10 Reasons Why You Should Get an MBA
An MBA education provides communication skills and training in pragmatic, analytical thinking, argues Thomas MacKay.
Thu, July 05, 2007
Gary Reiner, SVP and CIO, GE (Harvard Business School). See more about Reiner's career here.
James Dallas, SVP and CIO, Medtronic (Emory University).
Joe Eckroth, SVP and CIO, Hertz (Pepperdine University). Read about Eckroth's tenure at Mattel here.
Stuart Scott, Corporate VP and CIO, Microsoft (Vanderbilt University).
Jean-Michel Arès, SVP and CIO, The Coca-Cola Company (McGill University). Read about a recent tour CIO took at Coca-Cola here.
Thaddeus Arroyo, CIO, AT&T (Southern Methodist University).
Robert DeRodes, EVP and CIO, The Home Depot (University of Texas).
Kevin Summers, CIO, Whirlpool (Duke University).
Robert Carter, EVP and CIO, FedEx (University of South Florida). Read more about Carter here.
Jody Davids, EVP and CIO, Cardinal Health (San Jose State University). Read more about Davids in this story about effective CIOs.
3. An MBA is your ticket to the inner circle.
Many CIOs are concerned about not having a seat at the table. That's because IT is often regarded as tactical and not strategic, and because business leaders are not usually ready to talk about tactical technology solutions in the early stages of planning any business initiative. If you as an IT manager have an MBA, you're seen as having more to offer than just your knowledge of technology.
Indeed, you do have more to offer because you possess that broad business mindset, and your colleagues recognize your value by asking you informally for your perspective on their problems and formally to lead up committees that aren't technology-related. For example, I recently had a conversation with the associate vice president for auxiliary services at Christopher Newport University. He was trying to determine the best locations for serving lunches to students based on where they lived. I suggested that he might be better off syncing up lunch locations with the places where students had classes around lunchtime. He liked the idea and wanted to move forward with it. We then began to discuss marketing and sales analysis ideas for the university bookstore.
My exchange with the associate vice president for auxiliary services is notable not because my idea was so brilliant, but because the conversation happened in the first place. When you have those conversations with your business counterparts and start offering insight, they will think of you the next time a strategic issue comes up and they'll be far more likely to get you involved in conversations early on. I've experienced that at Christopher Newport University and at my previous employer, the College of William and Mary, where I was asked to lead an effort to develop a formal donor-prospecting process for our fund-raising efforts. This process was a hugely critical component of an impending fund-raising campaign. Even though this process wasn’t technology-based, I was asked to lead it because of the credibility I had as a business person.
