Month One of my Alternative MBA
In designing my alternative MBA course load, I’m applying an agile approach. I don’t know all the classes I will take, but I have a rough sense of the buckets of knowledge I need.
After reviewing a bunch of traditional MBA programs, reading online recommendations for business subjects, and studying the No-Pay MBA guide, I triaged the MBA subjects into three levels of priority.
MBA subjects that I think are high priority:
- Data analysis
- Growth and marketing
- Product design and testing
- Entrepreneurship
MBA subjects that I think are low priority:
- Family Business
- Project Management (not that I don’t want to learn this, but because I think I have enough experience in this already)
- CSR/ESG
- HR / people development / hiring
- Supply Chains
- Economics (my college major)
MBA subjects that sound interesting but I am not sure their priority yet:
- Finance, operations, and accounting
- Venture Capital
- Negotiation
- Social Psychology
- Law and policy
- Management and Leadership
My first step was to prioritize the high priority subjects into a plan for the coming months. Keeping track of all the classes and subjects started to get messy, so I mapped it with Post-its.
The diamond Post-its are certification programs. The square Post-its are individual classes. The Post-its that are torn in half are very short classes (ones I can complete in under a week). This let me see learning clusters by topic to get a sense for how much I wanted to dive into each one.
I first needed to answer: What is the most important thing to learn right now?
My hypothesis is to start with Steve Blank’s How to Build a Startup. Steve Blank literally wrote the book on start ups and I think I would love this class. It would also be very applicable to the work I am doing now with a start up. However, it estimates about 40 hours of work. I want to test whether entrepreneurship was where I should start before I dive in.
To test my hypothesis: Take the introductory class “An Entire MBA in One Course” (Udemy’s most popular MOOC of all time). This is a survey course and will show me subjects I may want to dig deeper into. This is a very short class; one that I could finish within a week.
~~Cue montage of me completing this class in about a week.~~
The class was extremely helpful for testing my hypothesis (less so in teaching “an entire MBA” though…). I validated I should start with entrepreneurship. But I asked myself: what is my assumption that says Steve Blank’s 40+ hour class is the best way to learn that? I believe it is because he is a master of customer discovery and validating business plans. That’s where I am spending 75% of my time right now.
So I realized what I actually want to learn right now is about user discovery. Returning to my Post-it note wall, I grabbed the four hour mini-class Insightful Customer Interviews for Product Managers. My board also has another short class focused on a related topic: Marketing Innovative Products (about 10 hours). I made a note of that as a possible follow-up.
But wait: electives!
I want to round out my alternative MBA with some electives, which the Princeton Review describes should “provide a narrow focus” in a degree subject. These are classes that will give more advanced instruction into the topics I think will be most important to me. At the outset, these are things like product design and development, data analysis, energy, and entrepreneurship.
However, electives can also be classes that are not strictly “business” related, but that are simply great. I hyperbolically dub these the “life changing classes.” Of the tens of thousands of MOOCs available, which are the top 0.01%? The ones that are truly one in a thousand.
I culled such classes from Pickard’s book, from internet rankings, and from the highest rated ones on different MOOC platforms. Class Central has such a list here. I found some that look truly great, like this one, this one, and this one.
My Just-In-Time approach means I don’t need to plan it all out. Instead, I focused on ROI for time to complete vs. improving my future course of studies.
I decided on “Learning How to Learn” (another one of the most popular MOOCs of all time). At an estimated 15 hours, I thought this would have a very high potential ROI as it would improve the rest of my learning experience. (Note after completing it: It was an excellent class that I recommend to anyone who hasn’t already learned about the neuroscience of how we learn. It’s been extremely beneficial in the weeks since I took it.)
My plan for my first month became:
- Take An Entire MBA in One Course.
- Start (and quickly finish): Insightful Customer Interviews for Product Managers and begin Learning How to Learn.
- Based on what I learn from “Insightful Customer Interviews,” I’ll either take another short course on the topic, move onto Steve Blank’s class, or reassess a new plan of action.
(Note after finishing week two: I pivoted to entrepreneurial strategy and took Harvard’s Disruptive Strategy course by the late but legendary professor Clayton Christensen. I am following this with Steve Blank’s more tactical How to Build a Startup.)
