Matthew Jacobson: “Most MBAs offer very limited value”

Former Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard was in Mauritius last week as part of an African tour for the Ducere Business School, of which she is the Chancellor. Matthew Jacobson, the founder of the school, accompanied her. News on Sunday seized the opportunity to talk to Matthew Jacobson.Mr Matthew Jacobson, please tell us about your school. Well, I grew up in Australia and I always had a passionate spirit for entrepreneurship which is a driving force for me. I started various businesses throughout my career and also had a few experiences with education. The idea of creating Ducere Business School came up because I really wanted to do something that I was really passionate about, and not just doing any business just for the sake of making money. Ducere became a reality five years ago and we partner with national public institutions in many countries, with various programmes on offer. Ducere is regarded as a business school. We have vocational programs, marketing, entrepreneurship, social enterprise, innovation and leadership. One of the long term visions for Ducere Business School is the concept of democratising education. In today’s world, is it necessary for leaders and managers and also entrepreneurs to acquire further education such as MBA? It’s not about the industry necessarily, but about the quality of the organisation or the individual. Is it worth doing an MBA? Is it relevant? Most MBAs offer very little value. They are traditional textbook approach, sitting in lectures and learning from people who have actually never been in business before. How can you learn to lead a business from people who have never been in business themselves? There is a fundamental disconnect. This situation is true everywhere, there is a disconnection with what universities produce and what the market demands. How is your MBA different? In our MBA, which has been quoted in the press as being global game changer, or the most innovative MBA programme that exists, we take a holistic view, where you learn from world leaders, you have a holistic view on complex challenges and you work with the biggest corporations in the world on actual problems and challenges that these organisations face, so you are concretely combining the real world with your academic learning. In that sense, you are building networks, you are engaging with the best people in the world, if you speak to our students, they will tell you that the experience and the networking is incredibly exciting. Thus, I would say that the traditional MBA offers much limited value to students. Do you have any plan to set up a Branch of Ducere here? Well, we don’t think any organisation does everything exceptionally well. We believe that in any area or industry segment, we should look at the whole value chain and then identify what we do the best and then focus on that aspect. We don’t want to offer all the elements of a university experience, we concentrate certain things of industry relevance, the global leaders, the industry partners, the design of the curriculum that we do exceptionally well. The University of Mauritius is a fantastic institution. You already have campuses here. You already have academic environments in compliance and with accreditations. We don’t want to replicate that. We don’t want to create campuses and run institutions. We rather work in partnership with national universities and focus on collaboration in areas that we work best in. Mauritius is built on an economy around services oriented sectors, not commodities based environment and I can say that Mauritius can create a very valuable export market for education. A question on entrepreneurship. Today we have lots of start ups. Your views… I think that entrepreneurship is definitely a buzz word. Everyone talks about it and there is great value in that and also great benefits as there is so much support for entrepreneurship from all levels, be it government, financing agencies, etc. But there is a downside to this buzz word. Sometimes people just focus on the cool side of being an entrepreneur. It’s not just a question of being cool. It is also hard work and you have to take it seriously. When you are running a business, you have cash flow requirements, you have human resources, you have regulatory environment; you don’t just design an idea, put it on a piece of paper and expect people to finance it. That’s a fantasy kind of idea of what entrepreneurship is. The real side of entrepreneurship is you constantly need to be working perhaps 24 by 7, working very hard, adapting constantly, you have challenges thrown at you everyday, etc. What advice would you give a youngster who is passionate about entrepreneurship? Well, the first piece of advice I would give is that he should enroll at the University of Mauritius, let’s say in the Bachelor of Entrepreneurship. The reason we designed this course is because we took into account the disruption and disconnection in education. It doesn’t matter what field you study, if you study journalism and want to be a great journalist and you go to university and are lectured by someone who actually never worked for a media organisation, it doesn’t really make sense. If you go for 99.9 percent of entrepreneurship courses that exist around the world, you are going to be lectured by someone who never actually ran a successful business. This doesn’t make sense. So, we designed an entrepreneurship degree where all the global faculties are entrepreneurs that are successful from Silicon Valley, from New York, from Africa, from Australia, from all over the world, creating multibillion dollar businesses, whether it’s the founder of the biggest online digital company in the world, whether it’s the founder of the largest cable network company, whether it is Mo Ibrahim, etc. You learn a lot from all these incredibly talented people. Remember you actually have to create a viable business and we give you all the tools and the resources to do that, as part of your degree. You can’t sit in a campus and three years later you are given a piece of paper that says now are an entrepreneur! You actually have to graduate with a viable business, with customers, with revenues, with tangible products. About Ducere Business School This Australian institution, founded by Matthew Jacobson, has developed unique academic programs with more than 150 world leaders, including presidents, prime ministers, Nobel Prize winners, the Chairmen / CEOs of multinationals (KPMG, Qantas, Goldman Sachs, National Geographic, NASDAQ, among others.) For example, the MBA (Master in Business Administration - Innovation & Leadership), whose registration is currently in progress, is supported by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Canadian PM Paul Martin, Baroness Valerie Amos ( Under-Secretary-General, United Nations (2010 - 2015), Prof. Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School). While Ducere Business School currently offers MBA courses in partnership with UoM, the introduction of online undergraduate programs in the fields of entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, management & marketing is also on the agenda. The MBA program between Ducere Business School and the University of Mauritius was launched last year. More than a dozen Mauritian companies support this program.