[lanceweatherby]

Here is a real example. Pretend like you are in a finance class. It's a case study. On Microsoft buying Yahoo! Determine how much Microsoft should be willing to pay for Yahoo! and the assumptions and rationale behind your conclusion. Or how much is AOL worth as a spinout of Time Warner. The core of the answer lies in something called the Capital Asset Pricing Model and it is as every bit as complex as the fixed point combinator for which YC was named.

A little more practical and more marketing aligned, doing real market research for a natural foods store to determine if they should expand their footprint to other locations or just increase the size of their current store. It took over a month to design the questionnaire before the prof deemed it acceptable.

With that said, the real challenge, and what any top school does, is teach students how to prioritize. They give you so much work that you can not possibly get it all complete at the level of excellence in which you want to operate so you have to learn when something is good enough and move on to the next pressing issue. Which, BTW, is pretty much what you need to do in a startup as well.

[plinkplonk]

"The core of the answer lies in something called the Capital Asset Pricing Model and it is as every bit as complex as the fixed point combinator for which YC was named."

Well I don't think the y combinator is a particularly complex concept and I did accept finance as hard and explicitly asked for non finance examples, :-) but that said I see your point (upvoted!).

"doing real market research for a natural foods store to determine if they should expand their footprint to other locations or just increase the size of their current store. It took over a month to design the questionnaire before the prof deemed it acceptable."

If I understand this correctly, the coursework is hard to the degree it intersects running a real business (in this case, as you said, doing " real market research for a natural foods store".

"With that said, the real challenge, and what any top school does, is teach students how to prioritize."

yes, but this is hardly unique to an MBA :-)

[jeremytliles]

Some of the coursework is difficult precisely because it is unstructured. I didn't find the finance courses to be particularly difficult because the problems typically fit into a fairly neat structure: "price this option" or "value this project/company".

One of the more difficult courses I had focused on managing small-to-medium businesses. The issues and cases we discussed tended not to be quantitative in nature, but really honed critical thinking. A particular case I remember dealt with a struggling, family-owned company whose founder/CEO had just died in the midst of an IP lawsuit, etc. (I don't remember all the details). Imagine you are brought in to run the company. What do you do first, second, third, fourth? The challenges are legal, financial, technical, and interpersonal. There are multiple crises: which do you delegate, which have to be dealt with immediately, and which can wait? What information do you need and from where are you going to get it? The answers are not always obvious and don't necessarily fit inside a neat framework. This is "hard" in a different way from advanced quantitative analysis of futures and options.

[plinkplonk]

"A particular case I remember dealt with a struggling, family-owned company whose founder/CEO had just died in the midst of an IP lawsuit, etc. (I don't remember all the details). Imagine you are brought in to run the company. What do you do first, second, third, fourth? The challenges are legal, financial, technical, and interpersonal. There are multiple crises: which do you delegate, which have to be dealt with immediately, and which can wait? What information do you need and from where are you going to get it?"

And how do you know any of the answers you come up with to the above questions are the correct ones?

For example, "There are multiple crises: which do you delegate, which have to be dealt with immediately, and which can wait?"

So I say "delegate crisis one and deal with crisis two immediately". You reverse that answer. Who is right? I am sure two intelligent people can go back and forth for quite a while justifying each answer. Such questions arise in the social sciences as well.

If you have at least a simulation, you can ,(within the assumptions of the simulation - how these map to the real world is a separate discussion/debate) try out your "answers" and see which one works better.

In the absence of a vlaidating/correcting mechanism, how can you ever know what the right answer is or how good your "solution" is?

I've personally found MBA case studies of dubious instructional value (but great entertainment value). It gives you something to do in class, but how much does it really teach?

Where there isn't a way to judge the validity or otherwise of an answer, (in my experience) the most articulate person "wins" and since you are not responsible for implementing the answer in the real word and suffer the consequences therof, it is fairly easy to construct an argument for one ooption or the other. What stops this from happening in an MBA "case study"?

[lanceweatherby]

The challenge is prioritization.

The uniqueness of an MBA is that it teaches how to think strategically about a business.

While I can not articulate exactly 'what' it teaches, I do know that often times in the face of new circumstances and rapidly changing conditions it has enabled me to ask the right questions and create the right framework to make a decision.

What I love about startups is they require this type of thinking. It has helped me tremendously in scaling technology companies.

[plinkplonk]

"I do know that often times in the face of new circumstances and rapidly changing conditions it has enabled me to ask the right questions and create the right framework to make a decision."

If you acquired this by doing an MBA this is certainly a definite value add :-).