The MBA Summit: What Employers Really Want From MBAs - Poets&Quants

 
Amazon. Google. McKinsey.

They are three of the most desirable MBA employers on the planet, companies that routinely rank at the very of the list of firms that business graduates would most want to work for. And all three firms are among the largest employers of MBA talent in the world.

What do they value most about MBA hires? How have the responsibilities and opportunities for MBAs changed over the past five years? What can MBA candidates do now to make themselves as competitive as possible for later?

Those questions and more formed the basis of an extraordinary MBA Summit panel sponsored by Poets&Quants and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Livestreamed on May 1 before a global audience from Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus, the discussion featured top executives from Amazon, Google, and McKinsey—as well as Ross Dean Scott DeRue. The session, What Recruiters Really Want From MBAs, was one of three making up the MBA Summit (also see The MBA Summit: How To Get Into A Top Business School).

AMAZON, GOOGLE AND MCKINSEY EXECUTIVES ON WHAT THEY’RE LOOKING FOR IN MBA HIRES

Moderated by Poets&Quants founder and editor John A. Byrne, the panel included: Peter Faricy, a 1995 Ross MBA graduate, is vice president of Amazon Marketplace, where he is responsible for millions of third party sellers worldwide across 14 global marketplaces.

Grant D’Arcy, a 2012 MBA from Ross, works for one of the most enviable organizations in all of business today. As the head of strategy at X, Google’s Moonshot Factory, D’Arcy works with a team to develop ‘moonshot’ technologies that address large problems in the world.

Ellis Griffith, who earned her MBA from Ross in 1999, is the gloal head of diversity and inclusion at McKinsey & Co., the highly prestigious management consulting firm. She partners with her global colleagues to attract, develop and retain world-class diverse talent.

Scott DeRue, a highly popular leadership professor at Ross, became dean of the school in July of 2016. Among other things, he is a keen advocate of experiential learning and has recently upped Ross’ commitment to what is the deepest level of action learning currently available at any business school in the world.

WHAT COMPANIES MOST VALUE IN AN MBA GRADUATE

During a one-hour conversation, they offer plenty of valuable advice to both MBA applicants and students who want to work in their companies. Griffith, for example, notes that employers are looking for “inspiration as well as evidence of action” or accomplishment when making a hiring decision. Telling that story well in a recruiting interview matters, whether you come from a mainstream or non-traditional background with your MBA.

D’Arcy says that an MBA program is the ideal time to fill in the gaps that exist between your current day skills and experience and the career you ultimately want. “If you want to be a consultant, ask what is the skill gap between you and a really excellent consultant today,” he says. “Then ask yourself how can you knock that down during the two years you have in an MBA program so you can be able to go in and authoritatively say, ‘I am going to crush it here. I am going to be a phenomenal consultant, I have advised companies, I have built the quant background to be able to do this. Frankly, I’ve been mentored by someone who’s already at this company, and I feel like I would be able to step in on day one and be valuable.’ If you can tell that story, if you can build on it, identify the gaps in your skillset and close them, you will be golden. It’s so easy to tell the people who’ve put in that work versus the people who have not.

Here is an edited transcript of our discussion at the MBA Summit:

John A. Byrne: Let’s start with the basics: What does each of your companies value most about MBAs?

Peter Faricy of Amazon

Peter Faricy of Amazon: At Amazon, I think what we’ve learned over time is that we’re not idea constrained. And we’re not capital resource constrained. We’re really people constrained, and we’re leader constrained. And so in particular, we love to hire really talented MBAs because we want people to come in and take on really big roles within our company. As we look down the road, it’s essential for us to find a pipeline of really talented leaders. And I think we’ve had great success across many schools here in the U.S. Obviously I’ve spent a lot of time here recruiting at Ross. But I’ll tell you we found a lot of very talented MBAs across many schools and it’s a great pipeline to bring in new talent.

Byrne: And Amazon is recruiting quite a few MBAs these days, roughly 1,000 a year, more than any other company ever.

Faricy: Quite a few. Yes. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the schools are helping to build really talented professionals. By the time people leave here I’m amazed at how big the roles MBAs are capable of taking on. If I were to compare it to when I graduated 20 years ago, I think people are much more prepared to jump into an operating role and make a big difference. So we’re very, very pleased with the results of our MBA hiring.

