Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2015. The opening remarks on the MBA market, including the popularisation of postgraduate degrees and a stagnant job market, reflect Spain in 2015.
These days, whenever a student finishes a degree, they are given the same advice: “Do an MBA (Master of Business Administration).” The advice comes as if it were certain that the day after you collect your diploma your phone will be swamped with calls from HR departments eager to have you join them. Unfortunately, that is not how it works.
Times have changed. The popularisation of postgraduate degrees, together with a stagnant job market and the huge number of MBAs now offered outside business schools, is eroding the high expectations they raised years ago.
This article describes some of the most common work experiences that Geoffrey James believes teach you more than you could possibly learn at any business school.
1. Bringing a product to market
Whether you do it alone or inside a Fortune 100 company, there is simply no more valuable business experience than actually turning a business idea into something customers really buy.
To do it, you have to sell the idea to investors, build a prototype, win your first users, improve the design, create the marketing materials, build the distribution channels, train the salespeople, set up customer support and so on.
Throughout the process you learn that managers, accountants, engineers, marketers, salespeople and customers all think very differently. Most importantly, you learn how to get all of them working towards a common goal.
Business schools use case studies, most of them about companies that innovated and succeeded or companies that tried to innovate and failed. But case studies are just words.
The only way to really understand innovation is to get your hands dirty.
2. Surviving a round of layoffs
Being a leader means understanding human nature, and there is no better place or time to study human nature than when a company is cutting staff.
From the moment senior management denies that layoffs are imminent (the sure sign that they are coming), a downsizing sends corporate politics into overdrive, complete with backstabbing.
Hard times reveal who your real friends are, so one of the first things you learn is that, despite past camaraderie, your co-workers are not your friends, and most of them would sell their soul to the devil if it meant keeping their own job.
The best talent leaves the company before the layoff letters start flying, and that is when you learn that networking outside your company is essential. Watching your managers lie through their teeth (“our group won’t be affected”), you develop a healthy sense of scepticism.
Most importantly, you find out whether you are tough enough to stand the heat, confident enough to land another job, and able to keep calm in a crisis. No classroom or teacher could possibly teach you any of this.
(See: 7 tips from young entrepreneurs for starting your business successfully)
3. B2B (business-to-business) selling
Some B2B sales are all about price and delivery times. There are fairly simple situations, such as selling cars or houses. But other B2B sales situations are not so simple.
Selling long-term projects, “mission-critical” services and major capital equipment can take weeks, months or even years. Like bringing a product to market, these long campaigns expose you to every part of a business.
In modern companies, decisions to spend large amounts of money on anything involve building consensus among a wide range of decision-makers, stakeholders and naysayers. Each of them sees the problem and its solution from a very different perspective.
Even while you are working through the customer’s various issues, B2B selling also requires you to work through your own company’s internal issues and secure resources to support the sales effort and to look after the customer once they have bought.
Anyone who successfully carries one of these big-money deals from first contact through to ongoing support has already gone far, well beyond what you can learn at a business school.
4. Working in customer service
There is no more demanding job than customer service, and those who have done it get an education about people and companies that simply cannot be bought at any price or learned anywhere except by doing it.
Customer service teams usually report to marketing and often do not get respect from the rest of the company. If the engineers build junk, or the salespeople overpromise or sell the wrong product, it is customer service that has to take the abuse from customers.
Customer service staff are monitored, measured and paid according to how quickly they can get through calls. Despite that, they are expected to turn furious or frustrated customers into people who are happy with the product.
As Warren Buffett himself put it, “a single day running a company is worth more than 100 years of management theory”.
See also: 6 business ideas for young entrepreneurs that need no investment
Featured image: Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
