What is an intro course to MBA?

A while ago, Professor Zvi Artstein from the Weizmann Institute asked me to teach two business courses to the institute's students. Wow, I was surprised! This was indeed a very good idea. The institute has only graduate students focused on academic research, and this is what they learn. how to do academic research. Yet, what do they end up doing once they graduate?

Most of them work in business companies, and very often they don't do any research at all. To the professor it seemed unwise that they are not prepared for their next phase, that they know nothing about the business world. So he decided to offer some courses. He asked me and I agreed to teach two courses, Introduction to Finance and Introduction to MBA.

The Introduction to MBA course gave me a unique and amazing experience. The lecture hall was full and I prepared the lessons with passion. I stood there and just explained to the students all kinds of things they didn’t know at all about the business world.

Why was the experience so great? Firstly, I completely related to the need of the students! I too was in the past a graduate student in physics and I had the very same need. What I did back then was to take 6 courses at the business school in order to get my basic business education. Secondly, it was fun to be with younger people that reminded me of myself and some of my colleagues and friends and I was happy that I could help them. And in the end I really enjoyed the dialogues with them and I enjoyed creating an innovative course that helped them.

For example, the class where we talked about what is "Human Resources" and their role in the organization. I remember that I opened and said: "The most important thing to remember from this class is that the people who work in Human Resources are not your friends". Big laugh, but a very important lesson. The loyalty of people who work in Human Resources is to the organization and top management, not to the new technologists. And the tendency of new and naïve employees is to believe everyone.

What I did in the course was to give a high-level perspective of 3,000 feet, a business context. The course helped them to understand the bigger picture of the business world, to think if they should do an MBA or if it is even interesting for them. In short, the course helped them to make decisions, both on occupational fields (which are not only research) and on future education.

If you look for such a course today, you can find in Udemey a course called MBA IN A BOX - but it's very different. At the end you might be able to start planning your store in the center of Tel-Aviv or in the fifth street in Manhattan. This by itself is great, but not enough. You can find short introductory courses in LinkedIn, and when you find a course like that in Coursera, please let me know.

As of today there isn't. What can you do? You can enter Stanford University's website - there are lots of great lectures there - listen to what looks interesting and learn. You can take the UDEMY course and complete the general knowledge by reading business information sources. You can take a few short courses on: marketing, strategy, and finance, in the hope that you will somehow integrate it all. The course as I described before doesn't exist. I hope it will be availble in a new version soon.