MBA is a public private party

AN MBA is about much more than a piece of paper. It’s not essay marks or assignment results that define participants’ success: it’s whether or not they finish the course with the skills, experience and contacts that will help them to develop their careers and their organisations.

And much of this depends not on the school’s lecturers and academics, but on the candidate’s fellow classmates, with whom they will be expected to work closely. “You need to know about the mix of people you are going to have in the classroom with you because you gain half of your learning from your fellow students,” says Dr Gareth Griffiths, an MBA director at Aston Business School in Birmingham. Steve Seymour, director of the executive MBA programme at Ashridge Business School, agrees. “The more diverse the group, the more learning there is for everyone. If you gave a problem to a group of people from the same sector, they would all have similar approaches.”

As well as learning new ways of thinking and solving problems from their colleagues on the course, participants will develop a better understanding of the demands and motivations of life in other types of organisation — useful both for people trying to use an MBA to move between the public and private sectors and those interested in building stronger connections between the two.

“You are maximising your opportunity to collect information and contacts,” says Amy Rogers, a careers consultant at Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London. Dr Andy Bailey, director of the executive MBA course at Lancaster University Management School, agrees with her. “We see relationships that are built here carry on well beyond the programmes . . . individuals become sounding boards across the sectors.”

Public and private sector candidates have much to bring to the MBA mixing zone. For example, public sector students “are generally good communicators . . . and accustomed to working in very complex organisations that are often quite hierarchical, so their negotiating skills, empathy and understanding are good”, Rogers says. Those from an entrepreneurial business background bring the ability to “react quickly, to spot opportunities, to really understand new ways of evaluating market competition, to be more reactive to change”, she says — all useful skills for, say, those managing local authorities that aspire to be more entrepreneurial.

“A big part of the process is about challenging misconceptions,” Dr Bailey says. Private sector students learn “that profit isn’t the most important motivation for all organisations and individuals; there can be other measures and drivers of success”. They also develop understanding of and respect for the complexity of the environment in which public sector managers operate — again, helpful for future interactions between the sectors.

Also from the interaction, public sector leaders in environments where the adoption of private sector practices is encouraged will get a particular benefit: the ability to find out how those theories are used in their original habitat, Dr Bailey says. “It helps to understand where these theories have come from and how they have been implemented in the private sector so they can focus on how to adopt the processes that will be useful and identify more quickly those which might be fads.”