If you are a MOOC freshman, you should know how the basic learning format works. A typical MOOC consists of a variety of learning modules, including recorded lectures, quizzes, written assignments, and problem sets. Many MOOCs offer links to supplemental reading assignments. Most include a discussion forum where students can interact. Some MOOCs run on a set schedule with a defined start and end date and assignments due on a weekly basis. Increasingly, however, MOOC providers have been shifting toward a “self-paced” model in which students work through the course modules and assignments when they can find time and at their own pace.
Costs vary across the various MOOC platforms, but the majority of them operate on a “freemium” model. It costs nothing to register for a course and to participate in some or most of the modules. Students who wish to earn a certificate and, in the case of Coursera, to access all quizzes and assignments must pay a relatively modest fee. Throughout this book, I use the word MOOC as a general term to refer to online courses that are open to the public and do not require enrollment in a credit-bearing degree program. Coursera and edX embody the classic MOOC model, with most courses produced by universities to match their on-campus offerings. Udacity, once the third member of the Big Three MOOC providers, has shifted away from the academic model and now offers a set of technology-based “nanodegrees” designed to prepare people for technical careers. A third model comes from platforms such as Lynda and Udemy, which function as open marketplaces for courses. On such platforms, industry experts sell short courses at a range of prices. For our purposes, I will refer to all of these online courses as MOOCs.
If you’ve never taken a MOOC before, now is the perfect time to get started. You’ll take plenty of business-related MOOCs throughout your quest for a top-notch business education, but for your first course I recommend one of the most popular MOOCs of all time, because it applies to all kinds of learning. That course is Learning How to Learn, taught by Barbara Oakley and Terry Sejnowski of the University of California at San Diego. The course draws on research from the field of neuroscience in order to teach you how to become a better learner, no matter what you are studying. The professors who created the course used state-of-the art pedagogic techniques to create a student experience that captures and holds your attention while imparting valuable knowledge. The course boasts a global fan base, many of whom give it credit for helping them succeed in learning everything from computer coding to Chinese. To register for the course, simply visit www.Coursera.org, type “learning how to learn” into the search bar, click “enroll,” and sign up for your free account. Voilà! You’ve started your first MOOC.
POINTS TO REMEMBER
1.Underscore the validity of a MOOC-based MBA by delving deeper into the history of online education.
2.Visit the Appendices at the back of the book and explore some of the wonderful learning opportunities in the MOOC universe.
3.Familiarize yourself with the typical MOOC learning formats by researching some of the courses you plan to take.
4.Consider taking Learning How to Learn, offered by the University of California at San Diego on the Coursera platform.
3
Lay Your Foundation
Learning to Speak the Language of Business
MICHAEL had been working at Brady Books, a college textbook publisher, for two years as a sales rep, when the company promoted him to an editorial position. Having majored in English in college, he was looking forward to using the skills he’d acquired at school in his new role, and he hoped that a successful record as an editor would quickly boost him into a management position. Further success, he knew, would depend on learning the business side of publishing. Toward that end, he arranged a lunch date with one of the company’s senior accountants, the national sales manager, and his boss, the firm’s executive editor. As he listened to the three men chat, he felt as if he had stumbled into a Star Wars bar where everyone was speaking incomprehensible gibberish.
“The ROI last quarter was way off target,” muttered the accountant.
“I thought we were measuring ROIC now,” countered the sales manager. “Anyway, we’ll turn it around with our new USP.”
Michael’s boss shook his head. “We need to tear down the silos, so all stakeholders can get on the same page.”
“Yes, cross-functional teams. That’s the ticket.”
The accountant took a deep breath. “But we need to outsource more in-house work and think strategically about supply chain management. And don’t forget our Six Sigma initiative and our move to JIT inventory.”
Michael’s head was spinning. “Do I need to go back to school and learn business as a second language just to talk with these guys?”
Professionals in the business world do speak their own language, and the traditional B-school curriculum delivers a good deal of vocabulary. While no business student could possibly master all the specialized terms and acronyms from every discipline, by the time they graduate, students have become quite comfortable speaking the language of business. As you begin your independent business studies, you should aim to gain fluency as well, so you won’t shake your head in confusion, as Michael did, when speaking with business professionals who toss around terms like ROI, MVP, market segmentation, cost of capital, “lean,” Six Sigma, and hundreds of others. The more articulate you become with business as a second language, and the more fully you understand the concepts behind the words, the more confident you will feel engaging with the business world.
