HBS versus Kellogg

In this blog, I plan to compare the MBA programs at HBS and Kellogg. My blog is an output of discussions with Kellogg MBAs and my own experience at HBS – so this is entirely my perspective. It is advised to take this blog as another data point in your overall research about different schools.

HBS is known for its case based pedagogy. Doing about 600 cases (In a class filled with brilliant colleagues), with each case forcing to think as a protagonist really sharpens one’s intuition in taking the best decision. While I personally love this method of teaching since it brings different perspectives to the table, it is not best suited for courses like finance and accounting. While professors do their best to ensure the case method works for finance and accounting (through additional reading material & type of cases), I feel a traditional lecture would work better in these courses. Kellogg has a mix of cases and lecture-based classes depending on the type of course.

Kellogg is known for its emphasis on team. All courses are structured with a team component to it. Each course has about 3-5 team cases (apart from 5-8 individual cases) where about 4-5 students analyze a problem and submit a paper with their recommendations. All these papers are graded. In the first year, the groups are formed by pairing up students from diverse backgrounds in terms their personal and professional experiences. This way, Kellogg believes that there are fruitful discussions with diverse opinion. Additionally students learn practice collaborative style of working, which is expected to translate it in to their work-life.

From the second year onwards, students themselves select groups. With about 4 courses in each quarter, this translates to about 16 assignments with different teams. While it probably helps a student become a team player, the sheer task of coordinating between so many teams itself is exhaustive! Students at Kellogg find different ways to manage their teamwork – being a leader in one & acting as a team player in others. At HBS, only a few courses have team component to it but HBS has some thing called learning teams (similar to Kellogg each learning team has people from different backgrounds) in first year. Every day the learning team meets before classes to briefly discuss the cases. This helps students clarify any questions / share thoughts before entering into a class of 90 people.

Another big difference is the way the program is organized. HBS program is a semester-based system (2 semester in each year) while Kellogg program is a quarter-based system (3 quarters in each year). In a quarter-based system, a student has more options of courses (Obviously with a limitation of lesser depth in each course). In a quarter system, the courses are also taught in a quicker way – leading to a lot of course load. However a relatively new development in HBS is that it started floating half courses that basically are short courses completing in half a semester. HBS also started intensive courses which is basically a full semester course compressed to fit in half a semester (Duration of each class being double that of the normal class). HBS is on this path to make sure the students have more options to choose from in their second year.

Another big difference between HBS and Kellogg are the mandatory courses. At HBS, the first year has required curriculum when all courses are mandatory. The courses include Leadership, Marketing, FRC (Financial Reporting & Control), TOM (Technology, Operations & Management) & Finance-I (In the first semester), BGIE (Business, Government & International Economy), LCA (Leadership & Corporate Accountability), TEM (The Entrepreneurial Manager), Strategy & Finance-II (In the second semester). HBS started a brand new eleventh course called FIELD spanning across the first year. Kellogg on the other hand has something called core courses (which could be waived upon passing an examination). They are Financial Accounting, Finance-I, Business Strategy, Marketing, Operations Management, Decision Sciences-I&II, Micro Economics, Leadership in Organizations (You can’t waive this course). Kellogg has a greater flexibility of choosing the courses & also the quarters in which the courses are taken. In addition to these, one could choose electives in their first year at Kellogg. I personally love the HBS structure (probably I am biased!) because all courses in my opinion are very much required for a good understanding of any business. Some argue that the mandatory structure forces a student to take a course that he is already aware of through previous work experience. While all courses are mandatory in first year at HBS, there is a huge pool of electives available in second year.

- Pavan Sirpa (Harvard MBA, Class of 2012, Read Bio)

Global Competitiveness - An engineer-to-MBA's perspective

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been thinking about Global Competitiveness. What is it? How do you think about it? Many companies are expanding their geographic reach every year by opening up their new subsidiaries. Are they indeed going global? Are they prepared to handle the competition from established local/global players? If I were asked some or all of the above questions before I came to business school, I would have had a “fuzzy” answer. To be frank, as an engineer, I would NOT have cared to think about global competition as long as my engineering project was doing well.

However, the academic training in business administration at Harvard Business School has prepared me to think about issues in a structured way. I have been trained to think about issues from a 30,000-foot level and then dive in where the crux lies. Let’s see how we can “peel the onion” when it comes to subject like “Global Competitiveness”. For me, global competitiveness is a three-dimensional subject. For a company to be truly global competitive player, it needs to rank high on the following criteria.