Byrne: And Peter, you’re a perfect segue to Ellis at McKinsey & Co. because you actually started at the firm when you graduated with your MBA from Ross in 1995. So Ellis, McKinsey has been really one of the pioneer recruiters of MBAs from the earliest days of Marvin Bower, the firm’s legendary leader who built McKinsey into a powerhouse What is it about the MBA that makes a person who has the degree so well prepared to jump into a consulting role at McKinsey?

Ellis Griffith of McKinsey & Co.

Ellis Griffith of McKinsey: The real core and the essence of it is around problem solving. It’s the ability to look at a problem from 360 degrees and walk around it and take a lot of different perspectives. Not a single perspective. Not one way into a problem, but to look at it from multiple disciplines and to really have that ability is something super unique about the MBA. And I think it’s really why we have continued and continued for many years to pursue MBAs.

Byrne: And Grant, at Google, what do you expect from an MBA hire that you might not expect from a non-MBA applicant?

Grant D’Arcy of Google: Frankly, I don’t necessarily feel comfortable speaking for all of Google. But for X in particular we’re in the business of launching start-ups. And there is a breadth of skillset that individuals come out with from an MBA program that makes them useful. We try to have small, easily fungible teams so having people with has some background in operations, some in marketing, some in accounting equally facile at looking at a user interview and a P&L and figuring out how to do manufacturing is important. That really makes a person valuable in a place where we might have to kill a project and pivot a person in six months.

Grant D’Arcy of Google

Byrne: Scott, as Dean, I imagine you make a conscious effort in terms of how you’re shaping the people who go through the program for employers like these.

Ross Dean Scott DeRue: Without question. At the end of the day, it’s our responsibility to insure that we’re developing talent that creates a pipeline for companies like Amazon, McKinsey, and Google because that’s our partnership. And we have to be able to understand where they’re going in their businesses and then understand what experiences we need to provide students to ready them for those experiences. We have to prepare students for the ability to step into big roles and functions at Amazon within a year or two running really big businesses and operations. With McKinsey, they need to have the skillset to work with clients in unstructured environments and to create structure and solve problems. It’s our responsibility and our opportunity to develop talent that is ready and prepared to take on those roles.

Byrne: To use the inevitable military metaphor, I would say an MBA makes a person combat-ready to immediately jumpstart his or her career. You really not only get the business basics in an MBA program, you’re getting a taste of different opportunities and learning what’s expected of you, so that when you hire an MBA, you know that person’s going to perform from day one, which is very different from when you hire someone else. Ellis, let me ask you how the opportunities or responsibilities of an MBA hire have changed over the years? Do MBA graduates assume greater responsibility today than they may have five, 10, 15 years ago?

Ellis: I really like your combat-ready metaphor because I feel that when you drop in on day one, you need to be ready to jump in and participate completely and fully. So I would say that has not changed since the days of Marvin Bower. What has changed, though, is the context and expectations.  The client expects us to come in with a totally interdisciplinary approach so a team is ready to problem solve on a global scale, to look at issues from all different levels, to have an analytical capability that is really quite excellent.

DON’T MISS: THE MBA SUMMIT: HOW TO GET INTO A TOP BUSINESS SCHOOL

Ross School of Business Dean Scott DeRue

Byrne: And Peter, I know that when MBAs come to Amazon, they’re immediately given responsibilty, often their own area to experiment in, right?

Faricy: That’s right. When I was getting my MBA here, there were a lot of companies that had management training programs. And a lot of them were very well-regarded, super good companies. You kind of imagine that the mental motto was to get your MBA for a couple of years, be part of a management training program, and eventually you would be put into an operating role. At McKinsey in a different way, but certainly the tech companies, the models have changed radically. The operating role begins the day you begin with Amazon. And we do expect people to be able to hit the ground running. So I think there’s even more importance while you are getting your MBA to learn how to handle ambiguity, to learn how to actually get things done, to learn how to experiment. We want to know that you’re ready to become an operator and that you’ve learned how to work well with others. Because there aren’t training programs to teach you that once you get on the ground. We kind of expect that when you’re coming in.

The reason we hire MBAs is that we expect that they have built those skills over time and that they’re ready to roll. And so it’s exciting. I think in many ways, this may be a great time to be an MBA because if I think back to the time when many companies had training programs, they just sort of delayed your getting to do what you really wanted to do. You really want to lead something. You really want to build something. And right now I think is a great time because, trust me, if you work for any of these three companies, you’ll feel very valued very quickly.

