Is Google the New McKinsey?

Most MBAs want to make money – it is still a big part of business. But for my MBA students, making money is not enough.

I teach three classes for MBA’s at UVA Darden: Software Design, Software Development, and Applied Digital Innovation. For many of my students, Google is now a top recruiting choice. It’s generally not the highest paying choice or the choice with the most professional certainty – and traditionally getting an MBA is in part about creating a kind of professional certainty for yourself. So: why Google?

I think it’s about the action. Moving to ultra-expensive Silicon Valley to take an entry-level management job is not a way to maximize your savings, at least not in the short term. Joining (or starting) the right startup after leaving a prestigious digital giant like Google is a great way to make money, but risky. The MBA that prefers Google cares about his or her skill set, and wants to be where the action is: digital disruption. Digital disruption is probably the single most exciting thing happening in business and that’s where these MBA’s want to be. At least, that’s what I hear from my students.

Marc Andreessen famously said “The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” My students want to tell the computer what to do. Regardless of whether they’re in a startup or working at a larger firm, I certainly think that’s the top skill they’re going to need.

What’s an MBA/business person to do? There’s certainly no shortage of material on how to be more ‘innovative.’ For the students I work with at Darden, I think their ability to contribute hands-on in an interdisciplinary team (designers, developers, growth hackers, data scientists, etc.) is most important. That doesn’t mean they need to be an expert in each of those disciplines – it means understanding the disciplines well enough to be a good collaborator, and being able to use the tools of design thinking to solve hard problems.

How can MBA’s learn that? Well, by doing. In my class Software Design, students take new venture projects through customer discovery, proposition testing, and product design. Basically, they learn what a design-focused product manager + owner would do in a modern agile team. In fact, it’s gone so well we created a Coursera class online called Agile Development, and now that’s now one of Coursera’s top 15 specializations.

Next, in Software Development, students prototype the venture concepts they refined using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The point isn’t to become a career software developer – clearly a business school is not the place to do that. But if you’re going to be part of a team that tells computers what to do, you want to have experience tinkering with software.

Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/darden/2017/01/25/is-google-the-new-mckinsey/

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