As an MBA graduate I'd say these Cliff notes are well said. There is a lot more that goes into an MBA program, but programmers, engineers and other "non-business" people should understand what the business is all about. Saying that, it's also important for us MBAers to understand what programmers and engineers do.
Obviously there's a lot more to learn about finance, both market finance (the various types of securities, how they work, how to value them, how to do arbitrage on them...) and corporate finance (financial analysis, stock analysis, stock buybacks, LBOs, mergers and acquisitions, generally how a corporation is/should finance itself, especially debt vs. equity, all that fun stuff...)
Financial controlling: ie how each unit reports its costs and revenues and how to control those and establish budgets and targets. Something which is quite dull when you're sitting in a classroom but is actually fantastically important to running any reasonably large company (50+ employees). It's particularly important because it's tied up into all manners of human resources and corporate culture: how you measure someone's performance impacts how you will reward it, which in turns impacts how people behave, what kind of culture you have, etc.
You might also have supply chain courses (God how I hated those): inventory management, supplier management, etc.
There might be some legal courses as well depending on your program.
Also, the main takeaway of a business course is that they're course- and discussion- based. The post gives a good idea of the theoretical takeaway from business classes, but you learn about those from reading and performing case studies as groups and discussing them with the professor, which also gives you a great sense of what can be done and what can't.
Cool, thanks. I think it would be interesting to compile an online free resource which covered all of this material. There are plenty of free course videos online...I feel a side project coming on...
Absolutely. Really the main benefit of a business program is the people, and spending two years with really smart people who have wildly different experiences and are passionate about business. Seth Godin had a great post about this. That said, I believe there are a few things they teach you in business school -- the basics of finance and accounting, some business strategy... -- that everyone should know. A business OCW would be a great public service project.
Ten Day MBA is a great little book. I bought a bunch of copies for the engineers here and we ran a discussion group, chapter-by-chapter over a few weeks. The exercise really improved the quantity and quality of business ideas and useful input into strategy from the engineers.
That equation for the macroeconomy (Quantity Theory of Money) went out of style in the 80s when people realized velocity wasn't a fixed constant, i.e., it only appeared attractive given the small set of data at the time.
Nice review of the book and the concepts. I have just finished reading the same book, although I read it just as a primer because I am starting a part-time program at NYU in the fall. Although not a programmer, I plan to try and keep my technical knowledge up-to-date, it should help with the management and work with the engineers/developers.
