Valuable Suggestions from the Dean of a US Top 10 MBA Program: PythaGURUS’ Interview

Identifying Business Schools and Careers?

Read PythaGURUS’ interview with the Dean of a Top 10 Business school in U.S. Valuable Suggestions from the Dean of a US Top 10 MBA Program: PythaGURUS’ Interview We are very fortunate to get opportunities to meet with “VERY VERY” diverse group of candidates who are keen on joining the Top Global MBA Programs. And this diverse group comes with very similar questions.

In order to address these better, we reached out to the leaders of the Top Global Business Schools, and asked questions that are representative of your thought process.

Interview with Dean Bruner Dean Bruner’s Bio Robert F. Bruner holds the position of Dean and Charles C. Abbott Professor of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He was appointed dean on August 1, 2005.

Bruner’s highly acclaimed book, The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market’s Perfect Storm, was published in 2007, shortly before the sub-prime crisis in the U.S. The book chronicles the 1907 financial crisis and describes the factors that lead to financial panics. His previous book, Deals from Hell: M&A Lessons That Rise Above the Ashes, was published in 2005 and focuses on failure in mergers and acquisitions. He is the author or co-author of 17 books, including the textbook Case Studies in Finance: Managing for Corporate Value Creation (now in its 6th edition); 20 peer-reviewed journal articles; and over 450 case studies and teaching notes. Bruner's research has been published in journals such as Financial Management, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking.

A member of the University faculty since 1982, Bruner served as Executive Director of The Batten Institute, an endowed foundation within the Darden School that focuses on entrepreneurship, innovation and corporate growth, from 2000 to 2004. His areas of teaching, research and writing include corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, investing in emerging markets, innovation and technology transfer.

In addition to his teaching and writing, Bruner has been a consultant to corporations and governments throughout his career. At Darden, he has been the leader of the school's annual conference, "Investing in Emerging Markets," and was the faculty director of Darden’s Executive Education program, “Mergers and Acquisitions.” BusinessWeek magazine cited him as one of the “masters of the MBA classroom.”

Bruner has been a visiting professor at various schools including Columbia, INSEAD and IESE. He earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1971. He earned an MBA from Harvard University in 1974 and a doctorate in Business Administration from Harvard in 1982. He is married and has two children.

Excerpts from our recent conversation with Bob Bruner, Dean of Darden Graduate School of Business: PythaGURUS: First of all, Congratulations to you Bob for securing rank one in general management. People come from diverse backgrounds ranging from Engineering to Arts, and want to establish careers in diverse industries and be functional experts. However, at times they fail to understand the importance of term “General Management” and relate it to “Managing things generally”. How well equipped is a General Management MBA curriculum to empower MBA Candidates to lead a transformational career?

Dean Bruner: Yes! General Managers are people who oversee the entire enterprise and the enterprise could be a very large corporation or it could be a very small entrepreneurial start up. Every organization needs leader who can synthesize and work with many different functional specialists and that kind of leader is called a general manager. The world I would argue has a deficit of general managers. There are many many graduates of a business school who are functional specialists and who perform very well and they are technicians. They are technicians in finance or accounting or marketing. They are people who make pricing decisions or supply chain decisions, people who assure there is adequate inventory within the firm; those are functional specialists. But no firm will exist without the presence of one or more general people who assemble and integrate the work of functional specialists in ways to produce high performance outcome for the firm and those people are called general managers. I believe that the fate of the world, the fate which depends on growth, depends on our ability to graduate general managers and leaders. Because if you look at the constraints on growth today in 2013, the constraints are not the lack of manufacturing capacity for as United States is abundantly strong. You can outsource manufacturing capacity to the firms all over the world. It isn’t intellectual property, it is not brand or brand value, it is

not even money as there is more money in the world than people know what to do with and the recent financial crisis amply demonstrates that. But the major constraints on growth today is the availability of leaders or general manager s who can accomplish great outcomes through teamwork and through managing firms and that is what Darden school is very well known for producing.

