by Laurie Pickard | Sep 17, 2013 | Courses, Platforms, and Profs, Thoughts on Higher Ed and Life
First semester is in full swing. I’m taking three courses - Introduction to Corporate Finance, Introduction to Accounting, and a class called New Models of Business in Society. The latter two courses are offered through Coursera, and they operate just like regular university courses, sans the classroom. One nice thing about Coursera courses is that while you are held to a schedule, there are new courses starting all the time. My accounting class, for example, started this week and runs for the next ten weeks. New Models of Business in Society started three weeks ago and runs for five weeks.
Finance and accounting are “hard skills” classes involving numbers, spreadsheets, and generally accepted rules and principles. New Models in of Business Society is part of a unit on leadership that I am including in my first year curriculum. For the purposes of my MBA, I am approaching leadership as “ways of thinking about work in life and society.” New Models takes a macro view of how businesses are perceived to act, how they ought to act, and how they do act. The professor, R. Edward Freeman, a business ethicist, is leading us through the progression of thought on corporate citizenship, from corporate philanthropy a la Andrew Carnegie to the emerging view that corporations can work towards a better world as part of their core business.
For another piece of my leadership unit, I’m reading books on the role of work in our lives, specifically how to maximize personal productivity and fulfillment. One of the best books on this topic is Drive: The Surprising Truth About what Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. Pink argues that work is fulfilling when it addresses three fundamental needs: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This three part formulation really appeals to me, and I can clearly identify times in my own life when my work has fallen into this sweet spot, meeting all three criteria - and times when it hasn’t. I know that I work best when I am able to choose when and how to work, when I am doing tasks that are challenging enough to require my full attention, and when I can see that my work is contributing to a worthy goal.
When I was in the Peace Corps I worked with a youth group. One day, I asked the kids in the youth group what their favorite activities were. Most of the boys and girls said things like, “I like to play baseball,” or, “I like riding a bike.” But one boy surprised me by saying, “I like to work.”
“Really? That’s your favorite activity, work?” I asked him.
He nodded. Yes, he liked to work.
I thought it was weird for a kid to list work as his preferred activity, but I’ve thought about his answer in the years since that conversation. After reading Daniel Pink’s book, I realized that one of my favorite activities is also work - provided that the work meets those three criteria of autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Another great book on this topic - a new book - is Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success by G. Richard Shell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Shell makes a similar argument about the importance of “meaningful work” to overall personal happiness. Finally, on the topic of work and life, I highly recommend Jason Fried’s TED Talk, “Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work,” in which he talks about the types of environments in which people do their best work - not usually the office during working hours.
Between Freeman’s course, the books, and assorted TED Talks, I’m getting both the global view and the personal view of what work and business could and should be like. To round out my leadership unit, I’m looking for resources that address the role of managers - both in encouraging the people they manage to do their best work and in pushing their companies to be the best citizens they can be. Your suggestions welcome.
by Laurie Pickard | Sep 5, 2013 | Courses, Platforms, and Profs
One of the courses I’m taking this semester is An Introduction to Corporate Finance, taught by Aswath Damodaran, of NYU’s Stern School of Management. Even the title of the course requires some decoding if you haven’t studied business before. What exactly does one study in a class on corporate finance?Let’s start with the word “corporate.” In this course we are looking at large, publicly-traded corporations, i.e. firms that are owned by shareholders. “Finance” refers to decision-making that involves money. Corporate finance, then, is financial decision-making for publicly-traded companies. A foundational principle of corporate finance is that the main purpose of the corporation is to maximize shareholder wealth (more on that in a moment).
The course walks through the decision-making process for corporations using the concept of hurdle rates. Basically, any time there is a financial decision to be made – acquisition of another company, selling off a part of the company, investing in a new business line, expanding an existing business line, etc. – it is necessary to demonstrate that the proposed action comes with a reward that outweighs the risk (the hurdle rate), thereby leading to greater wealth for shareholders.
I’m loving using this style of thinking, and I’m learning a lot of new terminology. For example, calculating a firm’s cost of equity involves using a coefficient called beta that measures how closely share price has historically mimicked the movement of the overall market.
However, I’m finding that in order to come up with numbers for anything involving a mechanism as complicated as the market requires a lot of simplification. Almost every number that is used to calculate a hurdle rate is at best a good estimate. The coefficient beta is calculated using the historical relationship between share prices and market fluctuations, but there is no guarantee that the relationship will be the same in the future.
Furthermore, even the guiding principle of increasing shareholder wealth is a drastic simplification. For another course, I’m reading a book called Conscious Capitalism. The author of that book, who is the founder of Whole Foods, says that much of the current public mistrust of capitalism stems from the idea that businesses are only out to make money, when in fact a good business should generate value not just for shareholders but also for its customers, its employees, its community, and society at large. But how do you measure that value? It is easy to calculate changes in share price, but how do you measure whether a community has benefited from the operations of a particular business? And even if you could determine that a business had had a positive effect, how would you calculate the size of that effect? A finance person would say that anything besides shareholder wealth is just noise; the only appropriate focus in corporate finance is maximizing shareholder wealth, nothing more and nothing less. But I’m not convinced.
