School vs. School: London Business School v. Oxford Saïd
Fish and chips or bangers and mash? Marks & Spencer or Harvey Nichols? London or Oxford? Choosing between two incredible options isn’t easy, particularly when they’re so comparable. And the same goes for top business schools. How do you know which MBA program fits your needs? That’s why we’re here.
Continue reading…MBA in the UK: Is London or Manchester Right For You?
With close to 9 million residents, London has the fifth-largest metropolitan economy in the world and is responsible for producing 22 percent of total GDP in the United Kingdom.
Continue reading…Register for the 2019 Forté MBA Forums for Women
Registration is open for the 2019 Forté MBA Forums. Designed for women considering an MBA, the Forums provide an ideal opportunity to learn more about the value of an MBA from admissions reps, alumnae, and current students at top business schools. Open to all women—career changers, college students planning the future, or career professionals looking to go to the next level—the events provide a distinct MBA advantage.
About the Forté MBA Forums
The MBA Forums are FREE and held in 11 cities across the U.S. and Europe. The events are a chance for women to build their peer support network and meet other successful businesswomen from a diverse range of industries. The MBA Forums offers exclusive insights into the MBA admissions process.
“The Forté Forum event provided the exact insights we were looking for,” said Madeline Keulen, Forté MBA Forum attendee and 2019 HBS alum. “Most of the schools I was interested in had representatives at the event who could speak to the specifics of their programs, and panels of alumni enhanced the richness of the experience through their personal stories of why they chose to pursue an MBA. I have a much better sense of where I’d fit best.”
2019 Event Dates and Locations
- August 12, Washington, D.C.
- August 13, Houston, TX
- August 14, Atlanta, GA
- August 15, Boston, MA
- August 19, Los Angeles, CA
- August 20, Seattle, WA
- August 22, San Francisco, CA
- August 26, Toronto, Canada
- August 27, Chicago, IL
- August 28, New York City, NY
- October 29, London, England
Sample Event Format
6–8:15 p.m. – Registration and School Fair
- Connect with admissions at top business schools
- Learn more about the admissions process
- Find the right school for you
- Networking reception
7–8 p.m. – MBA Alumnae Panel
Get advice and hear stories from top MBA women in a range of industries and at various career stages. Learn what motivated them to earn their MBA and the successes and challenges they’ve faced.
8:15–9 p.m. – Admissions Panel
Enjoy a panel of seasoned MBA admissions professionals from top programs. Learn more about admissions requirements, researching schools, applications, and financing.
Visit the site to see more details about locations and to register!
5 Most Affordable UK MBA Programs
The UK is home to many top business schools known worldwide. From London Business School to Oxford Saïd, many cutting edge institutions offer MBA educations second to none. However, these schools also tend to come with a hefty price tag. An MBA from LBS will cost you around £82,000 ($99,548 USD) while Oxford Saïd costs £57,200 ($69,440 USD).
So, where can you go to school in the UK and earn an AACSB accredited MBA for far less? We’re highlighting five of the most affordable UK MBA programs below—three in the £18,000 range and two in the £30,000 range.
How Virtual Work Can Learn from the Virtual Classroom
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How do you connect a workforce spread across different cities, countries and continents?
Finding the answer to that question is among the biggest challenges and opportunities for modern organizations—businesses, non-profits and academic institutions alike. Virtual collaboration and telecommuting are nothing new, but the technology that supports these practices is evolving faster than it ever has before. In fact, the first trend in Deloitte’s 2017 Global Human Capital Trends report indicates that the constant pressure to adapt to digital transformation and create “the organization of the future” is the most important challenge facing executives around the world.
Virtual collaboration is rapidly becoming important in the academic world as well, with leading schools like USC Marshall offering mostly online education programs, including its top 10 online MBA program. These programs challenge and teach students to learn, collaborate and communicate more effectively in virtual classrooms as well as in business settings.
Deloitte also makes the point that individuals usually adapt to technology quickly, while organizations take longer to adapt to changes in technology. As a result, there is considerable demand for business leaders and professionals who are not only familiar working and collaborating within virtual environments, but who can also lead and manage virtual teams.
Of course, this is more than just a distance problem. Global businesses face culture and time differences, and many offices may even operate with different technology and processes from each other. The organizations that pull ahead in the new digital age will be those that can continuously look forward to how they can effectively utilize technology to overcome distance, cultural and various other barriers to true collaboration in a virtual space. Fortunately, many of the technology limitations that inhibited remote collaboration are disappearing.
