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Top MBA startups: Which budding businesses have raised the most cash? by Nathan Allen @FortuneMagazine March 3, 2015, 10:11 AM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Google Plus Linkedin Share icons (Poets&Quants) — These days, you can't walk the hallways of a business school campus and not overhear excited conversations among MBA students about their business plans and startup ideas. Talk of using the MBA experience as a place to fine-tune an idea, recruit partners, gain access to seed capital, and finally launch a startup is becoming as ubiquitous as discussions about forthcoming job interviews at McKinsey & Co. and Goldman Sachs. MBA students today have greater interest in entrepreneurship than ever before, says Bill Aulet, an MIT Sloan professor who also serves as the managing director at the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship. "What I see today with young people is a desire to take control of their destinies," he says. "We expect our MBAs to come out with the spirit of a pirate and the discipline of a Navy SEAL. And I think we are only seeing the beginning." And what a beginning it is. MBA founders are routinely raising billions of dollars for their new ventures. What kinds of ideas are getting funded? Which schools have been most successful at graduating entrepreneurs with the best ideas? For the second time, Poets&Quants has tracked the most successful MBA founders and has come up with a newly updated list of the Top 100 MBA startups. The list is based solely on funding—the most accessible apples-to-apples comparison for these still-private enterprises. If a startup rocketed to success and was acquired by another company, we used the amount it was sold for in lieu of funding raised. This year, competition among the top 100 intensified. Last year, when WildFire topped the list after its acquisition by Google, a nine-figure funding amount would have secured a top two place. This year, the top eight companies all had at least $100 million in funding. But the competition wasn't exclusive to the top of the list. From the time we put out our first casting call for startups in December to our publishing date, the cutoff jumped from $1 million to the $2.4 million it is now. What's more, more than half of the top 100 MBA startups have raised more than $15 million each. Once again, the top spot went to a company that was sold to Google. Last year's third place finisher, satellite imaging company Skybox Imaging, reached an agreement with the search giant last August to be acquired for a whopping $500 million. SoFi, the student loan financing outfit, zoomed from sixth place last year, with $77.2 million in investor money, to $399 million of funding today. Rounding out the top three was last year's 13th placed startup, RelateIQ, which was sold for $390 million to Salesforce. Every single startup in the top three includes founders from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Stanford boasts a total of 25 startups on this year's rankings, down from 32 last year. But five of these startups are in the top 20. Meanwhile, Harvard Business School held strong with 34 startups out of the top 100, including nine out of the 20 with the most funding. MIT Sloan MBAs run 13 startups that made the cut, up from 11 last year. Wharton had five, followed by Michigan's Ross, Columbia Business School, and Chicago Booth, each with three startups on the list. This year's list includes a diverse range of schools. From Rice University in Texas to IMD Business School in Switzerland and seemingly everywhere in between, there was big time money to be had. All told, investors poured more than $1.7 billion into startups with a Stanford MBA attached to it. Startups with Harvard MBAs raised more than $1.1 billion. All in all, the top 100 startups raised upwards of $3.8 billion. Most of the startups make good use of the Internet, outsourcing many functions from software development to server hosting to get to market fast and cheap. The businesses themselves run the gamut, from highly sophisticated enterprises in financial services and high tech, to e-commerce outfits, mobile payment firms, and even an online physicians' network. A couple of Yale School of Management MBAs are behind Privateer Holdings, the private equity firm that is shaping the future of the legal cannabis industry. To find the best MBA startups, we reached out to the top 50 business schools around the world. We spoke with directors of entrepreneurship centers, and we consulted with professors who often mentor MBA entrepreneurs. The companies that made our list were founded between 2009 and 2014 and had to have at least one founder graduating with an MBA during those years. The earliest startup on the list, No. 1 Skybox Imaging, was launched on Jan. 5, 2009. The youngest business got its start on April 15, 2014, and was the only startup in the top 100 to be launched last year. One theme was clear among the winners: A business school is increasingly an ideal setting to incubate and accelerate a business. And given the huge sums of money being plowed into these startups, investors seem to agree. "It was a great way for us to build out the business plan in a safe environment," says Dan Macklin, co-founder of No. 2 SoFi, which was hatched at Stanford's business school. "It gave us an excuse to do a lot of research with professors, with fellow students, with alumni. We really tapped into our professors and our fellow classmates to build out the business. You have access to so much experience and so much expertise in so many different areas." For David Klein, who stepped on Wharton's campus to start an MBA in 2011, admission to the Wharton Venture Initiation Program was key. "After I was rejected in September [of 2011], I asked what I could improve and went back during the second admissions cycle," says Klein. "The first feeling of being accepted is validation that you have a good idea." Once in the program, students have access to a working space, a community of entrepreneurs, and monthly mentoring sessions and progress reports from professors. Klein founded CommonBond, which provides student loans and was founded with two other Wharton students, Jessup Shean and Michael Taormina. CommonBond raised $2.5 million in its first year in Wharton's Venture Initiative Program and now has more than $250 million in funding. "There is such a robust entrepreneurial community and a real energy around starting companies at Wharton," Klein says, who comes from a family of entrepreneurs dating back to his grandfather, who started a shoe company when he arrived in America after World War II. "There are a lot of opportunities that you can lean on or leverage to maximize the success of your startup." At the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, Stewart Thornhill, who also serves as the executive director of the Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, says that while an MBA is by no means necessary to startup success, it can be helpful. "Yes, the MBA really helps with the practical side of running a business, like understanding how a business works from marketing issues to people issues to financial issues," Thornhill says. "But you can learn all of that if you are a voracious reader with an Internet connection. The other part is the network and pedigree. Walking into an investor pitch with an MBA attached to your name gives you credentials from the beginning. And having a global network of connections and being able to contact them with a phone call is beneficial." Clearly, funders are taking notice. See below for Poets&Quants' top 10 MBA startups. More from Poets&Quants: The Full List Of The Top 100 MBA Startups The Top 20 Business Schools For Startups The Biggest 25 Investors In MBA Startups
Harvard B-school opens the flood gates with online courses by Nathan Allen @FortuneMagazine February 10, 2015, 11:19 AM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Google Plus Linkedin Share icons (Poets&Quants) — After a pair of highly successful pilot runs, Harvard Business School is now opening its online program in business basics to students worldwide. The school is also inviting admitted MBA students to enroll in the program as a pre-MBA boot camp experience, particularly for non-traditional admits or those who need more basic quantitative work before showing up on campus. All told, slightly more than 1,100 students have now taken the primer on the fundamentals of business called CORe (Credential of Readiness) program. In the first beta starting last June, the trio of courses—Business Analytics, Economics for Managers, and Financial Accounting—were open to only undergraduate students attending colleges in Massachusetts and alumni. Some 600 students took the $1,500 two-month program. Harvard then tested the suite of courses on 500 managers at nine different companies in a B-to-B experiment. For the first time, HBS is now opening up the program—based on case studies and videos—to applicants worldwide, including adult learners who have been out of school up to 10 years, and students admitted to the school's full-time, on-campus MBA program this fall. Initially, the program was designed largely for non-business undergraduates who needed the business basics to give them a leg up on the job market when they graduated from college. These latest changes could put the program in competition with more expensive Executive MBA programs, which demand a greater time commitment from managers with 10 or more years of work experience. EMBA programs cover a lot more ground, but Harvard's imprimatur on this program of business basics could make it appealing to managers who otherwise would attend second-tier EMBA programs. CORe more directly competes with summer business programs for undergraduate students from schools like UC-Berkeley and Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business. In its beta test, Harvard discovered that the program attracted a much broader group of students than it expected. "We positioned it as a program for Humanities and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) majors," explains Bharat N. Anand, faculty chair of HBX, the name of Harvard Business School's online initiative. "We ended up getting roughly a third from the humanities, a third STEM, and another third from from economics, social science, and business undergraduates. That was the rough breakdown." In a surprise, 20% of those who enrolled in CORe were graduate students, including students from medical and law schools, and even one PhD in natural science. Almost 20% of the students were international and 40% were women. "When we opened up the website, we were thinking of only rising juniors and seniors, but we also opened it up to rising sophomores because that is the time when students are trying to get themselves in line for internships," adds Anand. Asked to grade how engaging the course materials were on a scale of one to five, with five being the highest grade, 80% of the first batch of students awarded a grade of four or five. On course quality, the approval figure hit 86%, while the quality of the course instructors—all endowed professors who teach in Harvard's full-time MBA program—won a four or five grade from 90% of the participants. "The results are very encouraging," says Anand. "We are still in the early stages of this journey, but it is really exciting. We have high engagement from participants. We have an established revenue model and, most important, the program reflects who we are." HBS says it will now accept applicants from anywhere in the world as old as the mid-to-late 30s to apply for start dates in February, April, and June. The deadline for applications for the April 15 intake is March 25, while the deadline for the cohort that begins on June 3 will be May 13. "We are gradually increasing the eligibility," says Anand. "There are a lot of career switchers who want to understand business better, even entrepreneurs who