Start with the Foundation
You may have taken a few MOOCs already, or you may be just entering the world of nontraditional business studies. Whether you are a veteran of self-directed learning or a newbie, think of every MOOC you take not only as a source of knowledge, but also as a language lab. Thirty years ago, before the dawn of the Internet, Michael would have learned business terminology by subscribing to business-oriented newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and reading classic business books such as Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive. These days, you have an advantage. Instead of picking up business terminology here and there, through this article or that popular business book, you can take a systematic approach, enrolling in MOOCs that correspond directly to the core courses at such top business schools as Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton.
For a moment, I’d like you to imagine your business education as a pyramid. At the base of the pyramid you set a broad, solid foundation. Each brick in that foundation represents a set of core business concepts, such as unique selling proposition and customer value (marketing); return on investment and amortization (finance); and project scope and performance ratings (management). The second, slightly narrower layer of the pyramid includes the general business skills all business professionals need to know, such as giving a presentation, conducting a negotiation, and reading a balance sheet. The third, even narrower layer consists of specific skills that pertain to a particular business discipline. An accountant needs to work magic with an Excel spreadsheet; a sales manager should understand a wide range of selling techniques; a general manager must know how to conduct annual reviews and inspire her team to perform. Finally, at the top of the pyramid sit the hands-on, practical experiences seldom offered in a classroom setting, skills you can only learn in the real world. Our friend Michael, for example, got most of his business education on the job, acquiring authors, editing manuscripts, and supervising junior editors. “There’s business school,” he says, “then there’s the School of Hard-Won Experience. You never graduate from that school. Just when you think you know everything and have seen it all, something brand-new and unexpected takes you by surprise.”
Traditional business schools provide the foundation by requiring students to take a set of core courses during their first year in the program. A 2010 survey of 886 MBA programs found that almost all of them (85 percent) required courses on the following topics: accounting, marketing, finance, management, and economics.1 Many, but not all, required coursework in communication, ethics,
supply chain management, change management, and negotiation. Depending on your prior experience and training, you may have already laid many of the bricks in your foundation. You may also have added a number of skills and experiences to the structure. In Chapter 1, we discussed setting goals for your business education. Depending on your specific goals, you may decide to concentrate more of your energy on a particular layer in your pyramid. For example, you may have years of experience as a salesperson, but now you’ve been made sales manager. Like all students of business, you will want to start with the foundation, making sure your understanding of core business concepts is complete. Then, you might focus on learning managerial skills and using them on the job right away, building the top layer of your pyramid simultaneously with the middle layers. In a traditional B-school setting you would build the pyramid from the ground up. In a self-directed program, you may assemble it like you would a jigsaw puzzle, depending on your shifting needs. In the end, however, you want to have assembled a solid and complete Mastery Pyramid (see Figure 3-1) that can support your career growth.
Select Your Core Curriculum
One of the most beloved MOOCs among the business learners in my community is Introduction to Financial Accounting, taught by Professor Brian Bushee of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and offered on the Coursera platform. Despite its rather dry title, the course offers a delightfully engaging approach to the subject. A gifted teacher, Professor Bushee brings accounting to life with highly practical exercises and amusing interludes in which a cast of cartoon students makes wisecracks and asks humorous questions. The very first video lecture of the course begins with four cartoon characters standing in an airport lounge. One, a professionally dressed woman, opens a conversation by saying to the other three, “Hi, what’s up?”
Figure 3-1. The Mastery Pyramid
One of the other characters answers her in Swedish. Another responds in Esperanto. The third answers in the language of accounting. “I am excited because my company took a noncash, nonrecurring provision for impairment of goodwill, and now we’ll have lower amortization expenses and deferred tax assets in the future,” he says.
“Doesn’t anyone speak English here?” asks the frustrated first character.
Professor Bushee then appears on the screen to describe financial accounting as “the language of business.” The course, he promises, will teach you to read a balance sheet, conduct simple financial analyses, and speak knowledgeably with people who use financial jargon. Financial accounting makes sense as a first course in a core curriculum because it imparts so many words essential to a strong business vocabulary. Bushee’s course is part of the Wharton Business Foundations Specialization, a set of four courses drawn from the school’s first-year curriculum: financial accounting, marketing, operations management, and corporate finance. Since you are setting up your own private business school, you can and should structure its core curriculum according to your unique situation, background, goals, experience, and skills. You can reinvent the wheel to suit your specific purposes, or you can emulate Wharton’s (or the one required by any other top B-school).