PythaGURUS: A very important question for a lot of our readers: One year MBA programs Vs. Two year MBA programs: How should one decide between these two? Who is well suited for which program? How should one figure this out?

Dean Bruner: The common mistake is to think about it in terms of cost or convenience.

Obviously the one year program keeps you out of the work force for less time and it is possibly more convenient to you and interrupts your schedule less. But what we know is that a great education consists of “Growth in knowledge”, “Growth in skills” and “Growth in attributes of character”.

I think of this as “know what”, “know how” and “know why”. Let me elaborate for one moment. The “know what” aspects are formulas names and dates and mechanics of how accounting works, the supply chain and manufacturing processes work. That is called knowledge.

The second category is called skills and skills might be the skills of negotiation, skills of selling, skills of communicating, skills of forming teams, and inspiring to product great work. It could also include skills of giving difficult feedback to somebody.

And then the third attribute: the attribute of character. It could be empathy, it could be social awareness, it could be emotional intelligence, it could be integrity, it could be work ethic...and I would argue that the longer program( the two year program) are more successful in building a student strength in the areas of skills and the attributes and character. In very short program (one year programs) you do not have time to stop and reflect, you do not have a summer internship in which to experiment and try a program outside of your field, outside your familiarity, and the possible career path outside your field. You don’t have an opportunity to make mistakes and try again. In a one year program you work extremely intensively to complete the course credits necessary and before you know it, you are back in the work force. Now if a student is “very very” focused and particularly focused on gaining knowledge and does not desire to gain skills and attributes of character then a one year program is probably well suited for that individual. If a student is a “very very” quick learner, a one year program may be more appropriate. But many MBA students today come to graduate business schools having worked previously but being aware that there are many opportunities for their career in life ahead and they want to use business school as an opportunity to explore and to broaden their horizons. They want to deepen their skills and for them a two year program is really very well suited because a two year program brings an opportunity to experiment. There is a summer internship, which is clearly an opportunity to

experiment. There is more time to soak in the ideas and the thrill as a way to grow, and there are many more opportunities to engage with fellow students and with faculty. Quite often the bonding that occurs in the coursed of a two year program forms the foundation for a student’s individual network that becomes so valuable in the years after graduating. So, with more time, you have more time to bond with faculty staff and students, you have more time to experiment, you have more time to grow in the way you envision. That is the argument in the favour of a two year program and I think it is well worth the possible added expense or the inconvenience.

PythaGURUS: If someone is unable to make a school visit, what factors should he keep in mind while picking schools up in a country he has never travelled to in his life?

Dean Bruner: I always advise applicants to visit the schools whenever possible. The criterion you should focus on should be motivated in part by the individual’s vision or his or her career aspiration. If the individual is very ambitious then looking at the most selective schools will be more appropriate.

Let me speak for the students who have the more ambitious vision. I recommend paying attention to schools that have some kind of international accreditation, and there are three accrediting bodies in the world. There is AACSB, EQUIS, and AMBA. Of the three, AASCB is the largest and the best known. The estimate is that are over 13000 institutions that award degrees in business of some kind and less than 10% of these are accredited. Accreditation is very important as it implies that some outside committee has visited school and looked at its qualitative features, rigor of its program , the support system given to the students, the quality of the facility and the. Keeping these factors in mind, the visiting committee decides that this school is credit worthy, this is a worthy program, and you will get a decent education.

This makes no difference to the other schools who have no accreditation and it is possible that their program is good. But with an accredited school we know that some objective committee has visited school.