have run their own companies but now want to run their firms more systematically. The number of applications we received from people who are 13 or 15 years out of college was fascinating." Anand says the cohort starting Feb. 25 will likely number 500 to 1,000 participants and will include a relatively small group of Harvard admits who will come to campus in September for their first year in the MBA program. Like many other business schools, HBS typically held a one-week program called Analytics to get incoming students up to speed on accounting and data. Harvard has decided to give those students who feel they need a jumpstart the option of taking CORe or coming to campus for the residential Analytics program in July or August. He expects roughly 20% of the next incoming class at HBS, some 150 to 200 students out of slightly more than 900, to take CORe this year. "This is really getting our students to do the program so they are ready to take advantage of the full experience on campus," believes Anand. "The genesis of CORe was asking how can we create a wow experience online so they can get up to speed with the basics of data, accounting, and economics before they come on campus." HBS expects a significantly higher summer enrollment in June, when the price of the program rises by $300 to $1,800. Anand says he expects to have as many as 3,000 learners signed up, more than three times the intake at Harvard's full-time MBA program. CORe students would be divided into cohorts of 300 to 500. The school will also increase the amount of financial aid available for students. "We are trying to scale up in a measured fashion," explains Anand. "You want enough thickness on peer group conversations so that when someone poses a question it gets answered quickly and that requires a large cohort. But at the same time you don't want a cohort that is so large it becomes impersonal." Unlike many other online business courses, CORe participants are graded in each course based on quizzes, a final exam, and their level of participation. The program is largely taught through case studies of issues and challenges at such organizations as Amazon, PepsiCo, The New York Times, and the American Red Cross. But there also are lessons from managers at small, local companies, including the Bikram Yoga studio near campus. Harvard awards a certificate of completion to each graduate and says it will maintain transcripts of the grades. Top performers receive an Honors or High Honors designation, similar to what Harvard MBAs get when they graduate from the school. So, what has Harvard learned after sending two cohorts through the program? The second B-to-B cohort had an 80% completion rate and engagement rates off the chart, much like the pioneer cohort. The completion rate fell by five percentage points, largely because the second cohort was comprised entirely of full-time managers and employees who often found it difficult to complete all the work. Learners find that it takes about 10 hours a week over the two-month program to get all the work done. Participants also are prevented from moving forward unless they complete a module within a two-week timeframe, a deadline that makes it hard to catch up when students fall behind. Anand says that they initially tweaked the program to strike a balance between taking advantage of the asynchronous nature of online learning while preserving some synchronous activity so that students can help their classmates at certain points. "In the first cohort, we had five gates—or deadlines for the completion of work—across all three courses," he says. "In the fall, we moved to a slightly different structure. If you have all three deadlines on one day, it becomes very hard to catch up. So we put in many more deadlines, 17 in all, in the fall. The moment you go to 17, students have to keep up continuously but you also want to preserve some flexibity for them. So we are now moving back to something in the middle, about 10 deadlines with some overlap for when material is released to allow some students to move faster. "With 17 deadlines, if you miss one or two it becomes really, really hard. So with the next cohort we are creating a slack week in between the program so you can catch up. We're extending the program from 10 to 11 weeks. Things happen in people's lives. The completion rates are high, but we would love to see them higher." Despite the decline in the completion rate among full-time employees, engagement remained extremely high. Harvard attempted to determine how many students came on the platform because they wanted to be there. "The pioneers said that for every two hours they spent learning on the platform, they were spending an extra hour engaging with their peers," says Anand. "This is striking because that is entirely voluntary work. Many students said you could get through the material in 10 hours a week, but a good number chose to spend 15 hours a week because they were enjoying it so much." Do online students learn more or less than students in a traditional classroom? Anand says the school is in the process of studying this and plans to release a report shortly. He shares one anecdote from a student who took his exam a month after finishing CORe last summer. "He sat down to prepare three days before and he told me that for the first time in his educational career he didn't need to revisit the material," recalls Anand. "He retained everything. He said it was part of the educational experience. It was engaging throughout. He wasn't a passive learner." More from Poets&Quants: The Top Feeder Colleges To Google, Goldman Sachs, & More What It's Like To Intern At Bain & Co. As An Undergrad Cornell's Revamps Its Two-Year MBA Program
Dear college business majors: You're hired! by Nathan Allen @FortuneMagazine February 6, 2015, 9:12 AM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Google Plus Linkedin Share icons (Poets&Quants) — Barbara Hewitt, senior associate director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, was more than pleased when she noticed that only 4.2% of bachelor of business administration graduates from the class of 2014 was still seeking employment four to six months after graduation. "That's almost the lowest I've ever seen it," Hewitt said. That wasn't the only good news in the school's career plans survey report. Salaries were on the upswing, with 2014 graduates pulling in average base salaries that were $1,520 higher than their 2013 counterparts. And sign-on bonuses were up slightly, with the average signing bonus $157 higher than the previous year. Wharton is among a number of leading undergraduate business schools that reported strong job numbers for the 2014 class in recent career placement reports, driven by a robust hiring market for finance, steady internship to job conversion rates, and an increased appetite for jobs in the tech sector. Career services offices are responding by offering more intensive career prep to students, from career workshops as early as freshman year to hosting industry panels in growing areas of finance, such as investment management. But in the midst of the improving job market, some schools have noticed a dip in the number of employers coming to campus, as well as a decrease in the number of interviews they conduct, a sign perhaps that students are becoming less dependent on the campus recruiting process to land jobs, career services officers said. At most schools, there has been consistent employer interest in hiring for entry-level consulting and finance-related jobs, especially those in investment banking. Yet one of the areas that gained hiring momentum in 2014 was the technology sector, where tech companies and startups have been increasingly aggressive about hiring BBAs for entry-level jobs, schools said. At the University of Texas' McCombs School of Business, the percentage of students who took jobs in the technology and finance fields was "neck-to-neck" this year for the first time, said Velma Arney, McComb's director of BBA career services, with 12% of students heading into technology and 13% going into banking. Tech recruiters are courting undergraduates more aggressively, hosting additional office hours, coffee chats, and informal events for them, Arney said. "The largest major here at McCombs for undergraduate business students is finance, so when you see technology starting to rise, it is a bit surprising," she said. "The technology companies are appealing to this generation of students, who see these companies as a fun place to work. There's also the cool factor…." That shift was also evident at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School, where 18 students went into tech, up from 12 in 2013, said David Vogel, who leads career development and employer relations for the undergraduate business program. Despite the competition from tech, finance, with its lucrative salaries and hefty sign-on bonuses, remains a popular field for graduates of top undergraduate business programs. At the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, the number of students heading into finance has "stayed exactly the same," said Damian Zikakis, Ross' director of career services, with 44.4% of the class going into that field. Banks have shifted their recruitment strategies a bit in the last year or so as they've struggled with many of their recent hires being plucked by private equity firms, he said. "The banks are trying to figure out ways to keep the students around longer. They're making those efforts visible to students in terms of corporate presentations and talk of making the hours less demanding," he said. The finance sector's allure has held strong at the University of Virginia's McIntire School, where 47.8% of students accepted jobs in the field in 2014, nearly the same number as last year, said Tom Fitch, McIntire's associate dean for career services and employer relations. But students entering finance are expanding their horizons beyond investment banking to look at other jobs in the industry, including trading, investment management, and wealth management, he said. For example, the percentage of graduates going into investment management has steadily crept up over the last three years, from 2.8% in 2012 to 7.2% in 2014, he said. More students are accepting internships in these fields as well, as the school has offered more "industry focus" programs that expose students to careers in niche finance sectors, Fitch said. "At McIntire, we had a higher number of students this fall bypass interviews and accept internship opportunities than we've seen in the past," Fitch said. "It's a national trend among some of the major banks, and a trend we anticipate will increase." In a surprising shift, several banks and other companies decreased their recruitment efforts on campus in the fall of 2013, especially investment banks that rely heavily on their intern pool for full-time hires. Campus recruiting was down at Indiana University's Kelly School of Business, which reported a 7% decline in this area in 2014, according to the school's most recent undergraduate career services report. Much of the decrease in activity was offset by non-traditional recruiting methods such as virtual recruiting, which has becoming increasingly popular, the school said in the report. The number of employers conducting interviews on Wharton's campus was down about 10% over 2013, and the total number of interviews held fell 2%, Hewitt said. With those numbers, she would have expected that more students would have accepted a job offer from their internship, bypassing campus recruiting. That was not the case, as just 34.6% of students accepted a job offer from their internship in 2014, down from 39.1% in 2013. "I was a little surprised when I looked at that," Hewitt said. "It's still a pretty healthy number, but given there were fewer employers on campus, I'd have expected it to go the other way. I guess with a stronger job market, students had more options, even though they were perhaps getting fewer offers." Looking ahead to 2015, career services officers said they expect that the strong job market will keep pace, with several schools already reporting even better preliminary numbers for this year's graduating class. Wharton's Hewitt said she already heard one student from the class of 2015 had received a $85,000 starting salary. "If one bank does it, they'll all try to compete," she said. At the McIntire School, 70% of students have already secured full-time offers, up from 60% at the same time last year, Fitch said. "The job market for them is very good and they are getting great opportunities, including an increase in the number of job interviews and offers," he said. "I want to be optimistic and say the sky is the limit." More from Poets&Quants: Top Feeder Schools To Those High-Paying Jobs On Wall Street The Best Undergraduate Business Programs In The U.S. Campus Crime: School By School
