What is likely to be covered in a normal EMBA class?
An EMBA class is less likely to go according to plan. I will have a plan for the class, but quite often a really interesting thing comes up in the discussion and I don’t want to just ignore it because I have to follow my plan. Normally, my planning is a lot more flexible, and I leave a lot more time for discussions that you can’t predict in advance.
Learning from the experience of others is a big part of the value in an executive MBA. My view: Don’t try to kill those kinds of discussions. Let them flourish, but at some point you have to rein them in. For me, that has always been the challenge. How do we make sure we get all this experience into the classroom discussion without overwhelming the material we have to cover?
How do you relate that back to subject material that initially spurred the discussion?
The topics specifically covered in the core course I teach in corporate finance are mainly issues surrounding valuation and capital structure. For instance, how do firms finance themselves?
That is a pretty rich set of topics to get student input on, because invariably EMBA students are working on exactly those types of problems. It’s not that challenging to get it back to the material; the harder part is the nuances that come up in execution. Often, that is where the students have an interesting perspective. The theory will say, ‘You should take investment projects in these situations,’ and a student will point out an organizational challenge that makes it difficult to execute that policy. Those issues of execution often show up in the classroom discussion. The theory says one thing, but in reality you have to deal with different situations. How do we deal with those nuances? That is where the discussion gets incredibly interesting.
Why would someone opt for an Executive MBA instead of a full-time MBA?
If a person is in a very good position at their firm, the opportunity cost of leaving that position to go to a full-time program would be very high. That would be one reason. An Executive MBA is a good choice for people in a strong career path in their current organization who need to develop skills to push them over the top.
The other advantage of an Executive MBA is that the scheduling of the program can be accomplished while maintaining your career. The EMBA group meets every two weeks on Fridays and Saturdays. Obviously, these people have an incredibly difficult workweek with their careers and family life, but the scheduling of the EMBA allows them to juggle all those different things in their life.
Antonio Bernardo is a professor of finance at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Reach him at (310) 825-2198 or [email protected].
