What the world’s hottest MBA courses reveal about 21st-century business
STANFORD UNIVERSITY’S Graduate School of Business (GSB) exhorts its students to dream big. When one of its alumni in the class of 2006, Rishi Sunak, became Britain’s prime minister last year, the dean welcomed the news as if it had always been inevitable. “Rishi’s experience at Stanford raised his aspirations,” he proclaimed in a school-wide email. The GSB prides itself on offering the world’s most selective mba programme. Its class of 420 students is less than half the size of that of its arch-rival, Harvard Business School—and represents just 6% of applicants, compared with 10% or so for HBS. Although not all of them can be heads of government, many will follow alumni such as Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, or Detroit’s mightiest woman, Mary Barra of General Motors, into corporate stardom.
This makes the GSB the perfect place to glimpse the future of management. And there may be no better lens through which to examine it than the MBA programme’s most oversubscribed courses. Where the GSB’s highly driven bosses-to-be choose to spend their precious time speaks volumes about what they think will matter to their careers. And, given the clout they will eventually wield, those revealed preferences are going to define how the world’s most successful companies will be run.
Management education involves wading through case studies, poring over financial statements and building sophisticated spreadsheets. And, like any MBA curriculum worth its salt, the GSB’s has compulsory classes in accounting, finance and computer modelling, to be completed within the first two terms of instruction, out of a total of six. Look at the school’s three most popular facultative courses, though, and a more interesting picture emerges of the 21st-century manager. All three require virtually no number-crunching. Instead they aim to cultivate in students a capacity for hardheadedness,…
2023-04-05 09:42:56
Article from www.economist.com
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