Harvard Business School has a 'Japan Problem' by Nathan Allen @FortuneMagazine January 29, 2015, 1:59 PM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Google Plus Linkedin Share icons (Poets&Quants) — When Harvard Business School released its round two interview schedule for MBA applicants on Wednesday, there was one very big surprise. HBS set aside four separate days of interviews in Tokyo. That's a lot of interview slots for a country that produces perhaps 100 applicants to HBS a year. It's twice as many as those scheduled in Mumbai, India and one more than what's on the docket for Shanghai, China, even though GMAT test takers from both China and India outnumber those from Japan by a factor of nine to one. For every person who took the GMAT in 2012-2013 from Japan, there were 8.8 who did so in India and 9.1 who took the exam in China. Dee Leopold, managing director of MBA admissions and financial aid at HBS, told applicants that admission board members will be interviewing invited round two applicants in Tokyo on February 19, 20, 21, and 22. It's part of a major push to attract more MBA students from Japan and will likely come at the expense of candidates from other countries. "I'd like to know how many of those four days worth of Tokyo interview slots are being taken by applicants outside Japan," says Sandy Kreisberg, founder of HBSGuru.com, an admissions consultant. "My guess is, not many. That means they are interviewing lots of Japanese passport holders in an effort, for whatever reason, to increase Japanese enrollment. It is also an interesting question about who is getting 'punished' for this initiative. Applicants from China, India? Could be." Only last week, Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria bemoaned the fact that MBA applicants from Japan—and therefore Japanese students—have dwindled to a precious few. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Nohria said he believes a major falloff in candidates from Japan is occurring because the country has become more insular in recent years. "One of the anxieties we have is we used to see 30 to 40 Japanese students out of 900 M.B.A. students every year," he told the Journal. "Now it is down to four to five. Japan is only part of Asia that's in retreat. They were so engaged in the global economy in the 1980s, now they have become more insular. Japan is the third largest economy in the world, it's important for us to find a way to reach out." Turning the Japanese "problem" around won't be too difficult for Harvard. As Kreisberg notes, the school would only have to "prefer" those applicants to others—and that already seems the case. MBA admission consultants say that Harvard Business School already accepted eight candidates from Japan in the first round, nearly twice as many as the school has in its latest entering class. HBS is expected to double that with the round two interview invites that began going out on Wednesday. And the large number of interview dates in Tokyo suggests that HBS invited many more Japanese candidates for interviews. "Frankly, I don't know what Dean Nohria means by 30-40 Japanese [students entering HBS every year]," says Adam Markus, a prominent MBA admissions consultant who works in Japan. "As far as I know, there have not been numbers like that since the 1990s. HBS [admissions] is making a big push this year for Japanese [students] based on pressure from the Japanese alums and the dean. They let in eight for R1 [round one interviews] and are apparently shooting for around the same number for R2. If HBS has 15 Japanese [students] in the class of 2017, it would be the largest for many years. About eight to 13 students has been typical in the 2000s." GMAT test takers in Japan in the past five years have remained relatively stable. In the 2014 testing year that ended on June 30, 2,612 Japanese citizens sat for the exam, just slightly down from the 2,680 who took the GMAT in 2010. The Graduate Management Admissions Council, which administers the GMAT, has said that more Japanese students are applying to MBA programs in Singapore, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. In 2012, the percentage of score reports sent from Japan to U.S. schools fell below the 70% mark for the first time to 67%. In 2008, 77% of the score reports in Japan were sent to U.S. schools. Vince Ricci of VincePrep.com, who helped his first Japanese client gain admission to HBS in 2003, says that Japan's increasing insularity is hardly the only reason why Harvard is having more trouble attracting qualified Japanese applicants. He says the "perceived degree value is in question and the career impact is unclear." Ricci also believes that many Japanese students believe HBS and other schools are thought to have an "inflexible curriculum. Case study and general management skills are not as desirable as practical, hands-on learning." But it is clear to Ricci that HBS is making an effort here. In the last 12 admissions cycles, Ricci says he has helped anywhere from zero to six Japanese applicants get admitted to Harvard Business School. "The 2014 round one was a personal best, with 80% market share for Japanese admits," he says. Ricci adds that many prospective students mistakenly believe that HBS requires a score of 109 or higher on the TOEFL English language proficiency exam, or that HBS only wants younger applicants. While it's true that HBS expects high TOEFL scores—which Ricci says "plays on Japanese insecurities"—those scores don't have to be as high as 109 (out of a possible 120). Regarding the age bias at HBS, Ricci points out that the average age of Japanese admits to Harvard is closer to 30. "Some of my non-sponsored clients also question the career payoff," Ricci says. "Fewer 20 somethings see an HBS MBA as a ticket to career opportunities they want. In Japan, as elsewhere, i-banking and other high-end finance jobs are no longer motivating people to quit their jobs and invest $200,000 in a top MBA." All of these issues, of course, come in the context of massive changes to Japan's economy and culture. "The Japanese went from being one of the most important international student groups in the U.S. to one that [federal educational exchange organization] Open Doors no longer separates out from the general pack," says Markus. Demographic trends also don't bode well for a major shift in the near term. "The aging population and an increasingly polarized economy like the U.S.'s have resulted in a younger generation with reduced global outlook and interest," adds Markus. "My perspective on Japanese applicants overall is that since admission to top Japanese universities has become easier over the last two decades as a result of a massive reduction in the number of applicants (less kids, post-baby boom here), the current generation is not used to the same level of competition that, for example, their American, Chinese, Indian, and South Korean peers would be," explains Markus. "Great Japanese applicants, like great applicants from any country, really stand out, but the overall applicant pool here is not necessarily all that strong, especially if you look at the test scores and academic performance. I seriously doubt that even if they wanted to, HBS could find 40 Japanese [students] a year who would be up to the current level of ability and strength of background to really qualify for those seats. "Maybe this will go up significantly because they made a big push for 2015 entry, but I seriously doubt that HBS will get 200 applicants from Japan for this year or any future year until the Japanese start having a lot more babies or make English their official language of business, neither of which seems likely." More from Poets&Quants: Why Stanford Is Beating Harvard Business School On Dual Admits The MBAs Who Lead The World's Most Valuable Companies The Vertigo In The New Financial Times' MBA Ranking
What B-school rejection feels like: When Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg, Tuck, and Yale all say no by Nathan Allen @FortuneMagazine January 12, 2015, 2:57 PM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Google Plus Linkedin Share icons (Poets&Quants) — It was as if he'd climbed up on a high diving board, shouted down to everyone on the pool deck to watch him perform a triple back flip with four twists, bounced a few times to prepare for launch, bounced a few more times to make sure everyone was looking, propelled himself into the air … and missed the pool completely. Splat. Poor Grant. He wasn't attempting the world's most difficult dive, but its academic equivalent instead: applying to an ultra-elite MBA program. And while he wasn't wearing a Speedo on a high board over a pool, he was even more exposed—Grant was standing in the middle of the Internet for all to see. You may have read his blog, Grant Me Admission, in which he chronicles his quest for a top-tier MBA. It's received nearly 100,000 page views. And it's pretty good: enthusiastic, lively, clearly written, full of tips and ideas and lessons learned. Read it, and you're right there with Grant as he studies for and takes the GMAT, researches schools, visits campuses, analyzes sample essays, and gets interviews. It's incredibly detailed. Which is part of the reason Grant went splat. He wasn't just applying to top B-schools. He was also working full time, and doing a lot of nonprofit work, plus putting in hours and hours on his blog. His story holds a valuable lesson for anyone applying to top MBA programs. Grant failed to focus on Goal No. 1, getting admitted to business school, and he paid a painful price. As he writes on a recent post, below a photo of a bleak Martian landscape: Harvard: Dinged without an interview Wharton: Dinged without an interview Yale: Dinged without an interview Kellogg: Dinged Tuck: Dinged I'm not going to lie; it is incredibly hard for me to share these results. Of course, as anyone who plays this game knows, rejection is a person's worst nightmare—but it is also the norm. Last year, the five schools on Grant's target list received more than 25,400 applications for less than 3,000 available spots. With acceptance rates that range from a low of 12% for Harvard to a high of 24% for Yale, the odds of getting into one of these schools are against you. Overall, not much more than 18% of the applicants to these five MBA programs was accepted last year. One unfortunate fumble leads to another, and another For a 5'11", 175-pound, 27-year-old man who enjoys Olympic-style weightlifting and superhero movies, not getting into an elite business school may very well be his first significant failure yet. Grant works in corporate finance, and is now in the process of switching homes and jobs—from the East Coast, working for a Fortune 50 aerospace company, to Los Angeles, where he'll be working for an entertainment company not far outside the Fortune 50. He had suffered a lesser defeat before receiving the five rejections. The year before, Grant had applied to Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business alone, but didn't get in. He'd at least been wait-listed. And that's another reason why Grant