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Continued from previous page
What Happens Next?
Answering His Own
Question
The world was quite different when Bob Mittelstaedt, Jr.,
earned his MBA at Wharton in 1972. There was no
Steinberg Conference Center on the corner of 38th and
Spruce. There was no Aresty Institute of Executive
Education bringing thousands of managers to campus every
year. There was no Wharton AMP. There was no Fellows
program.
There was just an unanswered question.
As Mittelstaedt finished his degree, he visited two of the
faculty members he had worked most closely with during
the preceding two years – Gerald Hurst and
Bill Hamilton. Sitting in each of their offices, he asked
them a parting question: "This MBA program has been
a terrific experience, and I've learned a tremendous amount;
but how do I keep up after this?" The answers he received
more than a quarter century ago were fairly "mushy." He
was told to read articles and watch certain journals. "In no
case did the idea that five years from now you should take
an executive education course get mentioned," he said.
Back then, the early executive education programs that
did exist, such as Wharton's very successful Finance and
Accounting for the Non-Financial Manager, were designed
primarily for working managers who had never gone to
business school. "As an engineer, I felt this experience of
earning my MBA had opened up my mind in a whole
bunch of different directions I hadn't thought of before,"
Mittelstaedt said. "I knew that I was leaving an environment
where there is all this stuff to be soaked up. I knew I'd go
away and get focused on a job and would not be likely to
continue to learn in that way."
Today, the set of answers to Mittelstaedt's question of
how to continue to learn has become much richer.
Without consciously setting out to, he has helped to answer
his own question. After continuing his formal and informal
education at Wharton and in industry, he returned to campus
in 1990 as vice dean and director of executive education.
Under his leadership, Wharton has built one of the largest
executive education programs of its kind, with more than
8,000 participants annually.
Today, there is a stronger sense that a degree is not the
end of the learning process, but the beginning. "You got the
best MBA in the world, but if it is more than 15 years old,
even the best is outdated," said Mittelstaedt, who still has
books from his MBA courses on a shelf in his office. The
core frameworks and knowledge from an MBA course in
finance, for example, are still very relevant. "The difference
today is that there are so many more vehicles available for
financing and approaching a project, such as using reinsurers
and financial instruments and techniques that didn't
exist thirty years ago," he said.
A lot of learning still occurs on the job, but education
can accelerate that learning process by creating a context for
the new knowledge. "The MBA degree is a career accelerator, whether students recognize it or not," Mittelstaedt
said. "You have reached a point in your career where you
want to accelerate your knowledge about business and the
MBA gives you a jump. After a period of time, you need
another burst of acceleration. Through executive education,
you can accelerate the learning and improve the
clarity of it. We provide deep insight and perspective."
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