Online MBA Forum

Ok, so I had my mad moment yesterday, and it's on with the MBA and GMAT roadshow.

I had a telephone call from my MBA friend who is setting up his own business. He's just found some seed capital from a business angel, and is really enthused by the whole process. It's a particularly good situation as the business angel wants to get involved with the whole process, and add in his own expertise, which is quite different from my friends.

So he's on his way, and putting together his network. I'm waiting to see what his next steps are, this could be a really interesting adventure.

Today, I'm not going to write anything at all about MBAs, online MBAs, GMAT, or anything related to business. I'm going to simply tell you about living in New Zealand, as it is the anniversary of my first setting foot in the country.

This is a country of around 4 million people, in a geographical area around the size of the UK (which has a population of 60 million). The air is clean, the traffic problems are minimal, and the sea and rivers are relatively unpolluted. It is perfectly possible to drive in the middle of the day for some hours in the country and not see another car.

There are problems - 4 million is a very small population, and domestic markets for goods are small. And the country is a very long way from anywhere else. But with the advent of the Internet, many of these problems seem much less.

Yesterday, in the course of my normal business, I went to interview the CEO of one of the most successful (and largest) technology companies in New Zealand. During the course of conversation we started to talk about our own educational experiences. It turned out that he had studied for an MBA in the US around 6 years ago. His previous experiences of higher education had been in New Zealand, and in the UK.

He commented on how much he had enjoyed the study experience of his MBA. In part this was because he enjoyed the challenge of the MBA, and applying his experience to the work on the program. However he also remarked on how "real" the case studies and the group work had been on his MBA. It was his opinion that the US took professional education very seriously, and was particularly good at combining education and industry experience to create a really effective learning environment for students.

According to Business Week Online, there is a direct link between GMAT scores and the salaries graduates collect after their MBA. This holds absolutely true for the top 40 MBA business schools, and although the correlation is not so tight for the middle ranks, it is still a definable tendency.

Whether this is because of specific intellectual abilities, or is a result of personality traits such as determination is not explained. I suspect that it doesn't matter, either issue or a combination of factors means that if you are determined to do well enough to score highly in GMAT, you will also be the kind of person that can do well in a senoir management position.