Considering that everyone today believes that MBA education lacks the wherewithal to train managers, Fastcompany.com, a business magazine that reports on technology, design and digital media too has come up with a feature called 30second MBA where stalwarts of the industry answer basic questions on management for whoever might be interested.
How it goes is so: there is a question of the week, for example How would you deliver difficult news to staff, customers or the public?, which is answered by eminent personalities and businesspersons over the week, from Monday to Friday. The constraint is that the answers have to be only 30 seconds long and therefore, crisp and precise. The knowledge is as immense as brevity can offer, and some of the people answering the questions have been Eileen Gittins, Founder and CEO, Blurb, Barbara Fagan-Smith, Founder and CEO, ROI communications, Jason Silva and Max Lugavere, Producers, current TV and others such.
For the above question How would you deliver difficult news to staff, customers or the public?, Rebecca Segan, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Charles Schwab replies that the managers must have empathy towards the other person and his bad time, they should be honest about the bad news and enthuse hope in the affected party. Surely an efficient way to break bad news to people around; something that managers, especially in this scenario, have been doing quite a bit.
The fascination with compressing the learnings of an MBA to colloquial and concise metaphors is not new. Steven Stralser, a professor from USA’s Thunderbird School of Global Management did his bit with MBAinaday.com. Not ones to be left behind, the venerable John Wiley & Sons have published MBA for Dummies, as part of the popular ‘For Dummies’ books franchise.