Within the accredited schools, about one thousand two hundred or one thousand three hundred schools, may be 150 or 200 of those schools show up in rankings of some kind somewhere. So, the rankings indicate that the school has come to the attention of the major media who produce the rankings. The rankings are not Gods Truth with regards to the quality of the program but they are a way to determine that the school is gaining the popularity and the impact and has the regional or global factor that one might like to have associated with their program. Once you get in to the rankings then you will probably find a great deal of information on the internet and in the printed guide books. I believe that the rankings are imperfect, but their information, I do not deny that they tell the applicants something relevant. But they are mainly information, and they are not a place to make final decision regarding the program.

Then I would focus on trying to reach some of the alumni, some of the graduates of the school to talk about their experiences at the school, what they know about the school, and where they have gone with their own careers and what type of support has the school offered them since the graduation time.

Also, I would do my own due diligence around the general reputation and the resources of the school...and that means getting on the web and focusing intensively on the information that the school provides. One should ask questions about the requirements to get a degree and find out how many courses or credit hours are required. Look at the faculty too. Did the faculty come from good doctoral programs, well known programs? Are the faculty thought leaders? Are they excellent teachers? Have they won any teaching awards?

You should look at the quality of the student support system particularly for career development. Are their coaches? Are there mentors? Are there courses for students to take to stimulate their own thinking about their career development? And what is the student life like? Are there clubs? What does a student do outside of class? Do they mingle with the other students or they just take off and go back to their own apartment? Is it a friendly environment? (Particularly friendly environment for international students). For instance students from India might well ask if there a cricket club at the school. They might well ask “what is the percentage of students from south Asia or Asia at the school?” “What is the percentage of south Asians on the faculty at the school?” Things like that will add to the friendliness and will form the environment at the school. And ultimately it would be advisable to try to reach some students who are currently enrolled in the school to get their insights and opinions. That is still hard because schools do not publish the list of the students who are currently enrolled but it is still possible to connect with some of the enrolled students. I think all of those are sources of information that will help a student decide “Is this school right for me?” and you know it sounds like a lot of work but the time and the expense and the amount of work you are going to do at the graduate school it is worth doing the detailed due diligence.

PythaGURUS: There are times when students aren’t sure about their future career choices and want to make a career decision only after exposed to plenty of options. How should they tackle the “Short term and long term goals” story under those circumstances?

Dean Bruner: My advice is that it is entirely legitimate to say in your essay that you do not know exactly what you want to do upon your graduation but if you follow that strategy, it is very important to explain that you intend to explore many possibilities and that you are motivated by certain values to conduct your search with. What an admissions office is very vary about is a student who wants somebody else to tell them what they want to do in their lives. I tell you, in Graduate business school, certainly at the elite schools in the world, we are very good at helping students figure things out for themselves but we do not figure the things out for the students. And if a student is lost, I mean really lost, business school will probably not going to help the student find him or herself.

But in fact most people who do not know what they want to do in their career are not lost.

They are really guided by very deep principles. The principles might have to deal with a great respect for the environment or a great respect for democracy or rule of law or a great curiosity about the financial markets or a joy of working in teams. So many people who have had experiences in athletics can learn that there are many joys and challenges of doing things in teams and they are naturally drawn to team based work. Those are the kinds of things that the applicants need to discuss in that essay. So, it is okay to say I do not know exactly what I want to do next but here are the kinds of things that will guide me as I go through Darden MBA program and I am confident that this combined with the diversity of the case studies, corporate briefings and the diversity of my own class mates, I will really be able to figure it out because I really believe in these 5 or 6 principles to guide me. That tells us that the individual is mature and is self motivated and has the foundation for making wise career decisions. In fact I would say that I hope that every applicant to our school comes with genuine curiosity and openness to figuring things out. If an applicant says that I know without one doubt that I want to become a charted financial accountant and that person has been an accountant before coming to Darden, it really sounds to me that this person is so focused that he or she might not be receptive to the team learning that a graduate business school experience can offer. So we are looking for people who are ambitious, who have high aspiration for themselves, who have some direction. They have an internal compass but they are not so laser focused that they won’t be interested or interesting as regards other people.