Byrne: And I think it’s worth pointing out that in the last quarter of a century, there’s been a major reduction in rotational programs at many companies. These firms have become much leaner and I think that’s one of the major reasons why the MBA is the most popular graduate degree in America and why the business major is the most popular major because employers really want those who can contribute immediately in the workforce.

So let me ask Grant at Google whether he thinks the business model for the MBA is ideal the way it is or should it change?

D’Arcy: You actually expect people to come in a little bit closer to combat-ready. That said, you also have an element where you want people to be willing to take risks, to be willing to try things, to be willing to potentially fail and not to lack the ability to pick themselves up afterwards. So, where I think the business model has evolved that has been quite helpful is in providing a safe space to encourage risk taking. Encouraging that bias toward action in an environment that is mostly harmless if you fail is critical. That way, when you come out to Amazon, when you come out to McKinsey, when you come out to Google, and you face challenges and fail, because you will, you will know exactly how to pick yourself back up. And you know that you have both hard and soft skillsets to rely on to push that forward.

Byrne: And this speaks to the whole medical school analogy where people have a residency. Today in one MBA program after another business students have projects and assignments, with deliverables that give students valuable experience and make them accountable. Scott, do you think that’s an essential part of an MBA experience and a good example of how business schools are changing?

DeRue: Without question. The analogy that it’s a medical education I think is an astute one. It’s the same concept as a teaching hospital. You develop the skills of resiliency, being tolerant of ambiguity, understanding how to learn from mistakes by actually doing it. The other reason that becomes valuable is around how many students are using the MBA as a platform to make some switch in their lives. Often I talk about experiential learning as an opportunity to try before you buy because you may not have worked in consulting or you may not have worked in tech. So it’s an opportunity to develop those skills while you’re in school but also to experiment with who you want to be.

Put those two things together and the teaching hospital model becomes really important. Because in residency, you’re going to a surgery rotation and then you’re going to a pediatric rotation, etc. So you are able to develop those different skills. At Ross, one of the things that we’ve really committed ourselves to is building the most robust portfolio of experiential learning opportunities so that we’re developing talent to meet these needs and to meet the needs of those students who are coming in for the education.

Byrne: And in fact you just made a major change in how you do that. Want to describe your newest innovation in experiential learning?

DeRue: Sure. Our our aspiration for the school is that every student who walks through our doors has the opportunity to start real businesses, invest real capital and real assets, whether it be equity, real estate, or new ventures. So we have students running investment funds with real capital. We want every student to have the opportunity to advise real companies on real strategic issues. So when they go work for McKinsey, they’ve already done it. Our students will do roughly 200 consulting projects this year for organizations all around the globe as part of the curriculum.

And one of the biggest innovations we’ve done in the last year is we’re building businesses inside the business school. We’re doing this in partnership with leading brands and leading companies where we want our students leading real teams, real functions, and real businesses. Students learn marketing as we develop the marketing strategy and implement it for a real business. And students are getting this ongoing experience with companies. We’ve got both undergraduate and graduate students now working in teams across functions in actual companies, building businesses.

At Shinola, which is a Michigan-based company,  we’ve got 24 Michigan Ross students in their headphone business which launched this past holiday season. The students report to the head of their audio business who reports to the CEO, who happens to be an alum. And we’ve got faculty embedded with the team as part of the curriculum and they are working in four functions: marketing, supply chain operations, digital e-commerce, and back office finance accounting. And we’ve got marketing faculty teaching marketing strategy as they build and implement it for the audio business for Shinola.

We’re doing that with Shinola. But we’re also doing it with Ford. We’re doing it with one of the largest affordable housing developers in the country. We’re building a job placement and training service for survivors of human trafficking. Our goal is to have a dozen of these businesses up and running and we have eight right now. So we’re building what I think is going to be one of the most robust portfolios of experiential learning through the start, invest, advise, and lead framework. The goal is to build talent that can be ready on day one for these organizations.

Byrne: Peter, at Amazon, what’s your point of view about how well-educated MBAs are and how well-prepared they are?  Is there something else business schools can do to improve the talent they produce?

Faricy: I think we’ve hit it on the panel. I think the one thing I’ll say to the audience is that if you get into one of these business schools, Yale, Berkeley, and Michigan Ross, you’re very, very smart. There’s no question about your intelligence level. You have the intelligence to be successful at any one of these companies up here. I honestly think if I were to simplify it, the make-or-break part is whether you develop the skills to be able to get stuff done? You know, it’s one thing to be smart intellectually. It’s another thing to be book smart. But do you have the ability to work with others and put together an inspirational plan? So experiment a lot, fail a lot, learn a lot, and be persistent, and you’llend up with something wonderful in time.