went splat. After applying to Tuck in October 2013, and languishing on the wait list from December until his August rejection, Grant got a little obsessive, worrying over his prospects of getting in, trying to put numbers to his chances. The fact that a friend with a lower GMAT score had gotten into Tuck the year before after being wait-listed gave Grant hope, which turned out to be false. "It was probably borderline unhealthy," he recalls. "I was like an addict. I was constantly looking on forums, and playing the percentage game." So the next time, after he applied to Harvard, Wharton, Yale, Kellogg, and Tuck, he wasn't going to make the same mistake and drive himself nuts by fixating on his odds of getting in. Instead, he made a bigger mistake. The previous year, while anxiously awaiting an answer from Tuck, he'd remained diligent: he followed up his interview by getting in touch with the interviewers, emailing them once a month—demonstrating his strong interest and perseverance, and keeping himself on their radar. He should've done the same this time after interviews with Kellogg and Tuck, but he was trying to prevent the waiting game from consuming him as it had the time before, he says. "This year I didn't follow up on those interviews," he says. "I didn't email the interviewers. That was really stupid and lazy of me. I just kept putting it off. Really dumb." Not for lack of enthusiasm Generally speaking, Grant (who asked that his last name not be revealed because he hasn't told his employer he's planning to go to an MBA program), is not a poor candidate. Although he went to a middling California state university for college, he was a full-ride President's Scholar, led his school's team in the International Collegiate Business Strategy Competition, earned a 3.7 GPA, and graduated Cum Laude with a BS in accounting. For years, Grant had dreamed of earning an MBA. "It was even before I went to college, to my undergrad," he says. "That's always been there." Before college, he hadn't refined his B-school ambitions to a particular tier. But after graduation, he arrived at the conclusion that he wanted to get his MBA from a top-10 school, "but if that's outside the realm of possibility, then top-20," he says. "If you're not in the top 20, I can't even look at you because I'm not going to invest that kind of money without any kind of demonstrated value from the degree." Applying to Tuck, and only Tuck, two years ago was "kind of like my trial thing," Grant says. He had put a lot of effort into the application. He spent almost 200 hours studying for the GMAT and scored 710. To prepare for writing his application and the interview, he met with five Tuck students and interviewed another eight by phone. He reckons he spent 50 hours studying Tuck's programs, facilities, and professors, reading books, and speaking with MBA program experts. He organized the fruits of all that research into a "crazy document on Tuck," containing facts, school intricacies, details of programs that interested him, and information gathered from Poets&Quants, Internet forums, articles, and interviews. He visited the school twice, and doesn't include in the 50-hour total the time spent on those trips."I really knew the school and what the story was all about," Grant says. Going over Grant's enthusiastic posts written during his application process is like reading a diary entry by Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic, rhapsodizing over the lovely weather and smooth sailing that came before the unfortunate incident with the iceberg. After his interview with Tuck—when he had applied there and at the four other schools—he came to a conclusion while driving home from Hanover, N.H.: "I have fallen in love with Tuck again," he writes. "I was scared this was going to happen again. The first time I applied, I KNEW that Tuck was the place for me… And here we are again." Then Kellogg usurped Tuck, after Grant visited the school in Evanston, Ill., and had his interview. "Kellogg is amazing and totally synonymous with who I am and where I want to end up in my career," Grant gushes, going on to use the word "amazing" three more times in his post about his visit and interview. Add in the two "fantastics" he used, and you know that when that Kellogg ding came, it stung. But it turned out to be less painful than the one from Tuck. After all, he'd made the wait list when he'd applied there the year before, and a school official had later told him they hadn't let in anyone from the list. For his second chance at Tuck, Grant felt he was an even better candidate. And the school had become his last hope. Harvard had been the first to turn him away, without an interview, but that didn't concern Grant too much. "It's Harvard Business School, the best business school in the world—denied, big deal." "When I didn't get an interview at HBS, I was not surprised. When I didn't get an interview at Wharton, I was a little scared." Running on empty With every rejection, he'd beat himself up a little more over the mistakes he'd made during the process of preparing for the GMAT and applying to schools. He'd been determined to far surpass his first GMAT score of 710, writing on his blog that he "most likely will be taking it again for a ~750." But when it came to studying for the test his second time around, the rest of his life got in the way. "I got promoted, and then I got an additional leadership responsibility. Another opportunity came up at work for a special project to lead. I started blogging. I'm really heavily involved in non-profits," he says. Grant would wake up at 4:30 a.m., start studying at 5, keep it up for an hour or two, go to work, then go to his non-profit assignment. Each night, he'd resume studying at 8, and put in another couple hours. If he wasn't doing volunteer work on the weekend, he'd work through his Saturdays and Sundays. "I was operating on four hours of sleep for six months." All told, he put in 150 GMAT-prep hours over eight weeks. "It wasn't good quality studying time," he says. "My mind was racing on a million different things and the GMAT was just one of them." Not only was he "completely stressed out," he hadn't even come close to hitting his 200-hour goal, or even matching the 190 hours he'd put in when he studied for the GMAT the first time. While he'd spent 50 hours preparing for his first Tuck application and interview, he fell far short of that when applying to the five schools, not even hitting the same number for all the schools combined. "This is so embarrassing," he says. "I think I spent maybe 60 hours. Maybe. That's being pretty generous with myself. It might've been less, it might've been closer to 40. It was really bad," he says, before muttering to himself: "Damn it." He'd hired a consultant, but hadn't done any practice informational interviews, he says. He visited all the schools, except for Yale. After he didn't receive interviews at Harvard and Wharton, Yale was the next school to reject him. "I was like, 'Holy shit, I might not even get in (to B-school) this year,'" Grant says. The fear grew worse as the rejections added up. "When I got dinged from Kellogg, I was thinking to myself, 'I'm really in trouble.'" Meanwhile, Grant's career was shifting. He was anticipating disruption at his aerospace industry job. Staff were going to be cut, and those who remained would face additional work burdens. "I basically started hedging my bets. I had started looking at other opportunities." Swimming in a sea of self doubt The string of B-school rejections had seeded Grant with self doubt, not a feeling he was used to. "Am I really a top performer?" he asked himself. "Am I capable of doing anything on my own? "That's why it was so important that I applied for another job." By the time Kellogg rejected his application, he had already had a phone interview with the L.A. entertainment firm. Grant is not giving up on his MBA dreams. He's going to apply again to top 10 schools, but probably only three or four, and will likely not apply to Harvard, he says. He plans to spend 30 hours of prep time specific to each school he'll apply for, and he is shooting for 300 hours of GMAT studying time. "I'm really hoping to get a 760," Grant says. "That will help." Grant created his blog because he wanted to help other people on the same path, he says. That fits with his interest non-profit and volunteer work. "That's my life's mission," he says. "I want others to succeed, that's how I get my happiness. "That's what hurt the most. I was like, 'Hey, I'm going to lead the charge, and everyone follow me,' and then I, like, tripped." On his blog, beneath the photo of the Martian landscape that tops his revelation about his five rejections, Grant addresses his readers, "I feel that I have let you down," he writes. "It is incredibly difficult to fail publicly and own up to it. I am deeply sorry." Nevertheless, Grant is clearly well positioned for another attempt at getting into a top program, particularly at Tuck and Kellogg, which had already rated him high enough for an interview. His history working in finance for the aerospace industry makes him attractive to admissions committees, and his new job is impressive. He appears to have learned a great deal about what he did wrong in his first two attempts, and if he applies those lessons, he's bound to make a better impression in applications and interviews. A higher GMAT score would give him an additional boost. It turns out that the stark Martian scene, he says, does not represent a barren wasteland of the soul. It shows, he says, a new frontier. "It's a whole new world out there." More from Poets&Quants: The Highest and Lowest Paid MBAs of 2014 M7: How The Super Elite Business Schools Compare McKinsey Partner Chosen As Dean of UVA's Darden School
3 lessons every new leader should know by Nathan Allen @FortuneMagazine January 10, 2015, 11:47 AM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Google Plus Linkedin Share icons MPW Insider is one of several online communities where the biggest names in business answer timely career and leadership questions. This week we ask: What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time? The following answer is by Sally Blount, Dean of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. My three tips for moving into that first big leadership role: 1.) Recognize why you were picked. It's important to clearly understand why you were selected and what you are expected to achieve. Be explicit in negotiating these expectations with your higher ups and iterate them over the first six months. This will help as you learn more about what is happening in your unit and what you and your team need to do to be successful. 2.) Build your team. Figure out who you will keep on the current team, who you will not and make those changes. As a leader, you no longer do the work; you pick and coach the people who will. The biggest trip-up in this transition is that people keep trying to do all the work themselves. But this is exactly the time when you need to take a step back because your future success is reliant on the team that you build. Also, note that agreement on metrics and check-ins is essential both with your direct reports and key allies across the organization. 3.) Find good advisors/coaches. Build a circle of 2-3 senior people who have a stake in your success and cultivate them as one-on-one advisors. Don't be shy about turning to them every few weeks with thorny problems. People like to help talented younger people. You may even want to consider hiring an executive coach, ideally from inside your organization. I suggest selecting two or three people (so you're not over-relying on one person) but no more. Otherwise you may end up spending too much time managing these relationships versus doing your own work. Read all answers to the MPW Insider question: What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time? Barbara Bush: 4 tips for aspiring leaders by Barbara Bush, co-founder of Global Health Corps.