It happens again and again and again in our business school that students who enrol thinking that they were going to go in to one field change their mind and ultimately decide to go into another field. Then you know, I do not think that that is bad because I think we are helping direct the very best talent into their highest value system, their most joyful occupation.

PythaGURUS: You lead one of the only two schools (other being Harvard Business School) that use case method for 100% of their classes. What is your advice to the students who want to learn more about the importance of lecture Vs. Case method?

Dean Bruner: I think the best way to learn about the difference between the two is to talk to the people who have been through the experience or are currently enrolled in such schools.

But the case method is very different from the lecture method. I will give you two differences and two “Very Very� big differences. The lecture method is probably called passive learning.

You sit in a lecture hall probably for two years taking notes and you occasionally write an exam or a paper. It is fundamentally a one way learning experience. The professor talks and you listen and you write an exam and you graduate.

The case method in very sharp contrast is probably called active learning. It is two way learning. You are in a dialogue with the professor and with the other students. Instead of telling you, the professor motivates the class along by asking questions. And what is inevitable is a class experience that is apparently indirect. The professor literally does not have one suggestion or one direct recommendation as the ideal solution. Rather, the class must come

to some consensus about what the right resolution to the case problem is. This very act of engagement simulates what happens every day with millions of businesses around the world.

That is to say that groups of people sit together and solve problems. And by doing this intensively at Darden over two years, and study may be 600 cases over the course of two years, you learn how to get the most out of your own leadership. I hear from “Many Many” recruiters that there are students very good at working in project teams, they are very classical, they produce attractable recommendations, they communicate very well and they have strong work ethic. All of these are developed in the course of our 21 month MBA program. And it is the case method, a discussion method that brings those quality values.

The second important distinguishing feature of case method is that a lecture method is probably teacher centred. The teacher drives the class, the teacher starts where the teacher wants, the teacher ends where the teacher wants, and the teacher makes all the decisions.

And if you are lucky enough, they have a teacher who is very alert and aware about the receptivity of the students to the ideas. That process can work well. But the contrast is that in a case method, the case method teachers are student centred. They begin where the student is by repeatedly asking questions, they are subtly monitoring the progress of the class during each class hour as well as across entire period. The net result is that the professor is in constant awareness of the progress of the students and can accelerate or decelerate the discussions so that the students keep up with the work and get the most out of every class discussion. And I think this is a “Very Very” important distinction. Teaching by the case method is harder than lecturing because you have to be very good at listening to the students and because you as a teacher have to be on your toes to regulate the progress of the class according to what you hear. I list the two differences, active learning and the student centred teaching as the distinguishing feature in the case method.

And I believe that the case method builds what I was referring before, it builds the skills, the attributes of character, and it particularly builds skills of communication and making recommendations, and forming teams giving good results out of working in teams. I think it also builds attributes of character because it helps the student learn how to read a group and how to read the reactions of other people to the presentations of your ideas. And that ability and that social awareness is crucial in development of great business leaders. This social awareness is vital in negotiating the deal, is vital in leading in any setting and I believe that the case method is superior as a result.

PythaGURUS: Darden has built relations with the best schools in the country and students get to leverage the partnerships through exchange programs. Does Darden plan to have an international campus in the near/distant future?

Dean Bruner: We believe what matters is the impact rather than bricks and mortars. And therefore our intention is to carry our program internationally to important locations around the world. I like India very much and we already carry some of our pgormrams to India specifically to Chennai, Mumbai, and New Delhi. We get good students in our courses. Darden

professors travel to India to lead these programs and I would like us to do more of that and have similar programs in china, Brazil, Europe, South Africa, and I think the future of our school is to increase our global outreach. But if it is anybody’s guess as to if and when we might build an international campus, I believe that we should establish the impact of our programs and then, you know, invest in campuses if and when the need arises.

Source: http://pythagurus.in/list-of-questions-for-bruner/