care if you buy Froot Loops or Apple Jacks — either way, they get your business. There was even a lawsuit about it – smaller brands sued them for this near-monopolistic tactic.
And then there’s WUPU and WOPU. Have you noticed how the sizes of those boxes have changed over the years? Sometimes the boxes get bigger, sometimes they get smaller. The goal of the company (sadly) is to get as much of your money as possible for as little cost as possible.
WUPU and WOPU is how they play with quantity without you even realizing it. WUPU = weight gain, price increase. They give you more and charge you more. But then at some point, they use WOPU. They take weight off and raise the price again.
They alternate these tactics over the years and before you know it, one day you’re paying $5 a box for half of what you could get for $3 10 years ago.
I never had the ability to even think about this stuff before business school, much less understand it.
They are now most of what I see when I look at the consumer world. And the perspective is power
We live in a world dominated by capitalism. For better or worse, that is not likely to change radically in the near future.
An MBA gives you the ability to understand how business really works and the decisions that are made behind the scenes that shape our everyday lives.
Ideally, if you get a really good MBA, you will learn to think for yourself within the vast world of business
And to make sound, ethical decisions on behalf of yourself, your clients, and your company. The goal of most MBA programs is to teach you to speak the language of business and then use it to make a positive difference in the world.
If you’re like me, hungry to understand the world and have a positive influence on it, then I HIGHLY recommend business school. If you’re thinking about applying, here’s an article I wrote about it: 45 Things You Should Know Before Applying to Business School.
How did your life change after doing an MBA from Harvard Business School?
This other Quora contribution is by Steve Much, who is an MBA from Harvard ’91, MS Computer Science from Stanford ’87, Computer Science/Business from Carnegie Mellon ’86
My life changed in a variety of ways, some of which were directly related to HBS, and many of which were not.
As with any break, it served as a huge milestone, a natural and rare moment to close one chapter and open a new one. It’s not often in our lives that we get opportunities like these that allow us to make 90- or 180-degree turns toward the things we want and away from those things we don’t want.
Graduate school (of any kind, really) is one such opportunity, but you don’t have to attend it to have it
Since most business schools require more than two years of work experience (and Harvard is no exception), you’ve probably tried your first job ever and found it lacking some dimension, as I did.
Going to graduate school means you have to leave your old life behind at the end of August, and most people understand that perfectly, so you don’t feel guilty.
A “hard break” is a rare occurrence. It allows you to hit the reset button and ask yourself again what you’d really like to do, where you’d like to do it, and sometimes who you’d like to do it with.
Better yet, you interact with dozens of people from all kinds of industries, governments, nations, nonprofits, and careers
You can try out a whole new profession for a few months if you want to. During the summer between my first and second year, I had the opportunity to try management consulting and found that it didn’t offer the things I wanted in a career at the time.
After HBS, I moved to the West Coast and into the high-tech sector I’d always wanted to work in.
I followed the great advice of HBS professor Bill Sahlman, who said that the best first step in starting a company might be to join a fast-growing mid-sized company in the sector of your choice, to learn at their expense (while contributing, of course), before striking out on your own.
The key insight here is that while «in-sector» is obvious, the combination «mid-sized/fast-growing» together wasn’t obvious at all to me.
But these help ensure a better chance of getting greater responsibility much faster. Those were factors I hadn’t thought about enough, and they were critical.
So I abandoned the idea of starting a startup that I was going to do in my second year and joined a small 8,000-person software company in Redmond, Washington, that had just launched a product called Windows 3.0. I turned down a much more lucrative offer from the consulting firm. It was a fantastic experience: great people, fun technologies and platforms, and a lot of learning in an industry I would remain in for several decades.
I worked on great products like Microsoft Access (and the FoxPro acquisition), several CD-ROMs, and led the first generation of Internet gaming initiatives.
I helped co-author a couple of patents and met some amazing people, certainly including, but not only, Bill Gates. Within five years at Microsoft, I was managing a team of over 80 people and leading our entire Internet gaming strategy—most of the concepts later morphed into Xbox Live.
It wasn’t because I was exceptional in any way—I was a great person. It was because Microsoft was growing rapidly, in a rapidly expanding industry, and opportunities were (and still are) plentiful.
I eventually left Microsoft and founded two companies (at least at the time of this writing), the first of which was acquired for $80 million by Expedia Inc., the second of which was acquired just a few months ago.
At HBS I learned to make much better, rational, structured arguments about the things I believed in.
I learned that it was not only okay, but worth taking risks if I could back up my opinions with logic and facts, and that just as I could learn from others, so too could others learn from me from time to time.
I enjoyed forming many new, enriching, lifelong friendships with people from all over the world and from different professions, nonprofits, and governments.
Through the Socratic method and spending the entire first year with the same 80 people, the experience taught me that smart, well-intentioned people can and do have widely varying political perspectives, and despite the stereotype you may have if you haven’t been to HBS, the experience made me more tolerant of differences, not less.
I learned, too, that consistency matters: you can’t argue for one viewpoint on plant closures in an Ethics class (I was phoned in on the first day of a freshman class, on a case dealing with a GM plant closure) and then turn around and argue for the other viewpoint in Finance class—your peers will rightly criticize you for being inconsistent.
And I learned that just because someone approaches an issue from a different angle doesn’t make it bad.
But rather, their perspective may be different, shaped by different data and/or attitudes about that data over time.
Often, it’s not that hard to find common ground to build on. I learned that noble brands like Harvard are special for a reason, but that they don’t have a monopoly on good ideas, and that curiosity, humility, vision, and execution are far more important than a thumbs-up in determining one’s path in life.
10 Notable Benefits of an MBA Degree
The following contribution is from the University of Cincinnati Online portal, which is dedicated to providing a top-notch educational experience that provides flexibility for busy professionals, lifelong learners, and students from around the world.
All UC Online programs are led by nationally recognized faculty and combine innovation with freedom of intellectual inquiry to create an inclusive environment tailored to the needs of UC Online students.
With each course, students will be provided with the tools, skills, and education to enhance their abilities, expand their opportunities, and enrich their local communities.
Are you looking for a way to distinguish yourself in today’s competitive and ever-changing business landscape? The online MBA from the University of Cincinnati’s Lindner College of Business could be your ticket to standing out and achieving your career aspirations.
MBA a Strategic Path
In a digitally-minded world where continuous learning and adaptability are crucial, an MBA offers a strategic path to success and several benefits.
From increased earning potential to skill development and much more, earning your MBA degree has several advantages that make it a smart choice in 2024 and beyond.
So, whether you’re a seasoned professional looking for a career boost or an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to launch your own company, read on to learn the University of Cincinnati Online’s 10 reasons why earning your MBA is worth it.
