In hindsight, was it worth it?
26th January 2004
Do the letters MBA suggest naked ambition? Hugh Thompson finds out the degree's value.
Everyone who takes an often expensive and always time-consuming MBA course does so for a reason. The most classic is naked ambition. The course offers a way furthering a career, not least by changing direction and pace.
But the days when MBAs were few and far between and only the best of the best took them are gone. Others take them out of intellectual curiosity about their business life and desire to be better equipped...
... Paul May also did an Open University MBA. He is a leading loss adjuster and one-time President of the Chartered Institute of Loss Adjusters. He has just launched Concordia Consulting, having previously run Resolve, which specialised in international reinsurance claims.
"My first reason for taking an MBA course" he recalls, "was to improve my understanding of my clients' strategic problems, especially in business-interruption claims I was employed to solve. But it also helped me run my own business with more confidence and strategic analysis.
"Most importantly, when someone offered to buy Resolve I didn't react emotionally but just saw it as another problem that I had to analyse. While others do MBAs to accelerate their development, I feel I did mine to validate my experience" ...
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