MIT Sloan Graduates Its FIrst Class of Executive MBAs

EMC, a leading IT infrastructure provider, covered Mike Phelan’s full tuition, but Phelan says he would have paid for the program himself if that had been necessary. Phelan heads strategy and operations in the EMC Presales division, whose more than 3,000 engineers work directly with clients and partners to customize the company’s IT products and services. Despite multiple positions at EMC, after spending all 11 years at the company within a single function, Phelan was eager for retraining that would prepare him to manage the profit-and-loss aspects of a complex organization on a global scale.

For Phelan, the best takeaway has been a broader base of knowledge that lets him interact with people more confidently across functional lines. “I’m equipped to ask better questions and figure out second- or third-order effects of the decisions we make,” he says.

APPLYING ACTION LEARNING TO A NEW STARTUP

There is probably no better venue to apply action learning than when starting a new company. During his EMBA studies, Tony Bacos co-founded and became general manager of Hubbub Health, a health challenge and wellness platform launched by Cambria Health Solutions, where Bacos had led the technology team responsible for software and web development. Cambria owns several health insurance businesses, but Hubbub Health serves companies regardless of whether they contract with Cambria for their employees’ health insurance.

MIT’s marketing classes helped revolutionize Bacos’ understanding of how to identify the customer base that Hubbub might serve by showing him the importance of identifying a specific kind of customer rather than going so broad as to risk losing everybody.

Initially, it felt “counter-intuitive to make very specific decisions that you know are going to cut off some portion of the market because they will recognize [the product] is not for them,” he says.

As a result of his training, Bacos now accepts that winning in business requires targeting a certain kind of customer. Fortunately, that’s a conclusion Cambria was willing to support. “I didn’t feeI I had to fight anybody on that more so than myself,” he adds.

STUDENTS SAY A FAVORITE COURSE WAS MIT’S GLOBAL ORGANIZATIONS LAB

A favorite course among several first-year students was the Global Organizations Lab, or GO Lab, which let them apply everything they had already learned in the program. The GO Lab gives students experience working in a cross-border company that is generally outside their own industry. Students were assigned in teams of four to six to companies based in various countries, such as Argentina, Jordan and India and spent a week on fact-finding missions on the ground in at least one company location.

“Think of it as strategic advice [a company] gets from a mid-career executive,” rather than a high-level consulting arrangement, says Lehrich.

Another key feature of the program was a structured feedback system that MIT designed so that students would be able to critique the curriculum as it was being rolled out.  As guinea pigs for the pilot program, first-year students say they enjoyed the opportunity to contribute to shaping the curriculum which more than made up for the occasional frustrations of working out kinks along the way. They were impressed by how seriously MIT took their responses and how quickly the curriculum was adjusted accordingly.