Inner Circle MBA

If you’re in the market for an engagement ring the odds are you’re shopping for a diamond. You probably have a ballpark figure of how much you should spend on it too, maybe twice your salary. It might surprise you that this is all pretty new, and not much more than clever marketing. One company – De Beers – controlled 80 to 85% of all diamond production throughout the 20th century. With so much skin in the game on the supply side it makes sense that they wanted to amplify sales, allowing them to push prices up through demand. So, in 1948 they tied diamonds to enduring love with the “Diamonds are Forever” campaign. Fast-forward to the 1980s and De Beers wanted to anchor the amount consumers should spend on its diamonds. It opted to go high with clever taglines like “How can you make two months’ salary last forever?” This stuck, and De Beers could have been forgiven for thinking that its dominance might last forever. It didn’t, and now they’re facing a new challenge: the rise of lab-grown diamonds (LGD). Stefano Turconi explored this during his Luxury Strategy elective at London Business School, with additional insight provided by guest speaker, CEO of Smiling Rocks, Zulu Ghevriya. There is a lot about LGD that makes them attractive in more ways than their cut, colour, and clarity. They share enough similarities with mined diamonds to make the two essentially indistinguishable. But there are key differences, not least in price and in their environmental and social impact. This minimised impact on both wallet and world is important to Millennial and Gen Z buyers who have played a large part in significantly reducing the impression of LGD being cheap and fake. With the cost of LGD production decreasing each year this represents a major disruption to the industry, and a major problem for De Beers and its diamond mining competitors. There are a couple of scenarios emerging. In a substitution scenario the two types of diamond live together, with customers viewing them as largely interchangeable except for the most impressive mined diamonds. This will have a big impact on the mined diamond industry, with a reduction of perhaps 25-30% of its market share. In a segregation scenario, however, mined diamonds and lab-grown diamonds are seen as markedly different categories. This would create a far more harmonious co-existence, with perhaps less than 5% impact on the diamond mines. It's not clear which scenario will emerge, but either way there is a major disruption underway. Luxury Strategy is an extraordinarily relevant course and Stefano’s explanation of what’s at stake and what it means is done in a way which brings relevance no matter your industry. When Zulu Ghevriya took over in the second half he showed why the mined diamond producers should be concerned. More on his talk to follow, but there was enough in what he said to suggest that significant change is on the horizon. Maybe diamonds aren’t forever after all. Inner Circle MBA

If you’re like the average person, this post is just one of many stops on your daily journey up the Statue of Liberty. The average social media user scrolls through 91 metres of content each day. That’s the height of New York City’s famous landmark, and it’s your thumbs that have done all the work. This was one of many insights offered by Morin Oluwole, former Global Head of Luxury at Meta, during her hour-long guest spot for Stefano Turconi’s Luxury Strategy course at London Business School last week. Her talk was engaging because it was relevant. More than that, it was eye-opening because it showed how digital strategies are the real driving force for success in the luxury goods sector. There are around 8 billion people on Earth and 5.35 billion of us are online. Four billion are on social media, 99% of whom are accessing it via their mobile phones. These are staggering numbers which go some way to explaining why there’s such a clamour for companies to reach their customers via social media channels. They are where we are. They are our noisy town halls, our entertainment centres, and, above all, our marketplaces. The problem is, with everyone rushing to get in on the action it can get a little crowded. We generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. To get a sense of how big that number is, it would take a person 79 billion years to count that high. You’d need to start counting during the Cretaceous period to finish today. So, there’s a lot of content out there. Accordingly, the biggest challenge for any company is to create thumb-stopping content. This can be difficult; social media platforms spend a lot of time improving flow-factors and removing stopping points. They want you to scroll all day, and they’ve done pretty well at it: on average we spend 6 hours and 39 minutes on the internet. So how do you get someone from your audience to pause on your post? It’s a complicated answer, but the first step is to know who your audience is. What Morin does so well in conveying her message is her ability to bring strategies to life, and she does this through painting a picture of what the digital marketplace looks like. For the luxury goods sector there’s been a lot of change. Traditionally the biggest spenders were an older demographic. That’s changing fast. The average age of a Rolls-Royce buyer is now 39. Millennial and Gen Z customers will grow from 40% to 75% in market spend from 2019 to 2026. Social media has replaced magazines as the dominant influencer in purchasing decisions. A massive 77% of luxury fashion shoppers use their mobile phones as a tool while purchasing. The biggest spenders in the sector do most of their luxury shopping online. Morin’s talk was an outstanding complement to Stefano’s lecture. It brought the strategy he was teaching to life. Appropriately, it flowed, like a social media app. But interest grew with every insight, every data point, every colourful story. She knows how to stop a thumb. Inner Circle MBA

