When what you need is different than a traditional MBA
The road to an MBA is paved with questions. One of the first things prospective students ask is if they need an MBA at all. No matter how you slice it, the MBA is a means to an end. At the end – hopefully! - is professional advancement, personal development, and increased opportunities. But is the MBA the only way to get that outcome?
I have worked in graduate management education for more than a decade. I am a firm believer in the value of it. I’ve seen the transformation graduate business school catalyzes. I’ve been the subject of it. I also know there is more than one way to get to pretty much any place you set as your target.
I’ve kept tabs on new developments in the space that allow aspiring leaders to acquire knowledge and skills without a traditional degree. Not surprisingly, one program I have been following is the altMBA, an online leadership and management workshop, founded in 2015 by author and entrepreneur Seth Godin.
I’ve been intrigued with the altMBA for quite some time. As I often do when I am interested in learning more about a school or a program, I signed up for their emails. They are one of the few I actually regularly read. Analyzing the altMBA email communication plan is like a mini-marketing course in and of itself. It’s hard to resist the brevity, the concise and crisp messages that are also instinctively compelling. And the concept of the altMBA is what I have been preaching for years the future of graduate management education will be – just-in-time, technology-enabled, relentlessly experiential, intensely skills-focused.
Knowing what a great marketer Seth Godin is, I needed to dig deeper than what I was served up in marketing materials. I emailed the altMBA team and asked if someone will be open to speaking with me. I got a response from Marie Schacht, Provost/Chief Learning Officer of the altMBA. When we got on the phone, Marie was refreshingly devoid of any canned messages. She is an altMBA alumna herself. She is very clear about who the altMBA is for and what it does.
Do some students choose to do the altMBA instead of an MBA? Some do it as a way to explore what an MBA experience could potentially be like. Some don’t care for a degree; they need a system that helps them build a leadership muscle and turn it into a habit. All are drawn to the intense but short delivery format and the immediacy of the results.
Do some companies pay for their employee to attend the altMBA? It happens occasionally but is hardly the norm.
Do students have access to corporate recruiters? It’s not part of the strategy. Students leverage their newly acquired knowledge, skills, and network on their own.
The biggest surprise for me? Hearing that some actual MBAs attend the course. Why on earth would they need the altMBA? I had to find out. Marie puts me in touch with an altMBA alumnus.
Noel De La Torre is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Intuit and a graduate of the full-time MBA program at Indiana University – Kelley School of Business. On email, he is prompt, helpful, and has a sense of humor. On our Zoom call, I get straight to the heart of my curiosity.
What made a pretty recently minted MBA who did an MBA marketing internship at Google and landed a great gig at a coveted tech company in the Silicon Valley decide to jump on the learning wagon not even a year after leaving campus?
Noel’s answers are thoughtful. His MBA gave him great business foundational knowledge and of course that included marketing. When he joined Intuit, he was surrounded by people with formidable marketing execution chops. He had to level up, and quickly. He needed to be able to take all the strategic frameworks he studied in business school and learn to “do” and “ship”. The altMBA with its intense focus on execution provided just that. He had been following Seth Godin for a while. And indeed the altMBA with its relentless emphasis on shipping projects gave him what he needed.
Delivering 13 Seth Godin-designed projects in 4 weeks brought Noel’s execution prowess to another level. His confidence in his ability to launch campaigns and deliver action and results got the boost he envisioned. The altMBA was what helped him take the knowledge he mastered in the Kelley MBA classroom and apply it, week after week.
I ask about the quality of his peers and the value of the altMBA network. Perhaps not surprisingly, Noel has kept in touch with some of his peers but not to the extent he has done with his Kelley network, where some of his b-school friends are now part of his closest circle. He is connected to his altMBA peers on LinkedIn and he knows he can tap into that segment of his network if he ever needs to.
What I get from Noel’s story is a picture of complementarity that underlines the notion of lifelong learning. It’s a great thing when an MBA graduate continues to be hungry for more knowledge and is not shy about tapping new sources for it.
I may have approached things in reverse but the last thing I researched was the application requirements for the altMBA. Being able to describe your admissions criteria as simply as “We prioritize two things: your professional achievements, and your ruckusmaker attitude”? The former Dean of Graduate Admissions in me was jealous. And further on, “the application takes 9 minutes to complete”? Any seasoned MBA admissions recruiter knows most applications take more than that to barely SCREEN.
I can hear you asking, cut to the chase, Petia, what’s the bottom line? Is it “the MBA is dead, long live the altMBA”? Well, not exactly.
There are plenty of professionals for whom the comprehensive, all-encompassing business fundamentals training and experience a traditional MBA offers is the right answer.
But for those itching to get their hands dirty now, who are proudly scrappy, and unapologetically impatient – or who want to be more of these things! - I say “let them eat alt”.
Onwards and upwards,
Petia
Is this helpful? What else would you like to know as you work on your MBA application? Get in touch and let me know. I respond to all emails personally and promptly. And if you need me to be your second set of eyes, I have made appointments available every day this week.