Online MBA Forum

After Failing Economist's comments I asked my friend who had been most useful for his business, and he said fellow students. One of them had been instrumental in helping him find the second amount of venture capital, and one of them was now his business partner.

He too said that outside the classroom was the vital time for networking, and in particular he was impressed with how much people were willing to share their personal networks with him. He said that the fees for his MBA had been justified many times over, and he had the beginnings of a network that could give him input in all the areas of business that he could envisage using for the forseeable future. He also said that his network spreads all over the world - Europe, Asia, the US and myself in New Zealand.

One of my good friends studied for his Executive MBA last year in Insead in Switzerland, one of the top MBA institutions in Europe. His program was full-time, although he studied most of the time at home, with tuition blocks and online programs during the year, and group work in different related institutions, including ones in France and Singapore.

Throughout the year he used the tuition and exposure to professors, lecturers and business consultants to develop and refine several business propositions that he had, until at last he had selected one that he thought had the best chance of success.

This year he has used Insead contacts to find some seed capital and develop the proposal into a good business plan plus a prototype of his product. He is well on the way to finding venture capital funding to bring his product to market and to build his company.

All this stuff about MBAs and GMAT is making me feel rather stressed. For most people studying this kind of program, either examinations are looming or major assignments are being prepared, and the last push to the end of the academic year is starting.

If you are on a program that started at the beginning of the calender year then it's more likely that you are just settling down into the rhythm of study - a much better place to be. But most people follow the academic year, and May and June can be really stressful times.

This kind of stress can be good, because you learn to use it to propel yourself for effort. In business, you have to learn to smooth out the stress peeks and troughs, so consider this as practice for the real thing.