There’s an elective course at London Business School that has generated a lot of interest since it was introduced back in 2015. Stefano Turconi’s Luxury Strategy course consistently ranks as one of LBS’ more popular electives, both in terms of the number of students signing up for it, and in the evaluations they give afterwards. But, with content and case studies which focus on luxury goods and the biggest brands producing them you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s a little niche. So why all the interest? The answer is hidden in the stories that Stefano weaves as he teaches. Friday’s lecture was a grand tour of the gradual rise of the British outerwear brand Burberry, its brand perception crisis of the early 2000s, and its reversal of fortunes under Angela Ahrendts from 2006 to 2014. What became clear is that this is a story of multiple facets. It’s a story about history, it’s a story about brand, and it’s a story about finding the right market. What Angela Ahrendts did best was to weave the three together. Burberry’s history as the producer of trench coats for the British Army during the First World War was central to its story a little under 100 years later. Under Ahrendts the company shifted its attention to its British identity and its focus to its outerwear garments in an attempt to create a clear and compelling brand identity with which to polish off the tarnish that had accumulated in recent years. It also sought to exploit new markets; emerging markets in general, and millennials in particular. A large part of this was how Burberry engaged with its target market in the spaces they are most easily found: an early adoption and mastery of digital – a strategy underlined by former Global Head of Luxury at Meta, Morin Oluwole, when she took over in the second half of the lecture. More on that later. As the lecture went on the reasons behind its popularity became clear. With each insight given by both Stefano and Morin a light was shone on the overarching lesson being taught. Luxury Strategy isn’t just about luxury brands. It’s about how their strategies have brought enormous success. It’s about how these brands have been able to increase prices and margins, but also the number of customers at the same time. It’s about how to create value, and how to build an iconic brand. But really, it’s about what companies in other sectors could do to replicate this success. Doing an MBA is about outcomes. MBA students want career progression. Employers recruit MBA students because they want the best and brightest. What is telling is that the employment outcomes for those who take Stefano’s Luxury Strategy course often aren’t in the luxury goods sector. They are recruited into a wide range of industries, with most interest coming from employers in financial services and consulting. It seems there is crossover appeal. That seems obvious now. After all, what company doesn’t want to grow the pie and take a larger slice of it? Inner Circle MBA

The University of Cambridge has a long history of important scientific breakthroughs. It has produced 121 Nobel Prize winners – the vast majority in the scientific disciplines – receiving its first in 1904 when Lord Rayleigh received his prize in Physics for discovering argon. It took until 1964 for the first Cambridge woman – Dorothy Hodgkin – to be awarded a Nobel Prize. There has been only one woman since. This isn’t unique to Cambridge. More than 600 Nobel Prizes have been awarded in the STEM categories. Only 26 have gone to women. My spotlight is on Cambridge because I used to live there. Spend enough time in Cambridge and you’ll come across the stories of Francis Crick and James Watson, their time spent seemingly equally at the Cavendish Laboratory and the Eagle pub around the corner, and their 1962 Nobel Prize for deciphering the double helix of DNA. There is something else you hear far less about: they didn’t do it alone. Rosalind Franklin was born in London in 1920 and graduated from Cambridge in 1941 with a degree in natural sciences. After some world leading research in the wonderfully diverse areas of coal and viruses, she found a talent for X-ray crystallography. In May of 1952 she took the photograph known as Photo 51 which clearly demonstrated the DNA double-helix, writing in mid-February 1953 of the two chains in its structure. Two weeks later, on 28 February 1953 and after having seen Franklin’s data, Crick and Watson famously burst into the Eagle and announced that they had discovered the meaning of life. Rosalind Franklin died five years later, in 1958, at the age of 37. Francis Crick and James Watson were awarded their Nobel Prize in 1962. Rosalind Franklin wasn’t mentioned once in their acceptance speech. In his 1968 book about the discovery, Watson noted that “clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place”. Around the time that these comments were published, another trailblazing female scientist, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, had discovered the first pulsar using a radio telescope she had built as a postdoctoral physics student at Cambridge. This was of huge importance to astronomy and was crucial to our understanding of neutron stars and black holes. The discovery was deserving of a Nobel Prize, which was duly awarded in 1972. The recipient was not Jocelyn Bell Burnell, though, but her supervisors, Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle. So, in the lead up to International Women’s Day I’d like to draw attention to the achievements of these two unsung female heroes of science, Rosalind Franklin and Jocelyn Bell Burnell. The achievements of women in STEM don’t end there, though. There are female pioneers in every scientific discipline. Here’s to them, and every woman who has reached for the stars – literally and figuratively – even though they knew they might not be welcome. Perhaps the last word is best left to Jocelyn Bell Burnell: “If we assume we’ve arrived, we stop searching. We stop developing.” #iwd2024 Inner Circle MBA

