So I’ve done my first week of my MBA, which consisted of lectures on:<\/p>\n
1. Organisational Behaviour, i.e. how the shape and behaviour of organisations change as they grow.<\/p>\n
2. Management Skills<\/p>\n
3. Managerial Accounting<\/p>\n
4. Marketing Management<\/p>\n
5. Quantitative Business Methods, i.e. statistics<\/p>\n
The lecture on statistics involved a certain amount of maths, and I saw a quadratic equation for the first time in years. Happily, it’ll not be a patch on the maths I had to tackle<\/a> for my engineering degree. There will be no matrices or complex numbers, for a start. So far, I’m finding it all quite interesting, even the accounting. Yesterday a classmate nudged me and asked whether I was genuinely paying attention or just faking it. I replied that compared to sitting through French meetings<\/a>, this was like watching an action movie. Things will have to get an awful lot duller before I start to regret coming here.<\/p>\n On Wednesday one of my classmates asked whether he thought our MBA was worth the money (about 32k euros). I ran a few numbers and worked out we get around 480 hours of lectures over the academic year, which works out at 65-70 euros per hour. A lawyer will charge 300 euros per hour, and a plumber around 100. Unless the lecturer\u00a0 is a complete moron, this is pretty good value even if you’re in a class of twenty students. On top of that, we get guest speakers, company visits, and all the informal interaction with the professors. Whether the MBA will land you a job which pays enough to justify the outlay is another matter.<\/p>\n In my final term I’ll need to write a dissertation on a subject of my choosing, although it\u00a0 ought to be related to HR and add to the sum total of academic knowledge. It must be between 15k-20k words, which having written a 76k word book doesn’t worry me much. But what about the topic? I’m tempted to address one of the subjects I bang on about on here. Perhaps a study into the effects of affirmative action regarding women and minorities on young men (or women) in a multinational? Does it make them re-think their future with the company, or dissuade them from applying in the first place? Or maybe the contradiction between a company’s commitment to diversity and their embrace of local content laws? I could even look at the effects of local content laws in some manner. I’ve got no idea how I would even begin to research any of this – my biggest worry is I don’t think companies would share data or allow me access – but they’d be interesting topics of study, and I need that. Has anyone done anything like this before?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So I’ve done my first week of my MBA, which consisted of lectures on: 1. Organisational Behaviour, i.e. how the shape and behaviour of organisations change as they grow. 2. Management Skills 3. Managerial Accounting 4. Marketing Management 5. Quantitative … Continue reading