Navigating through an MBA program is no different than navigating through the corporate world. This article explains the purpose of an MBA program and what areas you should consider working on as an MBA student.
When you join an MBA course, you consider yourself a student. You behave like a student, learning from classes and books. When you leave the MBA course, after completing it, you are no longer a student. You are a corporate citizen and are being paid to behave like one.
In these two years, what have you learnt that makes you into a corporate citizen? Knowledge of management and its streams?
Does knowledge of Marketing, Finance, HR, IT and Operations make you a manager? Does that provide value to a company? The company can also search the internet for the data that you profess to have. In fact it is cheaper and more efficient, as this data is available in searchable form while it is available only incompletely in your mind. The difference between the internet and you is that you have arms and leg and can do things. But do what?
Doing things in a company means listening to your boss, understanding what he wants and doing it to his satisfaction. remember your boss contributes 90% to your career.
Doing things in a company means promoting yourself, your boss and your company and its products.
Doing things means executing projects to everyone’s satisfaction.
Doing things means influencing everyone to do what is required to be done.
How do you learn this in college if you are focused on memorizing and vomiting information?
If even the best MBA college teaches only theory, the instructors are simply aggregators of information. If you want book summaries, they are there on the internet. Why attend classes. Moreover, why not do a correspondence course?
So in order to be useful to any organization, apart from knowing the theory of management, you need to learn the practice of management.
You may argue: why do this?
Let us evaluate these beliefs. By the way, these beliefs come from a resistance to transition from a student in academic life to an adult in real life. You will fight tooth and nail to resist these changes, because they move you out of your comfort zone.
So what should you do as an MBA student.
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