Colin Barrow - The 30 Day MBA in Marketing: Your Fast Track Guide to Business Success

T he Master of Business Administration (MBA) is widely regarded as the solution to the apparent lack of professionalism in many aspects of man agement as well as providing a recognized qualification for business managers. Accountants, engineers, scientists, actuaries, chemists, psychologists and a host of others in and around the organizational world have bodies of knowledge and accrediting associations that ensure that those practising in the field meet at least some minimum criteria. The MBA to some extent addresses that problem for business and now over 2,000 institutions around the world turn out hundreds of thousands on MBAs each year.

The MBA has been around for nearly half a century but business schools, where these degrees are minted, have been around a good deal longer. The honour of being the worlds first business school is usually said to go to Wharton, founded in 1881 by Joseph Wharton, a self-taught businessman. A miner, he made his fortune through the American Nickel Company and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, later to become the subject of the earliest business case studies. Harvard Business School, a comparative latecomer, opened in 1908 with a faculty of 15 and launched a Management Masters programme two years later. By 1922 Harvard was running a doctoral programme pioneering research into business methods using the case study method, an approach that was to become its trademark and widely emulate d throughout the business school fraternity. It wasnt until the late 1950s that the first business schools opened their doors in the UK LBS (London Business School), Cranfield, and the Manchester Business School in the vanguard. In mainland Europe it took a further two decades for business schools to establish a niche in the market.

With the growing complexity of business it rapidly became apparent that there was a need for a more specialized business degree rather than the all-singing, all-dancing general MBA. While that was fine for giving an overview, anyone wanting to go deeply into a particular disciplinary area as a management practitioner needed something with a bit more substance. And so the specialized MBAs were born.