[amb23]

This isn't a great list--it's a lot of fluff, and self-help books masquerading as business content.

There are basically two skills you really need to hone in an MBA. The first are the hard skills/knowledge on finance, accounting, (basic) stats, and (basic) economics. The second is being able to assess and analyze business models, from both strategic and operational angles. The former can be learned in MOOCs, while the latter is best approached with case studies, ideally discussed as a group. I'd honestly suggest trying to start a business/entrepreneurs book club with ~12-20 people to try to replicate that experience over reading books on your own.

[minimalist]

What are some good publicly-accessible collections of case studies if someone wanted to start a discussion club? Someone once told me that part of the value proposition of the best business schools is the library of case studies that they amass (and sell). Is that true?

[mdorazio]

If you want good, you're unlikely to get free. We are talking about business, after all. The standard is HBR, which you can buy for what I believe is a reasonable cost: https://store.hbr.org/case-studies/

[ajot]

Cedric Chin's Commoncog has some freely accessible case studies:

https://commoncog.com/c/cases/

I do like Cedric's blog a lot, it frequently gets shared here on HN.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=commoncog.com%2Fblog

[in0v8r]

You are not alone in this line of thinking. A case study repository would be an invaluable find.

[ghaff]

The BU libraries have a bunch of links. If someone had some knowledge of what they were looking for they could probably assemble a decent collection of relevant studies. The Harvard ones are the gold standard but, really, they're just a jumping off point for discussion if someone knows enough to capture the most important points.

https://library.bu.edu/business-case-studies/open

[hnthrowaway0328]

From what I observe in many companies, you only need one skill: fail up.

[klipt]

The real value of an MBA is the network you create with other MBA students.

That's why a Harvard MBA is worth more than (unknown school) MBA - the top companies hire Harvard MBAs who then have a business network with other Harvard MBAs - who of course got hired at other top companies.

It's self reinforcing.

[hnthrowaway0328]

Yep, and very important to fail up and fail horizontally.

[Dowwie]

The network value is over valued and over sold.

[ghaff]

I'd say it can be important. I'll also say that, having gone to a top-ish business school, other than getting a (fairly ordinary) job out of campus interviews, I never otherwise benefited from network/connections and mostly didn't stay in particularly close contact with most of my classmates.

[hnthrowaway0328]

Connection is like good look. You just may benefit a lot from it, but life is really going to fuck you if you don't have it

Realization from someone with a height of 160cm.

[ghaff]

Oh, connections can be important. 3 out of the 4 jobs I've had since grad school have been through people I knew and the 4th was an on-campus interview. But none of the subsequent jobs were B-school related in any way though one was peripherally related to undergrad.

I was mostly reacting to the meme that the only reason to go to B-school is the network and in my experience that's not really true and I'd discourage someone from attending for that reason alone.

[j45]

Self reinforcing in a 1950's way

[j45]

Some fluff isn’t common knowledge.

MBA programs are also often predicated on predicting the next y years based on the past x years.

This is increasingly hard for mbas to do or stay ahead of because how things are done in business isn’t the same, and changing faster than mbas are updated and taught.

Like anything it not what your education makes of you, it’s what you make of your education.

[aik]

I agree some of these are fluff. However many here are great to have basic knowledge of for specific scenarios one may run into and then know where to dig deeper when needed.

Agree though to marry being a ferocious reader / learner with being a do’er is the way to go. Personally I did not grow up with an opportunity to develop an intuition about business and self-motivated action. Has taken a lot of work to move that direction over the years.

[mi_lk]

What specific MOOCs are recommended for the first one?

[cheriot]

I took some of the Wharton first year MBA classes for free on Coursera. Left me incredulous that people take out huge loans for that stuff. It's Wharton, though, so the signaling alone may be worth the price.

[csa]

> It's Wharton, though, so the signaling alone may be worth the price.

You’re (mostly) not paying for the content of the courses.

Reasons to go/pay (in no particular order):

1. It’s a finishing school, with all the good and bad that implies. Some of the details below fall into that category.

2. Developing your peer network. Includes classmates, professors, and alumni.

3. Access to incredible research opportunities and research resources (yes, even for MBAs).

4. Access to jobs that (mostly) only go to grads of Wharton and similar. Think consulting and IB.

5. Access to job networks of niche and often super interesting jobs via peers and professors.

6. Signaling, although this does work both ways. While it opens doors for some jobs, it makes you overqualified for others.

7. Being in an environment of driven and (mostly) competent people. The scope of “what is possible” will probably be redefined for most/many Wharton students. (This might be worded somewhat poorly… not exactly sure how to say it).

8. Related to 7, being graded on a curve against motivated and competent peers can… build character. I’m not sure what it’s like these days.