The Future of Virtual Collaboration: Already Here in the Classroom
There is still a lot of room for both software providers and businesses to grow. Although the future of virtual collaboration looks promising, the best practices for using virtual collaboration tools may not be where you think: Instead of businesses, it may actually be universities leading the charge.
In 2017, for example, the USC Marshall School of Business collaborated with IBM to teach students virtual collaboration skills. Students were given a group project with one big caveat: They would never meet other members working on the project in person. USC worked with IBM to create an online collaboration platform, so that students could work together remotely.
“Once we moved to a single collaboration platform using the IBM Connections tool … all of a sudden, they’re in this single space,” said Peter Cardon, Academic Director and Professor at the USC Marshall School of Business. “They’re integrating their work. There’s this level of accountability. And they can see what one another are doing to really contribute to the project, and that dramatically improves their ability to produce really quality results.”
According to Cardon, the success of the initial project created demand for similar initiatives designed to encourage collaboration among students across the world and from different cultures. This in turn shows how the skills taught by these initiatives as well as learnt intrinsically in top online MBA programs are critical for solving the challenges that inhibit the adoption of enterprise virtual collaboration.
USC’s Online MBA (OMBA) program provides additional examples of how virtual collaboration can be used successfully to solve real-world business problems. Courses are structured so that students participate in two live video sessions each week; this gives them opportunities to ask questions and more actively engage with faculty. The program also includes a one-unit course that focuses entirely on virtual collaboration, including best practices and technologies for enabling successful collaboration in the workplace. According to Miriam Burgos, Academic Director of the OMBA program, students are given opportunities to reflect on how the skills they learn through virtual collaboration influence their leadership and business expertise.
Students in the online MBA program must also work together to analyze and solve real-world business problems. In one of the first semester-long group projects, for example, students analyze data-driven business strategies. All the data and analytics for these projects are done and coordinated remotely by students from around the world. Each group must then virtually present their findings at the end of the semester.
“It’s incredible to see … how students from all over the world—from the U.S. to England to Dubai—are actively networking in an online environment,” Burgos told MetroMBA. “The live class sessions get them engaged with the coursework and each other, and they can take these skills outside the classroom. Students often tell us that what they learn in the classroom makes them stronger leaders in their workplaces … they start seeing an immediate impact on their careers.”
What Businesses Can Learn from the Virtual Classroom
Encouraging the use of virtual collaboration in business settings has historically been an uphill battle. For instance, many collaboration tools face limited user adoption because they do not offer a seamless transition between employees’ workflow and the collaboration tool; this will change as pressure mounts on businesses to embed collaboration functionality with existing tools and processes. Furthermore, a new generation of business professionals will have already gained proficiency in leading and managing online, collaborative projects; these professionals will be able to shift business processes to be more accommodating of virtual collaboration. At the same time, enterprise virtual collaboration will evolve due to several key industry trends, including:
• Communication channel variety: The number of potential channels for collaboration will grow. Some employees shine in face-to-face meetings, but others will shine most in virtual environments. The businesses that master digital transformation will provide a mixture of synchronous collaboration, such as real-time video meetings, and asynchronous collaboration tools, such as file sharing or cloud-based content management.
• Collaboration integrated with content and workflow: The best collaboration tools are only effective if users adopt them. This will push businesses to seamlessly integrate collaboration tools with project management and workflow tools so that collaboration can take place within existing business process and tools.
• Spontaneous Virtual Collaboration: One of the central challenges of virtual collaboration in the past is that it is difficult to mimic in-person experiences like spontaneous brainstorming sessions around the water cooler. Technology integration will help facilitate this; for instance, when chat and video call functionality is integrated with file sharing, it is much easier to discuss designs, plans or other documents while making changes in real time.
In the long-term, businesses will also have access to technology that dramatically alters the virtual collaboration landscape by placing emphasis on more realistic immersion and connection between employees. This is already starting to take shape in technology solutions. For example, platforms such as Cisco Spark VR allow teams to collaborate in full virtual reality environments. Many of these solutions remain in early access or beta testing stages. The solutions’ potential to connect employees across the world, however, is limitless. In the case of Cisco Spark VR, the platform creates virtual rooms where people can meet to share 3D images and documents.
Yet, the potential for these platforms extends far beyond meeting in VR spaces. Imagine a future where artificial intelligence makes video calling remote employees a seamless experience, with AI providing virtual name badges and getting rid of background noise automatically. It may be a while before we see full VR conference rooms, but if you want leaders who are at the cutting edge of virtual collaboration, it’s time to look inside the virtual classroom.
