| I consider finance to be a subset of “business administration” (which I assume you mean in the sense that the MBA uses it i.e. as a catch all) and what a CFO does is an important subset of what a CEO is responsible for. Finance is an important component but other MBA topics would be strategy, marketing, organizational dynamics, operations and so on. In a business school you would learn many of these through case studies (to the extent the school is influenced by HBS which every school is to some extent). These topics also have recognizable curricula. Operations courses will delve into queue theory (exercise: one oven bakes a cookie in 5 min but your constraint is the strainer which can only ... blah blah, or something to tell throughout from latency), a course in marketing might describe the 4 ps (price, placement, product, promotion). A course in strategy night talk about a swot analysis (strength weakness opportunity threat) or Porter points out that the pricing power in an industry is set by workers, customers, competitors, new entrants, substitutes and so on. Most MBA courses have their class requirements online. You can even click through the classes and add the curriculum and the books required. The materials, quite frankly, are not technically difficult but you have to practice them in order to remember to use them when you need them. Other important components of the actual experience inckude working in teams and presenting to the class. |