UCLA's business school embraces the tech boom by Nathan Allen @FortuneMagazine January 8, 2015, 1:14 PM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Google Plus Linkedin Share icons (Poets&Quants) — When Dan Reiss and Robert Fagnani were applying to business schools two years ago, their backgrounds suggested they would stay on the East Coast. After all, Reiss was a native of Philadelphia who majored in drama at New York University. He had been workingfor an investment management firm in New York City. Born and raised in New Jersey, Fagnani had gone to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and spent the past four years at Morgan Stanley in New York. Ultimately, the pair went west, accepting invites from UCLA's Anderson Graduate School of Management. Reiss turned down Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business to come to sun-bleached Los Angeles, while Fagnani passed on the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business to enroll at Anderson, currently ranked 14th best by Poets&Quants. Why turn down higher ranked schools to go to UCLA? For both MBA students, it came down to culture. "There's a very different way that people think on the West Coast," says Reiss, who also saw a benefit in the emphasis on technology in the West. "People aren't afraid to start with a blank canvas and rethink everything. I like that lifestyle. If I had went to Tuck, I would have never left the Northeast." Fagnani, 28, agrees. "The more I looked at programs, the more I realized that the infrastructure, the classes and the opportunities are roughly the same at the top schools," he says. "The biggest variable is the culture. I felt this was the place I would fit in and thrive." He's not alone. Student opinion surveys show increased satisfaction at UCLA's Anderson School, which has gone through a transformation in recent years, becoming more closely tied to the tech boom, in L.A., Silicon Valley, and Seattle. The upshot: Applications last year soared by 32%, while the average GMAT for the overall applicant pool was up five points to 688, swayed in part by the greater tech focus. Those extra apps drove the school's acceptance rate down to 18% from 22% a year earlier, while the average GMAT for the new class hit a record 715, up from 706. "This class is phenomenal," boasts Rob Weiller, associate dean of admissions for the MBA program. "The second years are in awe of the new class. More importantly, though, they are still the same kinds of people. We haven't sacrificed our supportive culture. There is just a world of opportunity out there and our career center is plugged into those opportunities. It is way more difficult to do that from the East Coast. I don't care if you have the H word on your diploma." At 26.5% of the Class of 2014, technology is the top hiring industry of Anderson graduates and has been for the past three years. The percentage going into tech from UCLA has more than doubled in the past four years, eclipsing the 20.4% who took finance jobs and the 14.2% of Anderson MBAs who went into consulting. This year, in fact, at least 15 students went to work at Google, while Amazon and Microsoft each hired 10 or more MBAs, and Adobe Systems, Amgen, Apple, Ebay, Symantec, and VMware each employed between five and nine Anderson graduates. School officials, moreover, believe that tech has morphed with L.A.'s traditional strengths as an entertainment and media mecca to give birth to a host of new startups and tech firms in Silicon Beach, a three-mile stretch of sand between Venice and Santa Monica. The area is home to more than 500 startups and tech giants, ranging from Snapchat to online video service Hulu, along with an expansive L.A. office for Google. "The school has pivoted fairly quickly to become much more of a technology school than when I first came here," says Mark Garmaise, a finance professor who joined UCLA in 2001 after a stint at Chicago Booth. "Our major new push is going towards analytics and technology. We have great data analytics courses and classes where students are working with Google and doing real-time problem-solving." Dubbed "The Google Class" by students, the course represents how Anderson, once a finance and quant haven, is transforming itself into a pathway into tech. Anderson worked with Google to develop the course, which is officially called "Digital Marketing Strategy" and was first offered on a trial basis this past fall. Co-taught by marketing professor Sanjay Sood and a Google executive, the course provides students with a broad overview of Google's approach to marketing. It focuses on four key areas: insights, measurement, storytelling, and brand. "We reinvented the class to be more industry relevant," says Karen Williams, executive director for the school's Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment & Sports. "There are Google cases and projects with Google executives. All the top schools are being challenged to bridge the thinking with the doing. It is a model we are talking with another company about and have two more firms on our target list." Beyond the Google example, Anderson doesn't shy away from bringing in leading executives to teach in its classrooms. Brian Frons, the president of daytime Disney/ABC, now teaches a course called "Making Creativity Profitable in Entertainment & Technology." Dean Judy Olian and Hollywood producer Peter Guber, CEO of the multimedia Mandalay Entertainment Group, teach a class together. Not surprisingly, perhaps, one of the school's six specializations, along with such traditional MBA areas as accounting and corporate finance, is technology leadership, with such courses as "New Product Development" and "Technology Management." "This California location has us keyed into the tech boom," adds Garmaise, who is also senior associate dean of the MBA program. "We didn't stop being a finance school, but we have pivoted in terms of industry because it is a better fit for us. You have California opportunities that would open up to you that are very difficult to access from other parts of the country." Once wary of heavily promoting its southern California location, in the affluent Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, the school seems far more willing to embrace it these days. "We've done a much better job of talking about why California," says Weiller in admissions."Five years ago, there was this feeling that we couldn't even put palm trees or sand on our brochures because some thought we would diminish our reputation by making people think we are here playing beach volleyball. But we are the school in Los Angeles. We are not going anywhere. So we need to learn to talk about L.A. as a competitive advantage." Many business schools in big urban centers tend to be less collaborative and more competitive. It's because students often disperse into the city after class, making it difficult to form bonds with each other. Not so at UCLA's Anderson. "Some students say they expected UCLA to be a commuter school because we're in the city, but their experience is just the opposite," adds Weiller. "They are here and it feels like they are in Hanover or Charlottesville. It is an organic part of who we are: We are confident but not cocky and smart but not overbearingly so." Students say the environment is supportive. "Business schools are super competitive, but you can be in this competitive environment and win together," says Schoelkopf. "I was showing students to a class last winter and we were finding out about consulting interviews and offers. One of my friends came up and said, 'I heard you got a final round at BCG.'" She said, 'I didn't get it but I am super pumped for you.' People were generally excited about the things others were doing. It is such an anxious time in all of our lives. At other schools, people don't talk to one another during recruiting. It's a lot more cut-throat." In Schoelkopf's learning team, he played the role of the finance guy in a diverse group that included a former Wall Street Journal reporter, a consultant, a serial entrepreneur, and a human resources person. "Managing that dynamic was a bigger learning experience than any class you are going to take," he says. At UCLA, students take a fairly typical set of core courses in the first year. In the second year, there's the usual array of electives as well as a capstone course, a 20-week project in which students choose teams and do one of three options: a management field study in which MBAs work on a key strategic issue with a participating company; a business creation option, which gives entrepreneurs the chance to work on their own startups, and a special project option, which allows teams to analyze a strategic issue facing an entire industry. Through it all, the school has gotten closer to students and their career needs, insists Regina Regazzi, assistant dean and director of the school's Parker Career Management Center. "We got to know the students a lot better. Starting with the Class of 2012, we committed to tracking them and met every student before the end of orientation. We started to problem solve what they needed and what they were looking for." The school launched what it calls ACT, which stands for Anderson Career Teams, in which some 80 second-year MBAs volunteer to coach first-year students based on their industry and functional backgrounds. "That allows us to teach our career series and then individualize it for each student," says Regazzi. "Some volunteers are putting in 10 to 15 hours a week. And when it comes to show time, before the interviews, our second years conducted 125 mock interviews in one week just for banking interviews last year." The entrepreneurial culture at Anderson is also predictably strong, with some 300,000 entrepreneurial ventures based in the L.A. metro area. "Finding new sources of value is the best way to secure our future," says long-time UCLA professor Al Osborne, founder and faculty director of the school's Harold Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. "This generation of students wants to be on their own. They are not interested in gold watches and security. I see students who want to make a big difference with their time. My generation made a fortune destroying the environment. What they want to do is make a future cleaning it up." Adds Reiss, who will graduate this June, "The students basically run everything here. The only disappointment is that I don't have 48 hours in a day to get everything done." His classmate Fagnani knows the feeling. "A common pitfall for a lot of MBA students is that they don't do enough [due] diligence before they come to know what they want to get out of the experience," he says. "They are trying to explore and those are the ones who struggle during recruiting because they spread themselves too thin." Reiss and Fagnani are helping to run the school's consulting firm, which is called the Anderson Strategy Group. Last year, the group—composed exclusively of UCLA MBA students—did consulting for companies that ranged in size from $200 million to $1 billion, including a food and beverage company, a ticketing company, a hospital, and a non-profit organization. Both students are making the transition from finance to consulting and will join their summer internship employers as full-time employees, with Reiss going to ZS Associates and Fagnani headed for Boston Consulting Group's West Coast practice. Within Anderson's Class of 2014, the median base salary improved by $10,000 to $110,000, but the school's job offer rates trailed many rival schools. Some 75.4% had offers at graduation and 90.3% had offers three months out, numbers that Weiller believes would be better if not for the strength of the job market and the school's location. Compared to some rivals, those stats are not nearly as impressive. The average offer rate at graduation for a Top 25 school this year was 84%, while the three-month rate was slightly over 94%. "The market has given people some comfort," explains Weiller. "We have more students who go to firms with just-in-time hiring. There were plenty of students who had job offers before graduation and they turned them down. That is a drawback of being in a big city. If you are in Hanover or Charlottesville, there is a real incentive to make sure you get a job before you get out of there. So we are going to lag a bit, but I don't want to push anyone to take a job for statistical purposes." All told, administrators, faculty, and students seem to be getting a lot of value out of Anderson and its new direction. "I think we are on this incredible upward trajectory," believes Weiller. "I love where we are positioned right now. We have caught up in many ways and our level of services has caught up. We are delivering a really, really good product to our students. In the past five years, the grumbling went from 'Parker sucks' to 'the water fountain in the library shoots too high.'" More from Poets&Quants: M7: The Super Elite Business Schools By The Numbers What Investment Banks Now Pay MBAs–By Firm This Week's Frenetic Rush To Submit An MBA Application