One of the areas I would love to see all business schools focus on more is purposeful failure. Most of our academic careers are all propped up to be successful. You want your children to get good grades. You want to get good grades. The professors want you to get good grades. Everything’s kind of centered on don’t get a bad grade. Somehow we need to change the incentive system so that part of getting a good grade is demonstrating the ability to experiment, to fail, and pull back and see what you’ve learned from it. Because the reality is if you want to invent something truly unbelievable and inspirational, you’re going to fail nine times out of 10. And so we want to train people to be really good at failing, learning from that experience, and bouncing back up, and going again.

And so I’d love to see, Scott’s model of you could start a business, you could invest in a business, you could consult in a business. I think that’s an awesome place to start. Allowing students to learn from these experiences is going to make them super well-prepared to hit the ground running.

DON’T MISS: THE MBA SUMMIT: HOW TO GET INTO A TOP BUSINESS SCHOOL

Ross Dean Scott DeRue (Upper left), Amazon’s Peter Faricy (lower left), McKinsey’s Ellis Griffith, and Google’s Grant D’Arcy

Byrne: Great point. And you know what I love about this discussion? Twenty-five years ago, when you were thinking about an MBA Peter, we were talking finance, statistics, accounting, and marketing in the contest of a business school. And now we’re talking about rolling up your sleeves, and getting really involved in the challenges that a business might face. We’re talking about what it takes to work effectively in teams and become a great collaborator. The whole conversation has changed and that’s just really exciting.

Let’s move on to another big issue: the people who get an MBA to switch careers. Ellis, a lot of people go into consulting from a different industry. How important is the MBA in allowing someone to make that often difficult transition from an entirely different industry or background?

Griffith: That’s a great question. And also it actually builds a little bit on what we were just hearing. I think when I started an MBA, I thought I was going to go and learn some mechanics of how a business works. I didn’t know all of the ins and outs of all these different pieces and I’m gonna learn about them. What I didn’t really expect was to necessarily learn about me. And I think that is the big transition. That’s the big switch. You take this time to learn about some of these things that are really technical and tactical, but then you learn about yourself and how you can put yourself in that situation, in that problem, and what you can contribute.

So I think there’s another switch that MBAs experience. You absolutely learn the mechanics of how business works, but it’s also about where I see myself and my place, and how I can contribute to the business community and to the community at large. So the transition is really about moving from a single focus, your industry background and experience, to having a broad focus in which you could be asked to do really anything in any discipline. That is much more about how you see yourself in any business challenge.

Byrne: One of the most underestimated aspects of business education is the amount of introspection that you’re guided through. There is no other academic discipline, not even psychology or philosophy, that guides its students so carefully through a journey of who am I? What am I best at? And what should I devote my life to? Grant, you’re the most recent graduate on the panel. Did you go through that experience?

D’Arcy: I did. And I think what I got out of business school in particular was a bias towards action. We’re not looking for people who become potentially paralyzed by the amount of information that they can find in any particular area. We’re looking for people who are willing to think about and apply the Colin Powell 40/70 rule. They’re comfortable making a decision with 40% to 70% of the information. They are not going to wait until there’s too much information, and they are not going to make the call too early with too little information. They are able to take a stance when the time is appropriate.

Having the ability to advise real companies, having the ability to go in and invest real capital, let’s you experiment with your own methodologies or modes of doing. You learn whether you pulled the trigger too late or maybe you pulled the trigger too early. Experiential learning allows you to find that sweet spot so you know where you’re able and comfortable to do that.

DeRue: And the key to get there is to provide the experience. What we’re talking about is instead of reading about a case study of something that happened in the past, you are the case study. And so you’re developing the business tools and skills, but you’re also going through this very personal transformation process. To enable that personal transformation to happen, you have to surround that with the coaching, the feedback, the assessment that’s necessary to make sure we’re learning from that experience.

Because Ellis and I could be in the same exact experience, but learn fundamentally different amounts and different lessons. Mentorship, coaching, assessments, and feedback enables you to face failure and fall down, only to get back up. It develops that adaptive capability and that resilience so that next time you do it at Michigan Ross or Yale or Berkeley, you’re better at it. And then by the time you get to McKinsey, Amazon, or Google, you’re even better at it. And you’ve learned about yourself in a really fundamental way. Because we’re not only developing business people, we’re building human capability here that I think is really important.

