Life, distilled by Will Critchlow

It’s easy to feel the hate for MBAs - especially if you hang out in the startup or online marketing world (e.g. 1, 2).

I have a very different viewpoint.

After my undergraduate degree (pure and applied mathematics at the University of Cambridge) I stuck around in Cambridge for a one-year course entitled “part III” - effectively a one year masters in mathematics.

Part III is described on the website in typical Cambridge style as “not an easy course”. This is a bit like maths professors using the word “trivial” when they mean “very hard, but previously solved”. I found part III hard.

One of the courses I took was financial modelling at the Judge Institute (the business school in Cambridge). This course is part of the MBA syllabus and we sat alongside MBA students. It was not easy for those of us doing it as part of an immersive mathematics course. The MBA guys were doing this across a whole range of disciplines and it’s probably this that is the source of my respect for the institution as a whole.

Although I don’t have the patience to go back into academia now and I love building a business in the real world I am always watching out for ways I can learn more about the theory of business.

I think the biggest three distinct benefits of an MBA are:

1. Learning to think with academic rigour - diving deep into specialist subjects and getting an advanced education in diverse areas - see the example of the financial modelling course above
2. Real case studies. One of the reasons I love articles from the Harvard Business Review and would love to attend in-person lectures on business case studies is the power that history has for teaching us about the future. I hated history as a subject in high school, but I increasingly seek out “history” as a source of learning. The majority of books I read are biographies or other factual accounts and I’m increasingly structuring my business learning around real world stories
3. The people / the network. I got huge value out of being surrounded at university by people who are smarter than I am. I am also increasingly seeing the value of watching those people go on to successful and powerful careers. With the extra experience typical for the average MBA student, I imagine the big MBA programs expose you to another level of interesting people.

I’m not realistically about to embark on an MBA and I think I have the rigour from my degree and just have to push my own flywheel on the network side of things. Which is why I’m focussing heavily on case studies.

The online world is dominated by young companies and young business people. Many of Distilled’s competitors are run by people no older than Duncan and I. We need to learn from history both to grow our own business and to help our clients truly effectively.

Watch this space.