At Harvard, Wharton, Columbia, MBA startup fever takes hold by Nathan Allen @FortuneMagazine January 3, 2015, 8:22 AM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Google Plus Linkedin Share icons (Poets&Quants) — On their Kickstarter video, Columbia Business School MBA candidates Connor Wilson and Nolan Walsh stand in a room where a group of male and female models cavorts around a pile of boots and shoes as they shower dollar bills upon it. "Welcome to the world of fast fashion," Walsh says. "Models, celebrities, and huge advertising budgets, all designed to sell us inferior products that wear out quickly." The Kickstarter campaign set a record for sales in the first 24 hours, and Wilson and Walsh have received more than $275,000 in orders for their $199 Thursday Boot Company boots. Production started about a few months ago. "I really like the idea of growing something small into something big," says Wilson, a former investment analyst and portfolio manager for Thornburg Investment Management. The two Columbia MBAs are part of a striking trend among business school students toward entrepreneurship. MBA program officials are seeing dramatic growth in student demand—including, for example, annual increases of 20% to 30% at Harvard Business School—for entrepreneurship-related offerings. Increasingly, MBAs are rushing to apply their business skills to their own enterprises. The Graduate Management Admission Council's recently released 2014 Alumni Perspectives Report reveals a significant rise in the number of business school graduates launching new businesses. From a survey of self-employed alumni who graduated from 1959 to 2013, GMAC has found that 45% of 2010-2013 grads started businesses directly after finishing B-school, while 80% of self-employed alumni from years past worked several years for an employer before embarking on entrepreneurial ventures. Wilson says he and Walsh, both 29 years old and interested in "fashion broadly and boots specifically," identified a market gap between "precious," costly boots sold at a high markup and "cheap, low-quality fashion brands." They also saw an opportunity to combine the durability of work boots with a fashionable product, Wilson says. Wilson say that he went to business school to become an entrepreneur, and he chose Columbia because of the quality of education, its focus on entrepreneurialism—Dean Glenn Hubbard has for more than a decade touted the school's entrepreneurial offerings—and its location in New York City, now reported to be the nation's second-largest startup ecosystem, behind Silicon Valley. Columbia mentors, including 37 Angels founder Angela Lee, helped the two students, and they received assistance from the Columbia Startup Lab's summer program, where they took advantage of office space, legal advice, and marketing expertise, Wilson says. "That was where we hashed out the idea that became Thursday Boots," Wilson says. Across the U.S., business schools are ramping up entrepreneurship programming, as students pursue dreams of lucrative innovation, and startup glory. At the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School's Goergen Entrepreneurial Management Program, lecturer Patrick FitzGerald has seen a tripling in the number of his students setting forth post-haste into entrepreneurial enterprises over the last four years. Now, 7% of Wharton students are starting companies right after graduation, a five-fold increase over 2007, FitzGerald says. At the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, some 40% of the class of 2015, 103 out of 280 students, are studying entrepreneurship—a "recent surge," says Ted Zoller, director of the school's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. "Entrepreneurship is entering the mainstream in the economy and therefore it's starting to enter the mainstream in the business schools," Zoller says. "You're starting to see people increasingly seeking out high-growth venturing as a pathway for their professional success." The U.S. tech boom, expanding from the West Coast, has served as the primary impetus toward entrepreneurship, Zoller says. "We've seen really the rebirth of Silicon Valley, and the most important companies that are making strides are the ones that have IPO'd in the last five years," Zoller says. "Students are increasingly interested in these types of companies." At the same time, technological advances and the availability of cheaper talent, such as skilled bachelor's degree graduates, outside Silicon Valley have made it easier and far less expensive to start companies, FitzGerald says. "Where it used to cost $200,000, you can now build a company for half that," FitzGerald says. "You can build something quite quickly and quite cheaply." As these tech-driven companies are spreading, highly ranked business schools are right on their heels, Zoller says. "Any top 20 business school needs to be relevant in every technology hotspot," Zoller says. "You're seeing all the major business schools focusing on New York, Chicago, Boston, Silicon Valley, and increasingly overseas: Shanghai, London. "In tomorrow's business market, business schools will need to be where the greatest growth is." Many schools are planning satellite operations in these tech hubs, and they are forging links with graduates already entrenched in them. "Many of them have built the capacity to create a really cohesive cadre of alumni in each of these markets that helps their students get placed and become leaders in the given region," Zoller says. Stanford's Graduate School of Business saw a considerable jump in interest in entrepreneurship in the class of 2013, with 18% of grads starting businesses within a year, compared to 13% in 2012. The percentage didn't change much in 2014 over 2013, but the types of startups did. Seventeen per cent of class of 2013 entrepreneurs went into finance, 13% into Internet services, and 11% into media and entertainment. In 2014, those who went into finance dropped to 11%, while Internet services and media and entertainment both plummeted to 2%; 9% went into each of three areas: energy and clean technology; health care; and software. This year, Kenan-Flagler started the Adams Apprenticeship program, selecting the top entrepreneurial prospects from its student body to work with UNC entrepreneur alumni for a year, with each participant committing to becoming an entrepreneur within five years of graduation. Demand for the Harvard Business School's Rock Center for Entrepreneurship's services has been surging in recent years, says director Meredith McPherron. The center's New Venture Competition matches students with mentors and judges around the world as they develop and ultimately pitch their ventures. In the Rock Accelerator program, which receives more than 120 applications for 20 spaces, student founder teams receive $5,000 to $8,000 to work on business ideas, while student "Venture Partners" help select and support participant teams. In the Summer Fellowship program, students either work at an existing startup or work on their own startup, between their first and second years. "Over the last couple years, we've had enormous pickup in demand on that," McPherron says. Although HBS recruiting reports show that the number of students who didn't seek employment because they were starting their own businesses hovered at 7% from 2012 to 2014, half of its graduates are entrepreneurs by 15 years after finishing school, according to HBS. Student debt is a main factor behind that timing, McPherron says. To help graduates jump into startups, HBS gives out 20 to 25 debt reductions per year, valued at $10,000 to $20,000 each. "You have to be a founder with an idea with traction, that has shown some merit," McPherron says. Two years ago, responding to increased demand for the reductions, McPherron asked for and received more funding for the program, which pushed reduction amounts toward $20,000, McPherron says. Among the top B-schools, there are stated divisions in what entrepreneurial roles they're training their graduates to enter. Wharton, says FitzGerald, is chock full of MBA candidates champing at the bit to launch companies and replicate the achievements of Wharton alumni startups such as smartphone-based payment app developer Venmo; eyewear retailer Warby Parker; startup investor SeedInvest; and baby products company Quidsi, which was bought by Amazon for $545 million in 2010. "They see the successes of those companies and realize that there's a real possibility that [their] startup can do well," FitzGerald says. At Kenan-Flagler, Zoller says they're taking a different approach, combating the media's "prototype of the successful entrepreneur being the maven, the Steve Jobs profile, the Larry Page," Zoller says. "We are finding that entrepreneurs are more everyday entrepreneurs, people who run businesses that are making huge contributions but may not be necessarily brand names," he says. At some B-schools, entrepreneurs are romanticized and a degree of "hero worship" exists, says higher education consultant and Eduvantis founder Tim Westerbeck,. "I've spoken with several business school deans who privately express some concerns that celebrating the glorious side of a successful entrepreneur's story, while it may be inspiring, does a potential injustice to students, because they don't develop the skills they need to deal with the often terribly difficult dimensions of entrepreneurship: the financial hardships, the inevitable failures, health challenges, the family disruption and conflict, the isolation, extreme stress, and need for steely resilience for prolonged periods of time." "These are the essential skills and competencies of entrepreneurs that are perhaps not being properly addressed in business schools." Not all schools are focusing on giving students tools to start their own enterprises. "We've decided not to be the best school for startups," Kenan-Flagler's Zoller says. "We're going to be the best school for 'grow-ups.' We're building a program that serves not only to support management training for large enterprises, but also high-growth enterprises." Kenan-Flagler is putting an emphasis on preparing students to enter executive positions in high-growth companies, or becoming funders of entrepreneurial and expanding businesses, Zoller says. "There are many ways that you can participate in entrepreneurial ventures without being the founder." But at Wharton, such a focus would conflict with candidates' ambition, FitzGerald says. "Wharton folks are certainly A-type personalities. They're probably more inclined to go out and start their own company rather than bring that entrepreneurship talent in house." While Wharton students may be inspired by alumni successes, that doesn't mean Wharton is teaching hero worship, FitzGerald says. "Trying to follow iconoclasts' models doesn't really work," FitzGerald says. "If you're not true to your own business model and your own mission, you'll fail really quickly." Demographically speaking, it