Byrne: Peter, some candidates wonder how important is the pre-experience before getting an MBA in your hiring decisions? At a tech company, for example, is it helpful to have engineering experience before getting an MBA? Is that more valuable to Amazon?

Faricy: It is. I think it’s funny because that’s not my educational background. If I were to go back and rewind it, although I love what I did, probably having a harder science discipline undergrad and coming back to get your MBA right now would be a great accommodation. You know, I don’t know how you say it but  mathematics and computer science are the new sexy for an undergraduate degree. You combine that with an MBA and you’re well-prepared to be able to build and manage things in a technology company. From the students we’ve hired, I think that three to five years of experience prior to getting your MBA is super critical. You do want to have enough real world experience that you’ve learned how things work. Maybe you’ve had some success. Maybe you’ve had some failures. But you have a reference point of how things worked in whatever industry that you were in. And I think you’re able to provide a richer experience for yourself and for your fellow students, and for the faculty when you come back with that kind of experience base.

I obviously love the hard science piece, and I think the other companies do as well, but we also have a completely open mind. If you happen to have a background in the arts or something other than the hard sciences, we really center at who the person is, not necessarily what it looks like on their resume. So I think the MBA gives you a chance to restart and replant yourself if you’ve figured it out a little bit further down the line.

Byrne: I’m sure it’s a similar story at McKinsey.

Griffith: Just the same. I was a Japanese Studies major. I’m not sure how helpful that’s actually ever been.

Byrne: So if I’ve done work in the Peace Corps or Teach For America or middle school, you’re not going to hold it against me?

Griffith: Some of those fundamental things are important. ”What was your major, where did you work, what’s the work that you’ve done, and how did you do in school?” Just as a small reframe of it, I think that the idea of your story, and who you are and who you want to become and how you write that story really matters, whether you were a Japanese Studies major or worked for the American Cancer Society. People are looking for inspiration as well as evidence of action.

Byrne: Grant, how important is the internship? I know a lot of companies today use summer employment as a tryout for full-time hiring. Is that true at Google?

D’Arcy: It is true at Google, and frankly in my situation it’s more common that someone who has not been in a strategic or operational role before, has done an internship. Maybe you’ve done it at McKinsey or somewhere else, but it’s important to check that box. We’re thinking whether you have enough experience to come in and do a specific role in the organization?” And the answer depends on your story. Are you telling a consistent story about how you’ve gained those skills? Do you have that commitment to putting in the work to show that if you’re coming to tech and you did not have the hard science background, are you taking coding classes? Are you advising startups in the Ann Arbor/Detroit region because there’s plenty of them? And are you taking the steps to be able to tell that consistent story? If so, then an internship might be plenty of experience. If not, then you might want to turn that internship into a full-time gig, get those hard skills with that organization, and then figure out how to pivot from a consulting role, an operational role, into the tech industry.

Byrne: Okay, Grant, you’re only six years out of the MBA program and you have one of the coolest jobs in the world. Head of strategy at Google’s Moonshot Factory? How’d you get that job?

D’Arcy: A lot of good fortune. There are two things that I wanto to say specifically about the MBA. One: A lot of humility was instilled into me during my journey through business school. Not just the failures that I experienced, but the ability to take leadership roles among my peers, find out how to build consensus among people who might have drastically differing opinions, or how to submit a team project in a particular class. But I also gained the ability to realize that I should admit when I’m ignorant. That is actually a strength that I now have as a result of my MBA. I can go in and say, “I do not know, but I have the capability to learn rapidly,” and that makes me more valuable.

Oftentimes, people come into an MBA program to switch industries and roles. I had consulting experience and non-profit experience but knew I wanted to do something strategic that would have an impact. Could I have gone into Google X in the strategy role right out of my MBA experience? Probably not. I didn’t know technology, I didn’t know how startups worked; What I needed to do was go into Google’s biz-ops team, which is their corporate strategy group, learn that world, do a couple projects from there, with X, and then make the transition over. I know we’re all in a hurry to get to the end state and where we think we want to be, but if you look at that North Star, and you’re next step takes you within 30 degrees of that, that’s probably the right next step. You do not need to make that jump all in one. And if you can tell a consistent story of how that next step gets you there, it’s going to be even more valuable as you do it.

Byrne: So when you were in school, did you have an internship at Google?

