In the world of business school marketing, flexibility is a term that is often used to describe the versatility and wide ranging applicability of an MBA program. Almost every top Bschool ends up promising versatile course content and fluid program boundaries, all of which are aimed at helping students tailor their MBA experience and career outcomes.
At Cambridge Judge Business School, however, flexibility has largely been ditched in favor of reinvention. While the former hovers around bending existing rules and facilities to fit the requirements of broad groups of students, the latter is firmly entrenched in the idea of inventing new ones so as to fit the needs of smaller groups of like-minded students. To better explain this, allow me to walk you through my unusual experience of the reinvention effect at CJBS.
I love playing videogames. I have owned almost every console released and, in my pre-MBA life, have spent countless hours playing titles such as God of War, Unchartered, FIFA and Battlefield. The creative and artistic effort required to bring these AAA titles to life is phenomenal, and is only matched by the marketing prowess needed to build them in to the franchises we see today. As a marketing enthusiast with a tech background, I was always intrigued with how the $70 Billion industry functioned and what determined the commercial success of one title over the other.
I brought these questions over with me to CJBS hoping that I would be able to answer them through the act of drawing parallels i.e. taking insights from certain industries and then applying them on to others. Little did I know how quickly the reinvention effect would take over the process. It all started when I shared my curiosity regarding the games industry with the CJBS careers team over twitter. Within hours, the careers team started chatting with us on how the industry was structured and if there were any MBA roles in it that we would like to explore. This discussion quickly grew in to a class wide poll which was meant to measure the interest in the games industry as a careers destination. Quite a few of the MBA cohort, ranging from ex-IP lawyers to strategy consultants, shared their enthusiasm to work in an industry that dealt with their favorite hobby.
Fast forward two months, and the MBA program has made significant changes to cater to this relatively niche interest group. This includes but is not limited to: professors discussing case studies on the games industry, podcasts with alumni who are working in the industry, recruitment presentations by 2 of the largest games publishing houses in the world, and a real life global consulting project that is meant to frame some of the bigger challenges faced by the industry today. And from the looks of it, the CJBS team is just getting warmed up.
This ability to consistently re-invent itself has historically set Cambridge Judge Business School apart, and continues to do so. So while this year I am enjoying my time with the videogames industry, I am sure next year would be a whole different ball game. And I am already envious of the 2013 class for it!