In the corporate hunger games

One thing I can’t say I didn’t know and also didn’t know I don’t know is the dominance of corporate work culture in the MBA experience.

I probably still don’t know what it really means, because the largest organization I was ever part of had ~50 pp. I never worked in a company that is even somewhat big and I find it hard to imagine what it feels like. Living for 6 months now in a community composed primarily of people who worked at large organizations, I do think I am getting the whiff of it.

I. Apply, apply again

December was a time of applications at HEC, the campus was busy and buzzing. A good chunk of the MBA cohort was filing applications to various corporations, practicing for hours at a time on interviewing technics, and sending out emails to colleagues with the hopes of getting recommendations. As I am writing this down I sense that if I don’t follow up with an explanation for all of that I myself will not be able to decipher that in a couple of years.

In some sectors (consulting, banking, multinational all-encompassing conglomerates) there is this concept of an MBA internship. The idea is to get a talented MBA student to come over the summer for a period of (usually) 8 to 12 weeks, to a company they don’t know at all, and work. Based on my experience managing people, I feel safe to say this is hardly a recipe for creating good work products. It is effective in getting the candidate to like the place and want to work there in the future, and even more effective as a candidates’ screening process.

Having interviewed over 100 candidates in my life, maybe 150, I find the common interview process I witness here fairly surprising. Most interviews are structured as a “case quiz”. A candidate is presented with a business issue and a set of hypothetical facts and is expected to offer solutions to the issue at hand. This is specifically targeting business cases the candidate does not have expertise in and is meant to test “how you think”. Evidently, candidates spend hours studying common cases and useful answer templates.

II. Network much?

Companies also spend considerable resources in “networking”. In many cases, this takes the form of small talk between company current employees and aspiring candidates, which can, if all goes well, end up with the employee “putting in a good word” for the candidate.

From the candidate’s perspective, this is time-consuming but with the potential of assisting, defiantly worth it. From the company’s perspective, I just don’t get it. The employee does not have information on the candidate that the recruiter doesn’t have or any assurance of the candidate’s skills. The employee just “knows the name” and I struggle to understand how this is a productive practice. I speculate this started because those networking events have marketing value, and to get students to attend them there must be an appearance of connection to the application process.

III. Superficial thoroughness

The MBA is based on a high-level point of view. I would be surprised if this is disputed. A single marketing course (15 hours course) can’t cover the huge, vast, rapidly developing space of “marketing”. Once you choose not to focus on a specific aspect of marketing, you condemn the course to be painfully superficial.

My mistake was to think this is a mistake. I know adapted to see this as a key feature of the system. For middle-level management in large companies, the ability to touch a wide range of problems is necessary. In the consulting industry, the ability to hold an opinion on a problem that’s completely new to you is at the core of your position.

IV. An MBA is a bit like a degree in mansplaining

Strategy course (2nd semester). The course is structured as a series of “cases”: a few pages of text and graphs on the “story” of a certain company. The story is thinly filtered, often by Harvard professors. Cases can be 5 years old but also 15 years old. In every class, the professor asks questions about “what the company needs to do” or “why they did that” and students take guesses. This blows my mind. How can the professor be an expert in the story of Tesla, Danone, Whatsapp, at the same time? How can students who all they know about the case is 5 pages of text, already have an opinion on what the company needs to do?

Where I grew up, learning about a company you don’t know, in a space you don’t know, about things the company did 5 years ago, is un-useful. If it comes with the commentary of someone from within, perhaps it has lessons to teach. The conversation would very quickly shift to what happened since the case was written.

Personally, I am quick to judge, but I try to look at the situation and rustle my criticism to stay quiet for a minute. I try to tell myself this is how the managers of some of the largest, most successful, companies in the world, were educated. This is the best way the traditional business world has found to grow its young managers, even leaders. I admit this is still a mystery to me. I am missing the message of “it’s complicated” and “you don’t know what you’re talking about”. If Danone’s problem were actually something you can identify after 1 day of familiarity with the company, don’t you think they would have solved it already?

V. MBA approaching tech

The MBA industry wants to come closer to the tech industry. If you look at all the leading MBA programs web pages you will find mentions of relevancy for careers in tech and alumni leading tech companies. My experience is that MBA programs have a very long way to go before they will be relevant for tech companies.

In the current market, MBA graduates (for argument's sake assume an average of 4 years worth of experience in a large traditional organization) have very little to contribute to hyper-growth tech companies — compared to a candidate with 3 years of experience in another hyper-growth company.

I assess 80% of MBA students won’t know the difference between demand generation and intent harvesting even if they got a perfect score in that marketing course I mentioned above. This problem troubles many MBA schools, but it takes time to solve.

The tech industry, with more companies growing and building a professional middle management layer, will eventually need to do its part in this relationship too. I don’t know what this relationship will look like in 10 years but I see intent on both sides to create a common language. Currently, I think the two parties just really speak two different languages. A good example is a way a super basic word like “marketing” is interpreted in the two languages.

This was me trying to explain MBA world to myself. I hope I’ll be able to read this in 5 years and understand what I meant.