makes sense for B-school grads to take a leap into founding enterprises while they have the chance, FitzGerald says. "It's actually more economically feasible to do your startup now when you're 27 as opposed to at 33 when you may have a spouse and one or two kids," FitzGerald says. However, Columbia Business School's Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center uses a slogan to encapsulate a definition of entrepreneurship that includes "intrapreneurship," the buzzword description of entrepreneurship within existing companies. The slogan, "Think, Start, Grow," is intended to represent the need for an entrepreneurial approach within any organization, regardless of size or time in business. "The 'think' element is really for anybody, I don't care where you go to work," says Lang Center Director Vince Ponzo. "More and more, people need the ability to think entrepreneurially, just because of the rate of change." Columbia is seeing heightened interest in entrepreneurship, adding seats every year to entrepreneurship courses, and holding workshops, panels, and other events on topics such as red flags in the startup process and financing ventures. Two years ago, Columbia opened its Entrepreneurs in Residence program with six residents; this year, there are eight. The program was developed to give students educational and networking entry points into specific industries and regions, to complement the school's Entrepreneurial Sounding Board, a mentoring program involving 30 alumni who mostly advise on tactics and operations, Ponzo says. Harvard operates under the notion that entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship derive from the same mindset, of "breakthrough thinking," McPherron says. "We're teaching entrepreneurial management." Westerbeck believes differences between stated goals on entrepreneurship or intrapreneurship in MBA programs can be chalked up to the need to address prospective students' desire for success, whether they want to start companies or work in established businesses. "Every school knows that entrepreneurship as a concept is in high reported demand by incoming student populations. They also know that the vast majority of their students will not ultimately become successful entrepreneurs and will eventually go to work within an organization established by someone else," Westerbeck says. "In a sense, it is preparing would-be entrepreneurs with the skills they will also need to be engines of growth and high-value employees within established organizations, which can be equally rewarding, ultimately, and perhaps less painful then the entrepreneurial life." More from Poets&Quants: Poets&Quants' 2014 Top 100 MBA Programs In The U.S. The Most Annoying MBA Essays Of 2014 Average GMAT Scores At Top 50 U.S. Schools
B-school Dean of the Year: Dartmouth's Paul Danos by Nathan Allen @FortuneMagazine December 23, 2014, 12:13 PM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Google Plus Linkedin Share icons (Poets&Quants) — When Paul Danos arrived in Hanover, N.H., to become dean of Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, Google did not yet exist, Amazon hadn't launched its online store, Steve Jobs was still two years away from returning to Apple, and Toyota had yet to launch the Prius. The horrific events of 9/11 could hardly be imagined, nor could the Great Recession. It was 1995, and the school that Danos agreed to lead was, in the words of one of its most famous professors, "in a vulnerable place, like a major league baseball team with a losing record." Tuck had plunged to 13th place in Businessweek's ranking in 1994, far from the top five ranking the school received on the magazine's debut list six years earlier. Some 20 years later, as Danos prepares to step down from the deanship on June 30 of next year, he will leave an institution that now has his deft fingerprints firmly implanted on every aspect of the school. "Paul Danos transformed Tuck's faculty into a world-class academic powerhouse, built a gorgeous campus, raised a ridiculous amount of money, moved the school into the top of the rankings, and became the most trusted administrator at Dartmouth," says Paul Argenti, a long-time Tuck professor of corporate communications. "We shall never see the likes of him again." For his extraordinary 20-year tenure and for the vast improvements he has led at Tuck, Poets&Quants names Danos its Dean of the Year. Few leaders have had the kind of impact over a prestige institution. Roughly half of the B-school's 10,000-plus living alumni will have graduated under Danos' deanship, while 75% of the faculty have been hired while he held the dean's office. At a time when the average term of a B-school dean is a mere three-and-a-half years, Danos has been the longest serving dean of any top business school in the world, and he has used that time wisely. Under his watch, the school expanded the size and scope of its programs, adding nine centers and initiatives, a master's in health care delivery, a fast-track summer business program for undergraduates, as well as an expansion of the B-school's executive education portfolio. During his deanship, Danos also built up the school's reputation for academic research by bringing in thought leaders such as Ken French in finance and Kevin Keller in marketing. He grew Tuck's full-time faculty from 34 to 55 members, and increased full-time enrollment by a third, to four incoming sections of 60 students each from three when he arrived. Danos raised the school's endowment from $59.2 million to $310 million, and he oversaw an increase in the participation rate of alums for Tuck's annual giving campaign from 63%, when the effort raised $1.6 million, to an unprecedented 70%-plus, with funds of $6.4 million. Most top 10 business schools have giving rates in the 20% range. "Overall, he has just improved the quality of the place on every single dimension, from the facilities to the students and faculty," says Robert Hansen, senior associate dean who served as the chairman of the search committee that brought Danos on campus. "On every front, he has always tried to make the school better. I don't think we'll ever find somebody who so selflessly works for the institution." Yet, among Danos' most lasting achievements is what he didn't change. Under his leadership, Tuck maintained and even built upon its unique and open culture: a smart, friendly place known for an esprit de corps that creates deep bonds among students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Danos fit that culture like a glove, making himself accessible, frequently walking the halls, creating recognition celebrations for staff, auctioning off for charity an annual crayfish dinner that he prepared for students, and maintaining an open-door policy. "At any top school, you get really smart students who are energized by what they are doing," says Connie Helfat, a strategy professor who had taught at Wharton and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management before joining Tuck in 1998. "What's unusual at Tuck is the loyalty they have to the place and the bonding they do with each other. I have never seen anything like this. It just permeates the place, and Paul has been fundamental to how well the school has done." Described by colleagues as a no-nonsense pragmatist, Danos is an unassuming gentleman, whose passions include writing and cartooning. In his office, where he works at a standup desk due to a weak back, one cabinet holds photographs of his wife, his two daughters and three grandchildren, and dozens of his cartoons. He gives most of his cartoons to his grandchildren on their birthdays or at Christmas. A favorite of his depicts a fluffy black sheep with the caption, "If one more person asks me, 'Have you any wool?' I am going to scream." An unlikely academic Danos, a soft-spoken man with impeccable manners who is now 72 years old, seemed an unlikely academic. His parents were Cajuns, who migrated from the Bayou Lafourche to the West Bank of the Mississippi across from New Orleans in the 1930s. They were hard working, uneducated people who spoke a unique dialect of the French language. Until Danos' father went into business for himself, the family was poor by modern standards, living in a home with no carpets, drapes, central heating, or air conditioning. There was little discussion about the outside world—on government, on foreign affairs, even sports—in their home. "As might be true for any young American from a humble subculture whose parents' first language was not English, I went through a period of lamenting my meager preparation for life and career," wrote Danos in a book of Cajun stories he wrote called The Other Side of the River. "All of that is gone now, except as a dull memory, but it was real and painful far into my adulthood…." When Danos was 15, he taught himself accounting and began keeping the books for his father's business, a supplier to the growing oil industry in the area. He majored in accounting at the University of New Orleans and became a certified public accountant. For five years after college, he worked in accounting for Freeport Moran in New Orleans. Danos entered an MBA night-program at the University of New Orleans, which gave him a first taste of academia. "I started thinking about applying to PhD programs and started reading what was expected of you," he recalls. "It was an exciting moment in accounting and finance because it was the time of explosion of data and being able to analyze things. All of that interested me, and I realized you could make a good living in academia as long as you were good enough to get a PhD and publish papers. I found it a viable path." Danos was accepted into the PhD program at the University of Texas's business school. He quit his job and became a full-time accounting adjunct teacher for a year at the University of New Orleans until starting his PhD the following summer. It was a big leap. "There were only two times in my life that I felt I was in over my head: when I started teaching full-time and when I first presented at a PhD seminar. I realized how easy it is to be a critic and how hard it is to be the author of a work." After earning his PhD in 1974, Danos was recruited to the University of Michigan's business school by then Dean Gil Whitaker, who would become a mentor to Danos. Danos taught accounting, chaired the accounting group, and after 15 years in the trenches of academia, he became associate dean and then senior associate dean of the MBA program at Michigan. It was in this role that he, along with Professor Noel Tichy and Jim Danko, now president of Butler University, created what is now the defining attribute of the school's MBA program: the Multidisciplinary Action Projects, which gathered teams of students to work on real corporate challenges. It would become one of the pioneering experiential programs in business education. "I had been teaching in the MBA program for some time and it was kind of classic and not all that exciting," remembers Danos. "We started thinking about what could add an exciting element in the late 1980s." A committee he chaired designed a new core curriculum, with this experiential addition. "It was pretty radical. We carved out a seven-week block where all the students did was this MAP project. Most experiential things don't take up half a term, so even today the MAP program is different…." Surprisingly, there was little faculty opposition, even though it meant compressing other courses to make room for the projects. Then, Tuck called. Danos admits his knowledge of Northern New England was so sparse that he had asked his wife, Mary Ellen, to get out the family atlas to see where Hanover, N.H., was located. When he started the job in July 1995, he found a tight-knit school that had a superb reputation for its teaching faculty, but was light on academic research. Gradating only 180 MBAs a year also made Tuck less attractive to many corporate recruiters. Tuck senior associate dean Hansen recalls a conversation he had with a visiting