Big Picture MBA

Big Picture MBA is a series of lectures summarizing business school. It is obviously preaching to choir, so you will not find anything here questioning the value of business school. Instead, you will find a lot of cheerleading for the value of an MBA as well as quick overviews of the "core curriculum" of MBA programs. In sections on getting into school, there is plenty of coverage of the advantages of full-time and part-time programs, as well as of different strengths of different schools. (The lecturers are from UC-Irvine and the part-time admissions department there, so there is obviously a bit of a slant towards their programs.)

The core classes covered include different types of accounting, finance, management and "dealing with people". Perhaps the one point of "criticism" that comes out of here is that human resources and organizational behavior do not get enough respect in business school. Perhaps if we did have a greater focus on people rather than dollars then we would not have some of the big "scandals" of recent years. However, criticism is not the goal here. Instead, it merely tries to provide the meat of an MBA program in a dozen lectures (while also claiming that it is not substitute for a real MBA.) After all, it is the connections in school that give the most value. The coursework primarily serves as cover for all the networking.