It’s often said that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat mistakes from the past, and that’s one reason why most business schools teach case studies about disastrous corporate decisions.
However, experts say that although business history is a fundamental part of an MBA education, understanding current business trends is also valuable. So is the ability to anticipate and prepare for changes in the economy.
“An MBA program is not current if it relies heavily on outdated case studies,” Jack Hampton, a professor of graduate business at Saint Peter’s University, said via email. “Beware of the program where lessons largely come from sources such as Jack Welch and his days at General Electric that ended in 2001.”
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Ronald K. Ma ch tley, president of Bryant University, says the present-day tech revolution that is transforming many U.S. industries is just as disruptive as the historic Industrial Revolution. He recommends every MBA student take courses that provide guidance on how to adjust to rapid innovation.
“The workplace is going to be significantly different,” he says, adding that it won’t be enough to do business the same way as in the past, but rather it will require innovation. Experts say it is important for prospective MBA students to find a cutting-edge business school, where they can learn how to address business problems that companies are either currently facing or fear will occur.
Here are four signs experts point to that indicate a business school will teach students how to anticipate business trends before they happen and show them ways to use these insights to generate profits.
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1. Forward-looking curriculum: Experts say MBA applicants should look for business schools that offer courses in predictive analytics, a type of business analytics that uses both historical and current business data to create forecasts, or precise mathematical models of what will happen next. Companies use these forecasts to find business opportunities that would be hard to discover otherwise and to determine which of a series of business ideas is most viable, experts say.
Kenneth Ko, an associate professor of decision sciences and an associate dean of various academic programs at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management, says it’s useful for MBA students to take a class that teaches them how to explain their forecasts to colleagues who lack formal analytics training. He also recommends a class where students take part in class projects that require them to produce forecasts for actual companies.
Another asset in an MBA program, Ko says, is a course or concentration in organizational behavior: an academic discipline that addresses how a company culture is formed and how that culture influences employees. This field addresses questions of how the most innovative organizations foster a culture of creativity and what causes an organization to develop a destructive environment.
Knowing what factors contribute to an organization’s success or failure makes it easier to identify companies that are worthy of investment, which is a key skill for private equity, venture capital and investment banking, experts say.
Ko says a good litmus test to determine whether a school has a pioneering curriculum is to see how many courses discuss artificial intelligence, a technology that is transforming many companies.
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2. Ethics classes: Experts also say a modern MBA program should teach multiple courses in business ethics. Nowadays customers often choose where to shop based on whether they like the culture of a company that sells a product, which means the quality of a company’s culture can determine whether it thrives.
Perri Finnican, a second-year MBA student at the Graziadio School, says that in her business ethics courses she learned about how customers sometimes use boycotts to hold companies accountable for their employees’ unethical behavior and how difficult it is for modern companies to hide scandals.
3 . Faculty with real-world experience: Ko says that MBA faculty who lack significant work experience and who have spent the bulk of their career in academia aren’t usually as aware of emerging business trends as their peers who have been leaders at major companies or who are currently running companies.
He encourages MBA applicants to target business schools where the majority of the faculty has meaningful real-world business experience.
4 . Lessons on how to deal with ambiguity and failure: Ma ch tley of Bryant University says it’s important for MBA students to take courses that will help them figure out what to do if their gut instincts conflict with the advice that artificial intelligence programs give. He says the courses should also show them how to recover if they take risks on an innovation that doesn’t work as planned.
“In this new world that we’re going to be living in, where you have to have one foot in the traditional world and one foot in this new world, there’s going to be failure, and the question is are students prepared to accept failure and have the grit and perseverance to move on?” Ma ch tley says.
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Correction 01/18/18: A previous version of this article misspelled Ronald K. Machtley’s last name.