Innovation

When it comes to competition, 21^st century is all about innovations. Companies need to steadily innovate and be on the leading edge of technological transformations. Number of patents filed, R&D expenditure as a % of sales, and number of “innovation awards” received are couple of metrics to rank companies on the Innovation Scale. However, please don’t think that innovation is just about having the most number of patents. Those patents need to be relevant – in other words they need to be used in real life products.

Local Responsiveness

Why did Wal-Mart fail to establish its brand in some countries? Why did e-bay fail to be leading auction brand in China? How did Haier (refrigerators in particular) succeed in the US despite being a Chinese brand? How is Samsung successfully capturing the market share from Nokia in India? One of the primary reasons for all the above is that these companies did/didn’t [consistently] understand the local needs and thus did/didn’t [consistently] modify their products/services to cater to the local market. Countries may differ in local tastes and preferences, traditional practices, government regulations/priorities and more. Hence, it’s very important that companies do the due diligence and adapt their products/services to meet the local needs.

Some may argue for the emergence of enormous global markets for standardized consumer products such as McDonald's hamburgers, Coca-Cola, Levi Strauss jeans, and Samsung TVs. However, these are extreme examples [outliers] and shouldn’t be used as justifications against local customization.

Efficiency

Companies have lots of resources (people, plants, etc.) but how efficient are they in deploying these resources? To evaluate how a company manages its work force, we need to ask - What is the revenue per employee? What is the ratio of number of patents filed to the number of R&D staff? And more!
Another important dimension is manufacturing efficiency. Most companies have moved their manufacturing centers from the west to the east. Around 90% of the products that we use today are made in China. Why? Low Cost, Low Cost, Low Cost!!! Is China the answer? May be not! Labor costs have recently been rising in China and countries such as Vietnam, Mexico, Philippines are [re]gaining their significance. Hence, companies need to be proactive in moving to these low cost centers thus directly impacting their cost structure and addressing competition.

In summary – To be globally competitive, companies need to understand and execute on the Three Essentials of Business – Find innovative ways to meet the local consumer needs, do that at a Low Cost, and make the process scalable.

- Pankaj Agarwal (Harvard MBA, Class of 2012, Read Bio)

The MBA journey: An engineer's MBA (What I learnt in my first year at HBS!)

As I mentioned in my first blog “My Engineer-To-MBA Story”, my motivation for pursuing MBA was to prepare myself to be an entrepreneur. Although I say this, I didn’t exactly know how an MBA would prepare me. One reason for an MBA that most engineers (including me) quote in their applications is they want to learn marketing and finance. Although this is true and very relevant to those pursuing those career paths, there are many other things that help increase understanding of businesses. When I was heading to HBS, a close friend told me “MBA will transform you”. I nodded my head wondering what it meant. Looking back now, I feel my thought process did change. In this blog, I have attempted at capturing the contributing factors below.

The first contributing factor is the classroom experience. I am referring to more than just learning a few frameworks in marketing and finance. In one year, we discussed around 350 cases among 90 students from 26 different countries. The case discussions not only gave me an opportunity to debate marketing/finance concepts but also an opportunity to look at various business models. The fact that I was part of the engaging discussion among people from different backgrounds (ranging from consultants to bankers to those who worked in industry) made it much more enriching. Before HBS, as an engineer I would/could think of a good business only in terms of a great idea and a good execution. Now I think of business in a more holistic way ranging from target market, customer segmentation, business model, strategy, operations, capital structure, human resources in addition to just idea and execution.

The second contributing factor is the peer group at HBS. Like I mentioned, the diversity is both in terms of geographic footprint and also backgrounds. Because of this diverse set of people with rich experiences, I was constantly learning beyond case discussions. For example often I would get into a serious discussion with another classmate about his country after the BGIE (Business Government and International Economy) class. In other situations, I would get into a serious discussion with a classmate who worked with Google to understand how different tech companies are from manufacturing companies. Beyond these, I constantly heard people discussing about startups, markets, economies, and government policies. Before HBS, most of these things didn’t make great sense to me. But now as I understand these things, I feel that I understand the world better than I used to.

