Golden opportunity? An insider's view of an MBA course

Perhaps the greatest disappointment upon completing an MBA is realising that you have not achieved immortality, nor discovered the alchemy for business success.

The hyperbole of the colleges and business magazines suggests an MBA qualification is the route to the boardroom, the golden ticket to managerial success. It may be all of that, but it's really up to you. It takes a certain amount of business daring to sacrifice a year's income (or two in some cases) and then dig deep for enormous fees. Luckily, I took a softer route - my employer sponsored me for the course.

So, do I now know the secrets of amassing a fortune? Frankly, if I did, would I be writing here now? In my experience, the MBA is something like an advanced version of the Leaving Certificate: it covers a host of seemingly diverse topics, requires masses of reading and classes from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day, only the textbooks don't hold all the answers. You have to provide the answers.

If you think a postgrad course is one lecture a week followed by days mulling over cappuccinos, you are in for a serious shock. The workload involved in an MBA would send you storming into the boss's office demanding either 10 more staff or a fourfold pay hike.

For eight months or so, you must hack your way through 18 subjects, 20 projects, 10 presentations, 16 exams and a dissertational tome that's unlikely to challenge the concepts of modern capitalism. Yet the real lesson is your own limitations and how to test them.

Sure, I learnt about the black arts of corporate finance, human resources and project management. I can now contemplate strategies, pinpoint core competencies and rattle on about Total Quality Management (TQM) while outlining a project's Net Present Value (NPV). But for me the essence of the MBA is teamwork and making teams work. From the moment I entered Carysfort's hallowed halls, it became obvious that, with each class requiring about three hours reading, either we were not going to sleep for eight months or we had to share out the workload.

Thankfully, you're assigned to a team within a class. The combined efforts of teams and class turn the impossible into the simply gruelling.

The highlight was not mastering formulas and ratios or learning how to break down every business problem into a simplistic boxed diagram with snappy abbreviations. It was the chance to rub shoulders with bright, brilliant people from as places such as Armenia, Russia, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Italy and from professions as diverse as medicine, engineering, concert management and US law enforcement.

Many had already honed careers on which I would have been proud to retire. Varying in age from mid-20s to late 50s, they opened my young naïve mind to the world's boundless possibilities. They were determined people, making a personal and financial commitment and, for them, there was no room for slouching. Lecturers were admonished if not performing to standard, and castigated for tardiness.

While first term was about grounding us in the basics, the second term took us into the great unknown of application. This is the realm of case analyses, of working out how great global corporations secure their position and what they should do next.

The fact that several of these giants have since gone to the wall, despite the mass admiration of thousands of MBAs is a telling sign of the potential frailty of an MBA's advice. We had case studies on Worldcom, ABB and we once even touched on Enron.

It's easy to sneer in hindsight at the fact that MBAs didn't spot the problems - nobody else did either. The fact that George Bush is a fellow MBA may be the final strike for some against spending a year and all that money on this US-derived accreditation.

In the end, I don't regret a minute of it: the pain, the embarrassing presentations, the interminable exams and the desire to strangle those who wanted to air opinions on every topic touched upon. The course has given me a broader view on life than many of the far more specific postgrads I have dabbled in and represents a far more real-life and practical lesson.

The MBA is not a guarantee of success in business, but it does give you valuable career tools. Like every course, the ultimate responsibility is on the student to use them effectively.

Michael McAleer Motoring Editor, The Irish Times