recruiter from Ford. "I told him, 'I hope you're having a good time,' and he said, 'So do I, because if I don't get someone, I don't know if I'll come back next year.'" Bringing research chops to a small, New England school Danos not only wanted to increase the size of the place, he wanted to do so in a way that wouldn't disrupt the culture that made Tuck so unique. And he also wanted to recruit more faculty with research chops. It was a move that could have potentially weakened the quality of teaching in the classrooms, but Danos insisted that his newly recruited professors do both. Initially, Danos focused on recruiting senior faculty with established track records. After building a research environment, hiring shifted to rookie professors. Tuck was at an immediate disadvantage because it lacked a PhD program. To make the school more attractive, Danos reduced teaching loads, gave faculty research budgets they could control, and brought in a staff of full-time computing professionals to help with statistical analysis and database management. Then, the school added a group of Tuck Fellows, full-time staffers to help faculty design cases, run review sessions and help with grading. The faculty came from Duke, MIT, Yale, Harvard and many other top business schools. Teaching remained an imperative, however. "If we go after someone, they know that teaching is important at Tuck," says Hansen, who helped recruit faculty to the school. "We live and die on the MBA program." Hansen says student evaluations of professors and courses remained extremely high throughout the transformation. Danos agrees. "As we have grown and gotten a more scholarly faculty, we have also improved the spirit of the place," says Danos. "It is a myth that if you get that kind of faculty you will lose the learning characteristics that everyone wants. Every year 280 strangers come into this place and they form this unbelievable bond over a year and they have it for life." The biggest challenge for Danos was "to try to close the circle between the depth of faculty understanding in their fields and a great learning experience in the classroom." The result: An innovation called Research To Practice seminars, courses that allow a professor to share research interests with groups of no more than 15 students. "Those seminars," says Danos, "are as close to closing the circle for MBAs as I have seen anywhere. It's expensive, but it does something that reconciles this long-standing friction between research and teaching." When Danos first proposed the idea, many faculty believed students would have little interest in the seminars. Undaunted, he forged ahead, proved their success, and now there are a dozen of them a year. "Today, these courses are among the highest rated we have," says Danos. "It allowed me to create something that is compatible with the way I see the ideal business faculty. It feels right from every angle. It touches on the core of why we have academics teaching in business schools, and the students love it." Hansen, who taught one of the first seminars on the economics of the credit crisis in the spring of 2009, helped make the idea a success. "In the old days, you might go to a professor's house for dinner. We still do a fair amount of that. But with 12 students siting around a table and talking about research, you have that interaction at an intellectual plane." An informal, authentic leadership style Throughout the changes, Danos remained highly accessible. For one thing, he likes to walk the halls, stop by the office of a faculty member and informally engage. "He just shows up in your office," says Helfat. "The first time he did this, I was shocked. I never had a dean show up unannounced in my office. And then I realized he just came to see what I was up to and to chat." Sally Jaeger, assistant dean and director of the MBA program, recalls a time two years ago when Danos wandered into her office. "I was at my computer and had just found out that my mother was diagnosed with cancer. He looked at me and immediately noticed I was distressed. 'What's wrong?' he asked. I told him and the first words out of his mouth were, 'What can I do?' Before I knew it, he was putting me in touch with doctors who could help." During the 9/11 attacks, Danos was in the Midwest. He immediately cancelled all classes on campus. "Paul literally got a car and driver to bring him back to the east coast because there were no planes," remembers Ella Bell, a professor of organizational behavior. "From the car, he called everyone from New York asking if they had family there and if there was anything he could do. We had students who lost family members and dear friends. Some of our students had worked in the towers during their summer internships and just came back. "We came up with a design for our classes that was supportive, nurturing and taking care of the important matters at heart, not just at business. We turned that into an incredible teaching moment. That was under Paul's guidance." Each spring, there's a charity auction for Tuck's Center for Business and Society. Danos always auctions off a crawfish boil for some 20 students. It has become one of the most popular items at the auction. The dean imports crawfish from Louisiana, cooks them up at home, and brings them to Tuck to be served to students. Colleagues describe Danos as an extremely ambitious but unselfish idealist. "I have known many deans who want to leave their stamp on an institution," says Giovanni Gavetti, a Tuck professor of business administration who has taught at both Harvard Business School and Wharton. "I don't think Paul cares about that. He is singlehandedly obsessed with the quality of the experience for the student. On that front, he has delivered." Danos has an annual one-on-one meeting with each faculty member to discuss their research. The meetings last 90 minutes. "He talks about your research and he knows everything about it," says Gavetti. "I suspect he had read some of my papers because he has a fairly intimate knowledge of my research and my plan to develop it. And he tells you what he thinks. Once he told me, 'I think that is bullshit. Why are you doing that?' I never heard anything like that from a dean." When Danos announced his retirement last spring at a school meeting, he received a standing ovation from faculty and staff. "They would not sit down until I begged them to so Paul could say a few words," recalls Hansen. The reaction of Ella Bell, who had joined Tuck as a professor 15 years ago and considers Danos her mentor and 'Big Cheese," was typical. She cried. We are very hopeful that we will get a phenomenal new dean," she says, "but Paul leaves big footprints to follow." Ask Danos what most fills him with pride among all of his accomplishments over those 20 years, and he doesn't hesitate. "It's the ability to bring these two worlds together, the world of research and the great classroom experience," he says. "It's like standing up in a birch canoe. It's easy to tip. You have to have quite a bit of balance to keep it going down the stream because it tips over fairly easy. To be able to do that and keep the team in a stable way is something that is gratifying to me. It's a good feeling." More from Poets&Quants: Best & Worst 2014 MBA Job Placement At Top Schools The 2014 Top 100 MBA Programs In The U.S. The 2014 Top MBA Programs Outside The U.S.
The MBA degree and the astronomical rise in CEO pay by Nathan Allen @FortuneMagazine December 18, 2014, 12:36 PM EST E-mail Tweet Facebook Google Plus Linkedin Share icons During most MBA programs, business school students read numerous case studies, evaluating the strategies of many different kinds of companies, analyzing the cost of bringing new product lines to market and novel methods to cut expenses. You would think that, after all that training, MBA grads would be the perfect candidates to halt the runaway growth of CEO pay. But, in an ironic twist, could the rising number of MBAs be pushing the perceived value of a CEO ever higher? The MBA degree's growth in popularity is one of the few trends in the business world that matches the extraordinary growth in executive pay. According to the most recent data, from the 2011-2012 graduating class, MBA students accounted for 25% of the total master's handed out, with 191,571 students receiving the degree. Education and computer science/engineering students came in second and third, with 178,062 and 66,014 degree recipients, respectively. The MBA has grown in popularity for years. In fact, the number of MBAs issued has jumped 623% since 1970; education master's degrees increased 103% during that time. CEO pay growth took a little longer, waiting until the 1990s before its exponential rise, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. As the MBA-toting population has increased in general, a growing share of corporate board members and CEOs have the degree on their resumes. It makes sense. Companies want to have the best talent and, presumably, the best will have focused on how to sustain or grow a business and be willing to make tough choices to do so, which is what students learn during an MBA program. About 40% of S&P 500 CEOs have an MBA, in any given year. It is, by far, the degree with the most representation among such executives. Between 25% and 30% of S&P 500 CEOs have another type of advanced degree, like a PhD or law degree. Executive search firm Spencer Stuart found that 61% of new directors were current or retired chairs, presidents, or CEOs. Another 13% were active or retired executives and 20% were bankers, investors or CFOs. It's safe to assume that a sizable portion of these executives have MBAs or other advanced degrees. Such similarities among large company executives and board members raises concerns about diversity. If many of these people have a very similar educational background, what's the likelihood that there will be a wide range of opinions when it comes time to talk executive pay and corporate strategy? There's little research on the impact of the number of MBAs in the boardroom, but a growing amount of evidence suggests that a lack of diversity can hurt a company. In a study currently undergoing peer review, researchers found a significant link between board diversity and willingness to take on risk. "We found that the more diverse the board, the less likely [a company is willing] to take risk," said Ya Wen Yang, assistant professor of accounting at the Wake Forest University school of business and a co-author of the study in question. "If you want to curb excessive risk taking, then add diversity to the board." Yang adds that there's early evidence that diverse boards are more willing to provide investors with dividends or give money back to shareholders. In this case, diversity was taken to mean differences in race, age, professional experience, and tenure. The researchers did not specifically examine board members' educational background. With all of these MBA students entering the workforce, why hasn't the cost of the talent dropped? Executives and board members will tell you that they view their CEO as extraordinarily skilled and nearly impossible to replicate. A degree doesn't signify that level of talent. And they may be right, to a point. But at some level, as more talent becomes available, the amount of extraordinary talent on offer should increase. There may be an outlier or two of otherworldly talent—you could use the example of Steve Jobs (no MBA) in the CEO world—but for the most part, there will be more great talent to select from, which should cause a decrease in the salaries those people command. CEO pay really started to rise in the 1990s. Was there a sudden drop in talent at that time, leading to a price increase for a quality CEOs? Did MBA programs stop producing quality graduates? I doubt that many alumni of America's prestigious business schools would agree.


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Ortigia Scented Candles | The Scented Candle Store
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