The third contributing factor for me is the confidence I gained in myself after completing one year at HBS. This is not mutually exclusive from the first and second factors I talked above. The cases we discussed often forced me to think as a protagonist and form a point of view. Over time, as I formed opinion and debated with my classmates, my thought process got refined and I started developing business intuition. The transformation has indeed boosted my confidence. As I learnt more and more from my classmates who worked in different fields, I felt more comfortable about different industries and this sense of knowledge also contributed to an increase in my confidence.

I feel great about what I learnt in my first year and am looking forward to an equally enriching second year starting this week.

- Pavan Sirpa (Harvard MBA, Class of 2012, Read Bio)

My Engineer-To-MBA Story (Pavan Sirpa, IITB, ITC, Harvard MBA)

Successful entrepreneurs fascinated me since my high school and I always aspired to become one myself. My choice of pursuing Mechanical Engineering in college was not a strategic decision (The fact that I was good at Mathematics and Physics and that most Indians pursue engineering in college probably played into my decision). While in college I wanted to do MBA since I believed MBA would help me build requisite skills and relevant network that would be of great use when I am ready to launch myself as an entrepreneur. The question for me was always when do I pursue my MBA. After talking to many people, I was convinced to leave for a business school after working for a few years in order to get maximum leverage out of the program (For any one who is confused, I strongly recommend working at least a couple of years before pursuing MBA).

While I was recruiting in my fourth year at IIT Bombay, I was looking for opportunities that were not heavy on technical side but would help me develop managerial skills. ITC Ltd fit very well with my objectives where I ended up working for 4 years in a rotational development program. I worked in projects, maintenance, quality and production. At ITC, I appreciated the complexity in running organizations successfully – leaders, managers, culture and systems play significant roles in determining the success of an organization. Working in factories was a very enriching experience – not only was there a lot of action, but also huge interaction between departments and people. That helped me understand people’s behaviors, team dynamics, project management, employee communication and made me a better manager. I also cherish my interactions with unions at ITC. Dealing with unions not only improved my patience but also my negotiation skills making me more mature as a manager.

After my four years at ITC in different roles, slope of my learning curve started to decrease and I reached my ZOTRA (refer “Should Engineers get an MBA? If yes, when?”). As per my original plan, I applied to B-Schools and was fortunate to make it to HBS. After my first year at HBS, I see huge change in my thought process when I look at organizations and business models. This wouldn’t have been possible without the greatly designed course structure at HBS, brilliant faculty and interactions with diverse people.

- Pavan Sirpa (Harvard MBA, Class of 2012, Read Bio)

Should Engineers get an MBA? If yes, when?

Yes, I highly recommend that engineers get an MBA. The top three reasons I can think of are the following -

1. MBA broadens your perspective significantly by introducing you to non-engineering concepts such as those in marketing, strategy, finance, operations, business ethics, entrepreneurship and many more. 
2. With an MBA, you are bound to get extra attention and credibility in your professional career – something that will offer you greater opportunities to make an impact by taking on meaningful responsibilities.
3. During your MBA, you come to know a diverse set of people some of whom also become your life-long friends. In business world, connections that you have define “you” to some extent. You can always tap your network to get things done efficiently.

However, the timing of an MBA is critical to make sure that you transition to a “business professional career” only after having had the best from your engineering career. Let's look at a typical engineer's career profile as shown below.

 

 

Like other professionals, engineers are also motivated to perform on their first job. There is a significant level of satisfaction and fun given the huge on-the-job learning opportunities coupled with prompt recongition from the immediate supervisors. In my case, my boss applauded me for consistently coming out with lots of innovative ideas. I filed multiple patents every year and also created many hardware prototypes (read proof-of-concepts) from scratch.

However, in a couple of years the exuberation begins to fade. The job becomes less interesting and sometimes also very redundant. Most of what you do becomes like doing a solved problem albeit in a slightly different context. If you just sit on your job for a couple of years (doing nothing extra-ordinary), your company will promote you to lead a team of engineers. That is indeed a good news, but then the question is – Are you prepared to handle the responsibility (designing (hiring/ firing) the team and setting up team interaction processes to create a good team dynamics, motivating the team, communicating with cross-functional team managers and also with the top management and much more) of a manager? Do you have the right set of skills and credibility to match your new job? A newly promoted manager gets just a few weeks of training from the company which is mostly spent “celebrating” the new job and higher pay check. Perhaps at that point, you feel the need for a more formal and extended duration of business management education but then it's too late to explore.