D’Arcy: I actually interned with the Civic Consulting Alliance, which is a non-profit organization that offers pro-bono consulting for the city of Chicago and Cook County. That experence solidified my desire to have impact at scale, and technology was likely the way to do it. Seeing how some of the systems and processes worked in arguably one of the more forward-thinking local governments helped, even though they were dependent on a relatively slow rate of adoption of technology to have impact. My first MBA job was with Google.

Byrne: So I’m sure you believe that if you didn’t have an MBA you wouldn’t have your current role?

D’Arcy: I would be nowhere close to my current role today.

DeRue: We knew him when.

DON’T MISS: THE MBA SUMMIT: HOW TO GET INTO A TOP BUSINESS SCHOOL

After graduating from Ross in 1995, Peter Faricy has had a fascinating career starting with McKinsey & Co., Ford Motor, and now Amazon for the past 12 years

Byrne: So let’s get into a question that I think every MBA and every applicant ultimately wants to hear. What do MBAs do at Amazon in their first year at your company?

Faricy: Well, one thing I’ll say before I give some examples is that I think it is important to get to know the companies that come on campus because you might be surprised by the breadth of roles and opportunities they have. In other words, we try not to just partner with one club here at Michigan as an example. It would be obvious for us to partner with the Technology Club. But the reality is, we hire HR leaders, finance leaders, product leaders, and operations leaders. If you name a discipline within Amazon, we hire every single one of those roles here on campus. And so we actually spend a fair amount of time with the career counselors and with lots of different groups of students talking about each of these different areas, and we encourage them to explore the breadth of Amazon because we’re convinced many students here would find a particular part of Amazon they could fall in love with.

I hire primarily product leaders. We hired a Ross MBA a few years ago to launch the wine business on Amazon. So we gave this person an ambiguous project: We said we want to start selling wine, which it turns out is very hard to do on the Internet. We gave them a very small technology team and we said, “We’ve got the launch date all set for you, and you’ve got about nine months to get this thing ready and off the ground.” It’s kinda one of these rocket ship roles. You have to be able to handle ambiguity. You have to be able to be energized and ready to roll.

We also hire, just as another example, we hired a Ross MBA to lead the pricing technology we use for all the small businesses and entrepreneurs who sell their products on Amazon. And it’s a really big deal because we help these entrepreneurs price their products competitively. We help them do it in a way that’s automated so that they don’t have to spend time manually doing their pricing, and it’s a program obviously that if you didn’t do well, you could cost people a lot of money, if you messed up their prices.

Both of these are entrepreneurial examples of real operating roles that we would send you into right from the very beginning. Our internship and full-time rolesare designed to get you up to speed in the business. These are real operating roles, and we need someone to deliver something of substance, usually pretty quickly. So they’re very big, very meaty, very exciting roles. You’ll feel very valued right from the very beginning.

Byrne: Ellis, what does a first-year consultant at McKinsey do?

Griffith: They feel valued, absolutely. Traditionally you walk in and you’re just a generalist consultant and that has been our most frequent path but so much has changed over the years. There is still a generalist consulting track, but we also have many other options. We have general management, we have financial management, we have practices that you can go directly into, such as digital practices. No matter where you go, you will be solving difficult problems, you will be working with a team, you will be innovating, you will spend a lot of time in a team room, much like the ones that are here at business school, working with other people, collaborating, listening to ideas, developing solutions, and using every single skill that you acquire through your MBA in that first…I was gonna say minute, but I’ll go with month.

Byrne: All right, Grant, what did you do in your first job at Google?

D’Arcy: I was in the group called Biz Ops, business operations and strategy. I like to call them recovering consultants. So it is folks who have decided to make the leap from a consulting background, banking, or another analytical or quantitative role, into a strategic and operational role within the tech company. So we were the SWAT team, going in and figuring out relatively thorny problems around Google. And frankly, just to set expectations, I was an associate coming out. I was doing very similar work when I graduated with my MBA, as I did when I went into consulting out of undergrad.

We all work for very glamorous companies that have lots of people who are excited and chomping at the bit to come work for us. That means we get very qualified people. That means sometimes we can hire overqualified people for the role that we are looking at, and potentially it might chafe some individuals a bit. So when you come out, that humility, that skillset that you develop within an MBA from your previous experience, you just need to trust that the best folks will advance. And if you feel like the role you’re doing is something that is not fully utilizing your talents, you need to show how you can fully utilize those talents.

Byrne: Is there anything an MBA applicant or student can do right now to help make themselves more competitive as a candidate for your company? Ellis?