However you go about it, you should include certain subjects in your core curriculum. To assemble your own core curriculum, you can draw them from this list of foundational subjects:
Business Ethics: how to apply ethics and value-based decision making in a business environment
Business Leadership: how to establish a vision and motivate others to realize it in a business setting
Corporate Finance: how to make decisions about borrowing, raising, and investing money
Entrepreneurship: how to start and sustain a new business venture
Financial Accounting: how to keep track of and report on the money that comes into and goes out of a business
Marketing: how to create and deliver value for customers
Microeconomics: how to analyze the behavior of firms and individuals within markets
Project Management: how to achieve a one-time, nonrepeating set of business objectives
Operations Management: how to improve efficiency in repeating processes within a business
Customize Your Core Curriculum
At this point you may be thinking to yourself, “Hold on. This list seems incomplete. My friend who recently got an MBA from the Tuck School studied Change Management during his very first semester.” Indeed, the list could include many other subjects. If Change Management or Self-Directed Teams excites you, feel free to add one or more of those topics to your core curriculum. Your customized set of core courses should reflect your background, experience, interests, and needs. If you dream of working in supply chain management, for example, you will surely want to include at least one course on that topic in your core course list.
Consider writing a mission statement for your business education then choosing a core curriculum that will fulfill that mission. Traditional schools require many of the same courses, but each one has developed its own brand identity. For example, Yale sets itself apart from its competitors by emphasizing global leadership and the softer, people-oriented side of business: “Whatever your leadership ambitions, you need to understand how markets work and how to build a thriving organization. But to make a deep impact in coming decades, you also need to be able to navigate the complexity that exists where sectors, regions, and cultures intersect in an increasingly connected world.”2
MIT’s Sloan School of Management, on the other hand, proclaims itself as a center for innovative thinking: “MIT Sloan is about invention. It’s about ideas that are made to matter. At MIT Sloan, we discover tomorrow’s interesting and important challenges and opportunities. We go where we want to have impact. And then, we invent the future.”3
Whatever core curriculum you tailor to reflect your personal brand, you should consider the fact that most schools include three major categories of study: Quantitative and Financial Analysis, Management and Leadership, and Big-Picture Thinking. As you choose your four to six foundational subjects, aim to distribute your choices over these three areas, selecting one or two subjects from each.
In the Quantitative and Financial Analysis part of the curriculum, you will find topics such as finance and accounting, data analysis, and economics. Successful businesspeople know their way around budgets, balance sheets, and customer data. Wharton enjoys a reputation for imparting wisdom in those areas. Management and Leadership centers on people skills and includes such topics as human resources management, project management, operations management, and management theory, motivation, and team building. That’s Yale’s brand. Finally, as MIT’s mission states, tomorrow’s business leaders need to think big, chart new courses, and innovate new products and services in the marketplace. Big-Picture Thinking courses cover topics such as marketing, entrepreneurship, and business strategy. Your success in whatever business field or function you choose will probably involve skills from all three categories.
Let’s see how one student customized her core curriculum according to her personal goals and career direction. Louisa works in Product and Customer Strategy at a Cincinnati tech startup called LISNR (pronounced “listener”). She relishes the job’s fast pace and the fact that new challenges come across her desk practically every day. But since this young performing-arts major did not take a single business course in college, she needs to learn the business terminology that will enable her to communicate effectively with people in sales meetings to strategy sessions.
Before Louisa took this new job, she had begun to hone her business acumen during a stint as a contractor for Procter & Gamble and through several entrepreneurial moonlighting projects, including cofounding a nonprofit organization. When she landed her job with LISNR, she decided to take a more systematic approach to acquiring a business education. When planning her first set of classes in her self-directed program, Louisa chose to begin with two subjects that would introduce her to entirely new ideas: Professor Bushee’s renowned Introduction to F
inancial Accounting (offered by Coursera) and How to Build a Startup (taught by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank on the Udacity platform). Like many liberal arts majors, Louisa found accounting challenging. However, she soldiered through it and later found the knowledge she had gained extremely useful on the job. For example, Louisa’s position as an account manager involves interacting with prospective clients, often over meals or in social settings. Having studied accounting, Louisa could now see the importance of meticulously tracking the expenses involved with such client meetings and outings. The company’s profitability depends on controlling all of the costs associated with closing a sale.
Louisa’s second choice made a lot of sense. Not every business student would include entrepreneurship as a core course, but Louisa has always fancied herself as having entrepreneurial qualities and currently works for a startup. She also runs a small career coaching business in her off-hours and dreams of founding her own tech company one day. In How to Build a Startup Louisa learned the way entrepreneurs must think about their new ventures, adopting a perspective much different from those who work for and manage mature businesses. “Working in a startup, I used to get really frustrated when whatever I was doing wasn’t working,” she says. “Now I can see that I’m not trying to operate a well-oiled corporate machine. I’m trying to research, learn, iterate, and pivot if necessary.” The course not only gave her knowledge and a new perspective, it taught her the language she needs to think and talk about the subject.
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