Now, the obvious question pops up - When is then the right time to pursue a management degree? I have identified a ZOTRA (Zone Of TRAnsition - please see the image below) in a typical engineer's career profile. Every engineer should be aware of his ZOTRA and plan to leave for an MBA after he has delivered a “stellar” performance for around 3-4 years. Most engineers (including me) tend to totally disregard/ignore their ZOTRA due to peer pressure, influence from the boss, internal resistance to shift from the comfort zone and so on and so forth. However, this time (once you are in ZOTRA) is right because of many reasons – your confidence level is high and are motivated to achieve more, you can get good recommendations from your mentors/bosses, you have “fresh” stories to write in your business school application and your age is very close to the median age range of prospective business school students/applicants.

Immediately after your MBA, you would most likely assume the title of a manager/senior manager. However, unlike a manager without an MBA, you would have a solid tripod pedestal (business concepts, soft skills and solid network) that will assist in making you a great manager.

 

- Pankaj Agarwal (Harvard MBA, Class of 2012, Read Bio)

Engineering Degrees & Work Experience Prior to Harvard Business School

Looking at the profiles of my class mates (Class of 2012), I couldn't stop myself to dig deeper and come up with some more relevant datapoints. 
 

First of all, I looked at the engineering degrees of these engineer-to-MBAs and came up with the following chart.
     

Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering degrees are dominant (representing more than 50% of the total pool). It makes sense to some extent in that most undergraduate/graduate schools have these two departments highly “over-represented”. However, over 50% representation of these degrees in B Schools creates mixed feelings for an electrical/mechanical engineer applying for an MBA (at harvard). There is always a fear of potentially falling into a “me-too” applicant pool category. That leads to hypothesize that engineers with the most represented engineering degrees (as in the chart above) need to work harder in proving their uniqueness. Having said that, those who pursued a very unique undergraduate engineering major (say genetic engineering, bio-medical, etc) are going to have some “comfort” in crafting their uniqueness. 
 

Secondly, I looked into how many of us had more than one academic degree prior to business school. Only 33 out of 77 students have more than one degree. That's around 43%. Not bad! I am sure this data point will instill huge confidence in those who have just one degree but sound professional experience. 

Lastly, I looked at the number of years of experience these engineers had before coming to Harvard and came up with the following column chart.
     

Remember bell curve? That's true even here. The median and mode is 4 years and the standard deviation is 1.5. I hope all the above data points in this blog and earlier blogs give some relevant insights to engineers aspiring for an MBA (at Harvard Business School). 

- Pankaj Agarwal (Harvard MBA, Class of 2012, Read Bio)

Industries that engineer-to-harvard mba pursued

“Are you crazy? You are applying to the MBA program at Harvard Business School (HBS)”, said one of my close friends to me. I was trained as an engineer to ask as many whys as possible and hence naturally asked him “Why? What's wrong with that?” He smiled and softly whispered in my ears - “Are you a consultant/investment banker/finance professional? Don't you know that HBS doesn't take in engineers?” I nodded to his rhetorical question and he went on to suggest which business schools would “like” me. Applying to Harvard University was in itself an honor for me and so I prepared my application without talking much about it to my colleagues. I applied and “luckily” got in. However, there are many engineers who have had misguided apprehensions about business schools. I do not know much about other business schools but Harvard Business School admits quite a good number of engineers. 
 

Below is a snapshot of the official data at http://www.hbs.edu/about/statistics/mba.html - this data is not relevant enough for practicing engineers who want to get more specific data on the types of engineers admitted to HBS.

Feeling the need to fill up the gap, I did some research on the backgrounds of my classmates at HBS. Here we go!

Out of the total enrollment of 903 students, 77 were engineers at some point in their career. That's a huge 8.5%. This hits the nail right on its head and removes any negative illusions that engineers may have while applying to Harvard. But, given that engineering is such a broad domain, some of my juniors also expressed interest to know which industries did these engineers-to-MBA's worked in. It was a good question and motivated me to come up with a pie-chart as shown below. Isn't the pool very diverse? However, I was surprised to see that there was none from Clean Energy/Clean Technology, Environmental Conservation and Telecommunications. May be not too many from these domains applied in our year. Or may be they did. In either case, I strongly feel that those belonging to the above fields have a “fairer” chance given that business schools always want to increase the diversity of the incoming class.

- Pankaj Agarwal (Harvard MBA, Class of 2012, Read Bio)