Griffith: Absolutely. I think it starts with that core of knowing yourself and telling your story. It starts with how you’re going to be an innovative person in this world, and how do you contribute to the community at large, and really knowing that and solidifying that, even before you begin, is great. When I started my MBA, I actually thought, “I am going to learn finance.” And I’ll admit, I am not a amazing math person. But I was committed and I sat through this finance class and I looked at everybody who looked just like Peter getting excited like, “I get this!” and I thought, “I do not get this. I do not.” And I was freaking out. I thought I had come to the wrong school. At that moment, I went and talked to my advisor here and said, “Many of these classes are so easy but finance isn’t.” My attitude was, “I’m going to beat it, and I’m going to get it.” At the time she said, “You know, it might be that they’re not easy for everyone.” I was like, “Oh no, I’m sure they’re easy.” “Nope,” she said. “Not easy for everyone. Maybe you’re not a finance guru, but you can pass, and you’ll do fine.” Ultimately, I did and I went into the HR field when I came out of business school. So the idea of making yourself competitive by making yourself you is absolutely the key to me.

DeRue: Just to add to this, if I look at where our students are gravitating toward over the last several years it’s teling to see what opportunities students opt into. We have a program that we launched called Story Lab out of our Sanger Leadership Center, and it’s all about helping students find and discover their story, and teaching them to tell that story—not just in an interview context, but in life generally. I think we had 700 students participate in this year alone in some version of Story Lab. Which is interesting, because it’s all about them discovering their story and being able to tell that story.

And then through our Center for Positive Organizations, we have this tool called the Reflected Best Self and it’s sort of in the Strengths Finders realm. You go and solicit stories from people in your life, personal and professional, and they tell stories about when they saw you at your best. And then you derive a set of themes that are the strengths that you may often take for granted. The exercise lets you know what makes you unique and different. Students are voting with their feet, they’re asking and demanding these opportunities as a way to discover those strengths to better craft their careers, not only in the short-term, but also in the long-term. To hear you describe what you look for in the ability to tell stories is the same thing our admissions teams are looking for on the front end. And I think for prospective students, that’s a really powerful lesson from both the companies as well as the schools. Be you and do you really well.

D’Arcy: On my end, I think there’s such an obvious dissonance when the story you’re trying to tell and your passion fail to align. It is so obvious when someone is saying, “Hey, I really want to work in tech,” and you look at their resume, and the person majored in marketing, focused on marketing, did internship in marketing, and was the head of the marketing club. You’ll say, “All right, tech marketing is something you could do. Why is strategy the role that you might want here?”

So what I advise people is if you want to be a consultant, ask what is the skill gap between you and a really excellent consultant today? And then ask yourself how can you knock that down during the two years you have in an MBA program so you can be able to go in and authoritatively say to Ellis, “I am going to crush it here. I am going to be a phenomenal consultant, I have advised companies, I have built the quant background to be able to do this. Frankly, I’ve been mentored by someone who’s already at this company, and I feel like I would be able to step in on day one and be valuable.” If you can tell that story, if you can build on it, identify the gaps in your skillset and close them, you will be golden. It’s so easy to tell the people who’ve put in that work versus the people who have not.

Byrne: So Grant, you must have ESP, because you just answered the first question from our livestream audience. Someone out there is asking, “What advice would you have for MBA candidates as they approach their MBA journey?” Scott, what’s your counsel?

DeRue: One piece of advice I would offer students is to use the MBA as an opportunity to explore. I think a lot of students come in with a fairly narrow view of “I’m gonna be X” or “I’m gonna be Y.” Most students shift while they’re in school, and then shortly after school. And I think that the two years that you spend in an MBA program is a wonderful opportunity to expose yourself to different content like corporate finance that you may not understand or appreciate. To expose yourself to people who are in different careers that you’ve never even heard of. And to build an experience set as opposed to a skillset that allows you to discover the path that you want to follow both in the short-term and in the long-term. I think that requires an openness to experience.

Byrne: Peter, your advice?

Faricy: I’m going to take a different angle on this. Sometimes I see students trying to optimize for the company name or the title or the money. And I would do something completely different. I would find what you love, and I would really try to align yourself so you can go do that. I think eventually the people who are the most successful really actually love what they do, and they don’t view it as an occupation or work. They ove the environment they’re in, and I will tell you when I graduated from here and I worked for McKinsey, and these last 12 years at Amazon, I’ve been really happy. That obviously helps to enable great happiness in your personal life. So don’t allow yourself to make a compromise for something that will be more short-term. Find something that you love, find some way you can make a big difference in the world, and go do that.

