Soon after I began teaching strategy at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, one of the MBAs whom I supervised came to talk with me. The economic downturn in 2000 had left most of the business school students scrambling to find jobs when only a year before they would have been considering offers from several well-known employers. The student began by describing his work experience; he had served as a general manager both in his family business and also in another traditional company before he decided to pursue an MBA. The man, in his mid-twenties, explained that he was having a difficult time finding a job in either a management consulting firm or in an investment bank because neither group of professional service firms was hiring during the current recession. Did I have any suggestions or contacts that I could offer him?

My initial response was simple and reasonable, or so I thought. Given his work experience and the fact that he was so clearly a superb general manager, why wasn't he looking for a challenging job within an industrial company that would suit his newly acquired “Master of Business Administration” degree? The student smiled at me and indulged my naïveté by replying that if he had really wanted another job in industry, why would he have spent all that time and money to acquire an MBA?