Isn’t learning to “think like an MBA” the reason we are all here pursuing a Masters in Business Administration?
Having a degree doesn’t necessarily mean you are able to think or act like an MBA. Successful MBA’s are able to pull together resources, information, and ideas from multiple sources in order to create impactful business solutions. The Suffolk MBA program is now offering a course intended to develop these necessary skills and tools to utilize in real-world situations, and of course, to ultimately think like an MBA.
“MGES 803 – Think Like An MBA” is an Entrepreneurship elective hybrid course of 3 credits taught over a short three week period. The curriculum moves quickly in an intense face-to-face and online format. What seemed to be an extremely demanding and overwhelming class, turned into a very energetic, fun environment with a high degree of participation and continuous constructive feedback from the professor and colleagues. By the end, not only you will be able to identify and analyze problems more clearly, brainstorm uninhibited alternatives, and create credible innovative business solutions, but you will also acquire the confidence and persuasiveness to do so.
The Course Structure
Although the classes meet twice a week, don’t be mistaken, there will be something for you to do every day until the end of the course. “Think Like an MBA” will also introduce you to many tools and online platforms that will help you to collaborate in teams and accomplish the workload successfully. They are:
- Wall Street Journal Online Subscription – The individual problem-solving assignments and practice presentations will be based on up-to-date WSJ articles. So if you do not read the news every day, this class will be a great reason to start and add that to your MBA life routine!
- VoiceThread – Feedback is the main part of this course and VoiceThread facilitates it for you. The online tool allows you to upload your practice presentations online and have ongoing digital conversations with your colleagues. Everyone will participate in each others’ presentations by commenting via text, audio, and video posts.
- Padlet – This online tool will allow you to collect information, organize thoughts, and share the research data for your final presentation between your team members more easily and efficiently.
All these applications will give you the necessary understanding and instruments to apply to the final presentation. In the final presentation, you and your team will be analyzing a real company and assessing its current problematic situation. For the class of Fall 2017 the focused companies were: Staples, Chipotle, Uber, United Airlines and Whole Foods.
If you think it could not get more real than that, it can, and it will. The final presentation is given to an outside panel of entrepreneurship professors representing the company’s Board and C-suite members. They will evaluate you as harshly as they would be in an actual business conference meeting. But don’t you worry – it is all constructive criticism!
– Isabela O. Daudt, MBA ’19