Byrne: Really good advice.

Griffith: I want to add only one thing: As you approach this journey, approach it with full openness. It’s not about money, and it’s not about status, and it’s not about that one particular job. It’s about optimizing for all of those and who you are and how you fit into that equation. I can’t tell you in words how much I admire my classmate who opened in downtown Manhattan a cupcake and beer pairing restaurant. I just can’t even tell you how happy that makes me. And apparently they’re good together. There are infinite possibilities and a singular goal as you enter this journey actually can hold you back from finding what’s really going to inspire you.

D’Arcy: Can I add one piece to that as well? Get out of this castle. This campus is beautiful, but get out of this castle and go explore the academic institution where you are. Michigan is phenomenal. It has a number of top 10 graduate schools. I took classes or was in extracurriculars with people from the school of education, the school of natural resources in the environment, and the school of public management. I basically was trying to get myself as broad of an education as I could while I was still going after my MBA. Many business schools are in similar environments. Don’t just hole up with your business school classmates. Go out and try and take full advantage of the full institution.

Byrne: Okay, here’s our last question from the audience. Do you think an MBA is more, less or equally as valuable as the day that you received yours? Scott?

DeRue: Admittedly, I am biased in this conversation, but I think the MBA from a top school is as valuable as it’s ever been. So many prospective and current students think about the short-term value of that first job, career placement, and starting salaries. But I think longer-term about the personal transformation that can happen and the community that you’re part of. That’s an underappreciated aspect of business schools generally. You will become part of a lifelong community of really talented professionals who care deeply about that community. And I think that’s a really important piece of the value equation.

The return on investment is an important calculation for everyone. MBAs are not cheap. And so you have to think about what the return on that is, and I think the pressure in business education today is on schools that can’t justify or warrant a return on the investment that you have to make. But if you look at the top 10, 15, or 20 schools that are out there, whether you look at short-term career metrics or long-term value, the value I think is as strong as it’s ever been.

Faricy: MBAs from top-tier schools, including Yale, Berkeley, and Michigan, are as valuable today as they were back when I got mine in ’95, but I do think there’s been a large number of MBA programs that have been added, and lots of online options, and it’s dizzying. I think that you should be discerning. You have to find a school that you think is going to push you and help you learn. And I love these schools that are pushing the envelope on how to learn more interactively, because the old days of sitting in a big room doing case studies, is the beginning and end of your education. That is an old-fashioned model and not very useful. If you’re going to get one of those MBAs, you might not be getting your money’s worth. But I think the high ROI MBA programs are still as valuable today as they were 20 years ago. Very, very valuable.

Byrne: Ellis, as head of inclusion and diversity at McKinsey, I’m thinking that frankly an MBA is great for someone who’s making the transition from a less traditional field or someone who hasn’t had all the opportunities in life of growing up in a privileged environment.

Griffith: Yeah, absolutely. Today the MBA provides opportunities that maybe we didn’t know about 20 years ago.The application of an MBA is so broad across so many industries, so many sectors, across so many types of world problems and government agencies. I’m not sure we thought of it that way back then. And I do think it gives us the opportunity to level the playing field. MBA programs are eager to have people from diverse backgrounds. It’s a starting point for people to gain equal access to the corporate sector and other fields.

DeRue: I would propose that business is the most powerful force on the planet for creating both economic prosperity, social mobility, and personal opportunity. Even if you don’t go into the private sector to Ellis’s point, the tool set and the capabilities that you’re going to develop, as well as the community that you’re part of, will help you at an NGO or the non-profit sector. These are the tools that are going to enable you to create innovation, to create value in those sectors as well. So if you think about the impact you want to have in the world, the MBA sets you up in a way that is quite unique in affording you both the capabilities and the opportunities to have that impact. And so to me the value of the MBA in the short-term and the long-term is all about who you want to be and putting yourself on a path to have impact in the world.

Byrne: So Scott, you’re telling me that you’re really running the moonshot factory?

DeRue: Yes. Coming from the private sector, I came to appreciate just how important business was in society and how powerful education is to transform people’s lives, to enable them to capture those opportunities. You put those together, and what better place to work than a business school?

DON’T MISS: THE MBA SUMMIT: HOW TO GET INTO A TOP BUSINESS SCHOOL

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