Nonetheless, I highly recommend the course; Professor Damodaran is a great lecturer – engaging, funny and incredibly knowledgeable. His course provides an approachable introduction to a topic that is intimidating to many people without a business background. And the concepts introduced in the class and the method for working through calculating a hurdle rate are an important foundation. Although I’m not planning to become a CFO, I’ve found this class enormously helpful in understanding the finance mindset.
by Laurie Pickard | Aug 9, 2013 | MOOC MBA Design
I am modeling my No-Pay MBA on top-flight MBA programs such as Harvard, Stanford, UPenn, and MIT. The first year of a degree program at these universities typically focuses on fundamentals. The second year, students get to take more elective courses. The core curriculum for the first year usually includes some subset of the following:
- Finance
- Accounting
- Leadership, managerial skills, and organizational psychology
- Business ethics
- Technology and operations management
- Marketing
- Microeconomics
In my first year, I plan to do coursework in all of these areas. My overall strategy is to take 16 courses over two to three years. I will take two courses at a time for 3 months at a time. At that rate, I can do eight courses in a year.
Some of the courses I have found are traditional ones that are set up on a semester schedule, with required readings and homework. For technical topics, such as finance and accounting, I will make a point of seeking out such courses. For topics that are less technical - such as leadership - I will try to incorporate a diversity of opinions by taking shorter courses, listening to lecture series, and reading books on the subject.
For anyone reading who has done an MBA, how does this list look to you? Am I missing anything critical in my first year curriculum? Is there anything here that you would leave out or replace with something else?
by Laurie Pickard | Aug 9, 2013 | MOOC MBA Design
If you aren’t fully convinced that free online degrees are the way of the future, neither am I. I received a tremendous amount of value from both my undergraduate and my graduate experiences, and I wouldn’t trade those experiences in for a free degree earned from the comfort of my bedroom. There is no true substitute for the classroom environment, for realtime exchanges between teacher and student, for lively face-to-face discussion. So I’m certainly not saying there isn’t any value to a traditional MBA. However, given my particular situation, the numbers just don’t add up. For me - and, I would expect, for many others - a free online degree seems like the way to go.
Here is what makes me a good candidate for a No-Pay MBA:
1. I already have a master’s degree. Having a few more letters behind my name might not open any doors that are currently closed to me.
2. I don’t need the B-school network. I’ve been told that a large part of the benefit of attending business school is acquiring a network. I don’t doubt that this is true, but since I already have a professional network, and because I work in a fairly small field not typically filled with MBA grads - international agricultural development - I think I can forgo that perk of attending business school.
3. I don’t want to stop working. When you consider the lost income from the years you spend in school versus working, the price of an MBA goes even higher. Plus, my work will give me a laboratory for applying what I’m learning.
4. I am disciplined enough to finish the courses and willing to explain my approach to others. The fact is, most people who sign up for online courses don’t finish them. Not only that, most courses don’t give credit. So in order for me to reap any benefit from doing a free MBA, I have to be able to both do the work and convince others that I have learned what I say I’ve learned. It’s a tall order, but in part that’s why I am writing this blog - to provide some accountability in my self-made MBA.
5. I have a particular field of interest that isn’t part of most business schools’ curricula. I want to be able to focus my attention on topics connected to international agricultural development - supply chain management, sustainability labeling, sourcing from developing countries, financing for small farms, and other such themes.
by Laurie Pickard | Aug 8, 2013 | MOOC MBA Design
For quite a while now we’ve been hearing about the staggering cost of higher education. In March, The New York Times reported that student aid was falling even as the costs of going to college were rising. Just a few months later, in the same paper, Joseph Stiglitz suggested that student debt was crushing the American dream. Also this year, two books came out saying that American higher education had better get ready to face a reckoning because these days degrees are just not worth what they cost.
I’ve been reading about this trend while simultaneously researching MBA programs. They’re all shockingly expensive; the most prestigious schools can cost over $90,000 per year once you’ve factored in tuition, housing, and other expenses. While I would like to have an MBA, I don’t want to walk away from the experience with $150,000 in debt, thank you very much.
The other innovation that has entered the higher education scene in a big way is the massive open online course, or MOOC. MOOCs are increasingly available from some of the most prestigious universities - through the universities’ own sites or through sites like Coursera or edX. Some people have even suggested that in the future it may be the norm for all higher learning to happen virtually.
All of this has gotten me thinking:
Would it be possible to create my own MBA using free online courses and other cheap or free materials?
I’ve looked at what’s out there, from Coursera to ItunesU to TEDTalks. These resources may be relatively new, but there is a ton of material out there. Many of the courses on Coursera even operate like real college courses - with homework assignments and discussion groups. I’ve compared the free course offerings to the curricula of top business schools. And the answer I’ve come to is this:
Yes, it is possible. And I’m going to try.
In my next post, I will introduce the sole member of the first entering class of The No-Pay MBA self-administered degree program - me!
I hope you’ll support me in my journey, and I’d love to hear from others who are trying the same thing. Comments welcome.