9. In the past, there were some niche concentration courses that were super interesting. I’m not sure what they are now, and I’m not sure they make it to MOOCs.

10. Wharton Follies.

To close, if someone goes to Wharton primarily for access to the classes, then I would say that they have pretty much failed Wharton, regardless of what their grades end up being. Most of the knowledge from the classes can be gained more easily and cheaply in other ways.

[thruhiker]

I always thought the sums people were paying for MBAs was absolutely outrageous. In tech I feel like MBAs can actually work against you and can be perceived as a red flag. I knew someone a decade ago who paid I believe $120k to Duke Fuqua for a mostly online MBA that also required travel to multiple international destinations. This was a person in their late 20s.

[refurb]

An MBA is a prerequisite for many high level jobs. Management consulting partner, investment banking managing director are just a few. There are paths to those roles that don’t include an MBA, but they are rare.

The reason people pay is the math works out. Spending $120k to unlock career tracks that include roles that pay $500,000 or more is a pretty straightforward cost-benefit analysis.

My spouse did an MBA at a top school and 15 years out a very large chunk of the class are CEOs of large corporations, founders of private equity firms, etc.

The value is mostly in the signaling and network. Being able to get time with half a dozen CEOs simply because you went to the same school is invaluable.

[ghaff]

It's also true that MBAs used to be quite a bit cheaper, even accounting for inflation, and that there were almost certainly fewer opportunities for people with "just" solid STEM chops to earn much beyond mid-level professional salaries.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

I’ve done part of an MBA program. I’ve only hit pause because I couldn’t make the workload work with how demanding my job is at the moment. That does mean that beyond experiencing the program itself, I spent a fair bit of time looking at MBA program curricula. What I found was a pretty significant amount of study into areas that to me seem integral to actually running a business in reality. The sort of stuff that techies love to pretend doesn’t exist, or that they can just intuit with a combination of reading a few Wikipedia articles + their largely incorrectly self-identified transferable expertise.

I don’t know if my MBA program is particularly good. Whilst it’s run by a legitimate institution it’s certainly not a particularly prestigious one. I’d expect that it is in a lot of ways very middle-of-the-road.

One thing it has done is reaffirm my pre-existing vague suspicion that, whilst there are obviously no shortage of formulaic, uninspired, and largely street-dumb MBAs out there, a lot of the hate for those with an MBA that I see in communities like Hacker News is probably misdirected hatred toward the realities of business. Especially given how many people here have grown up in a zero-interest environment where they could bounce from place to place being paid very well to sit around in beanbag chairs thinking about engineering problems whilst the money fairies without fail backed truckload after truckload of cash up to their San Francisco office loading docks.

[runlaszlorun]

Harsh but spot-on. Especially the last paragraph…

[gavinray]

Aren't business models complete bullshit?

I've spent a decade in startups, and pitch decks along with projections are more or less riding-the-edge-of-grifting fluff.

If it were possible to accurately forecast cost and revenue, then everyone would start a profitable business, right?

[mdorazio]

You're conflating startups with the broader business world. Startup models are shit because there are so many unknowns and it's in the interests of the people making them to fluff them up as much as possible. In the other 99% of businesses, business models can be quite accurate and are valuable tools for decision making and evaluation. For example, public companies often issue revenue guidance and analysts do their own earnings projections based on models.

[xyzelement]

Ideally your business model is evidence (including to yourself) that you've done some hard thinking about who your customers, suppliers, and competitors are - and about some basic dynamics of your space.

It doesn't mean anyone should expect it to go that way exactly and the deviation from projection could be quite large, but it's still miles ahead of someone who's not bothered to think through it at all in most cases.

[refurb]

Everyone knows the forecasts don’t accurately predict the future. That’s not the point of forecasts.

The value of models is the assumptions you put in. How big is the potential market? What price do you think you can charge? How much of the market will go to competitors.

The value of forecasts is in pressure testing assumptions and opportunity.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

There is a world outside of the Bay Area, I assure you.

[fsckboy]

>If it were possible to accurately forecast cost and revenue, then everyone would start a profitable business, right?

that doesn't follow: it's just as likely if you could accurately forecast cost and revenue, then you wouldn't start many businesses because you'd know they wouldn't be profitable

[dsr_]

Both of you get to the same place: if it's possible to accurately forecast cost and revenue, then all the businesses started by people who can do that will be profitable.

And there are so few serial entrepreneurs in existence that we have the following pair of conclusions:

A. It isn't very probable (we are mostly seeing survivor bias)

B. People who can do that start exactly one business, which is sufficiently profitable that they never bother to do it again

Both of these conclusions lead to the situation that picking a serial entrepreneur to invest in is just buying a lottery ticket.