THE CONTEMPORARY MBA // EDUCATION MBA
THE CONTEMPORARY MBA BY JOHN HARDY
STILL CLOUT?
T
o MBA or not to MBA, that is the question being asked by students, résumés, employers, executive recruiters and HR professionals.
Traditionally, MBAs were the preferred choice for those who aimed for leadership positions and reached for the top rungs of finance or management consulting or the C-suite of large companies. An MBA was also a bit cliched as a “golden ticket” to fast-tracked, corporate success, executive salaries and vague, ladder-climbing prestige. For various reasons, during the past decade or so, MBAs have undergone a dramatic evolution. They have been transformed from a sacred must-haves for senior management positions into contemporary nice-to-haves in corporate careers, entrepreneurship and the business galaxy of high-techs and start-ups. “The business landscape is constantly changing,” notes the upbeat Oleksiy (“Oleks”) Osiyevskyy, MBA program
director and associate professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at the Haskayne School of Business. “Leading companies of today are facing accelerating environmental turbulence in the global marketplace. There are emerging disruptive technologies and business models, evolving societal perceptions of business, raising expectations about the role of business in solving global problems, digital transformations of industry value chains, challenges to international trade and misbalances in global capital markets. Not surprisingly, to remain relevant, the MBA programs need to constantly reinvent themselves.” According to a recent benchmarking study of the MBA Roundtable Report on The Graduate Business School Curriculum, half of the surveyed business schools underwent a major curriculum revision in the last five years, and a majority expect significant further changes in the next five years. There’s consensus, in business and in academia, that MBA programs must keep evolving to address the warp-
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