To learn more about the USC Marshall School of Business Online MBA, visit the Marshall website.
From Just One Woman to 39 Percent of the Class—and Other Ways LBS Has Changed Over the Past 50 Years
The 2017-18 academic year marks the 50th anniversary of the MBA program at London Business School (LBS). Since 1968, the school has offered a two-year Master of Science (MSc) in Business Studies degree program—the original MBA—and has continuously refined its offerings since that time. In celebration of the 50-year mark, LBS is looking back at how far the program has come.
The Beginning
In 1966, two years after London Business School opened its doors, the school launched a two-year Master of Science (MSc) in Business Studies. The first class consisted of 35 men and just one woman, with the average age around 25 years old. The goal of the two-year degree was to prepare students for employment. In fact, according to the website, employment was seen as “one of the most significant aspects of the school’s progress at this stage of its development.”
After graduation, most students joined manufacturing firms, and a few went into merchant banking, management consultancy, and advertising. Their job functions included marketing and financial executives, planning personnel, and personal assistant roles.
As for the feedback on the first year of study, a report on the class stated, “The overall academic performance of the students during the year has been more than satisfactory. The course of studies is arduous and the number of hours of work required is much above average, imposing a considerable workload both on students and staff.”
The Early Years
In the early years of the program, growth was slow but steady. In 1971, the class size grew to 86 students and by 1975, 108 students were admitted, including 16 women. Throughout this time, LBS made various modifications to its program.
- In 1973, LBS introduced the International Management Program, which gave 10 students the change to study abroad in Paris or at New York University.
- In 1978, the International Management Program expanded to include Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Chicago, and top European institutions.
The 1980s
The 1980s were a time of change for LBS and the MBA program. During these years, banking and finance overtook manufacturing as the top industry for graduates. In addition, LBS continued to increase its international reputation; about half of its class comprised non-British students by the end of the decade, with more 30 nationalities represented. Most importantly, the Class of 1987 was the first to be awarded an MBA rather than an MSc degree. In an annual report, the school stated, “This more accurately and effectively conveys the spirit of the program, and the type of qualifications our students are aiming for.”
- In 1982, LBS introduced a new part-time master’s program. The first class accepted 60 people and allowed students to complete their studies over two and a half to three years while still working.
- In 1984, three more U.S. schools joined the International Exchange Program including Dartmouth Tuck, MIT Sloan, and Northwestern Kellogg.
The 1990s
In the 1990s, LBS adopted a more flexible format for its MBA program. The school added increased training in “soft skills” and introduced computer-based management simulation games. The class size also increased to 271 students, with 79 percent of students coming from outside the United Kingdom. Consulting became the top choice for graduates, and manufacturing shrunk to just 11 percent.
- In 1992, LBS introduced a language requirement where students must be fluent in English and one other language to graduate. In addition, the part-time master’s was re-launched as the Executive MBA.
- By 1996, entrepreneurship became an important part of the program, and the school launched several electives with an entrepreneurial focus, including “Small Business Management” and “Financing the Entrepreneurial Business.”
- 1999 was the first Financial Times Global MBA ranking, and LBS ranked #1 in Europe and #8 in the world—the only non-U.S. school in the top 10.
The 2000s
By the 2000s, LBS had become a global leader in MBA education—and in 2009 it became the first non-U.S. school to top the Financial Times ranking. The MBA program was reformatted for increased flexibility, allowing students to graduate in 15 to 21 months. The class size also increased to 315 students, with 89 percent of the class from 59 countries outside the United Kingdom.
- In 2001, LBS ranked as the best Global MBA by the Financial Times, and Forbes ranked LBS as #1 in Europe and #2 in the world for return on investment.
- In 2003, LBS became the first European school to join the Forté Foundation to increase women in business, and in 2005, women made up 22 percent of the class.
The 2010s
In the last decade, London Business School once again revised its MBA program to give students even greater flexibility. The school also continued to increase its size, welcoming 468 students by 2018—12 times the size of the first class in 1968. In addition, women now make up 39 percent of the MBA class, and students represent 77 different nationalities.
- In 2010, LBS started its Incubator Program to help entrepreneurs. As of 2017, 58 businesses have completed the incubator, raising more than £31 million and creating 440 full-time jobs.
- In 2012, LBS launched the Global Business Exchange (GBE), giving students the opportunity to spend a week in another country with options ranging from South Africa to the United States.
- In 2016, LBS completed its first fundraising campaign, raising £125 million.
To learn more about the 50th anniversary celebration of London Business School’s MBA, visit the school website.