There was big news out of London this week for those looking to do an MBA. After 58 years of bucking the European trend by offering a two-year program, London Business School has fallen into line with the bulk of its local rivals in offering a one-year MBA. For a school that was founded on the US model of the two-year MBA this is a big change. What does it mean in practice? For those who want to complete their MBA in a year there will be trade-offs. They will take fewer core courses – 10 instead of 15 for the two-year program. They will have fewer electives to choose from – around 80, instead of over 100. And they will have less time to form the kind of lasting relationships that MBA programs are known for. On top of this, there is a catch. The one-year program isn’t open to everyone. To qualify you must have completed an accredited Masters in Management program. So, why the change? An easy answer is that this reflects the ever-smaller attention span and restlessness of those in the MBA target demographic. There is evidence to suggest that this is the case, both from in and outside the world of graduate management education. But data from the Graduate Management Admission Council™ (GMAC™) suggests that something else might be at play. The GMAC Prospective Students Survey from 2023 had a few bombshells, but perhaps none as big as the finding that, for the first time, interest in the one-year MBA had overtaken the two-year version. It’s tempting to blame modern attention spans. But with other data from the same survey pointing to potential MBAs wanting more in their programs rather than less, it’s probably more likely that opportunity cost is at play. It costs a lot more than just the fees to take an MBA, and forgoing a salary for one year rather than two represents a massive saving. But then LBS is anticipating that its new one-year MBA will cost £75K, rather than £115K for the two-year program. If you add the £47,500 cost of the 12-16 month long Masters in Management then you’ll actually be paying slightly more, and spending slightly longer out of paid employment. Perhaps, then, this is about flexibility, and choice. The new LBS one-year MBA allows students to break up their business school experience, filling the gap between a MiM and an MBA with valuable work experience where they can bed down some of their learning before restarting. And it gives them the freedom to attend two different schools for their management education, giving them twice the brand, twice the experience, and twice the network. In reality, then, this is LBS’ foray into the world of modular education. They’re not the first school to go in this direction. Several other schools offer stackable degrees. Saïd Business School, University of Oxford has for several years offered a pathway to its Executive MBA via Executive Diplomas. So is this move from LBS a glimpse of things to come? The short answer is yes. Inner Circle MBA #mba #mbaadmissions #londonbusinessschool

A funny thing happens to me when I buy something online. I’m presented with a pretty clear option to “Buy Now”, which generally makes the process as quick as possible. But I almost never choose it. Instead, I’m drawn to the “You might also like” section. And then the problem starts. Before long I’m reading reviews and watching videos and generally not making a purchase for days. I’m not alone in this. In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz identified a growing problem: the explosion of choice in the modern world and how it is linked to anxiety and inaction. It’s a great book and impossible to summarise here beyond the observation that more choice isn’t a recipe of more happiness. Instead, those with a view of success (a goal), and an understanding of how to get there (a plan), will generally be happier than those without them. And we all know from experience how new options can complicate the simplicity of an effective plan. I bring this up as this time of year sees a lot of people applying to business school and taking admissions tests. And this year is a little different as the Graduate Management Admission Council™ (GMAC™) has just launched its update to the gold standard of graduate management education admissions tests: the GMAT Focus Edition. I went to the GMAT Focus Edition Summit in Milan last week. This was the second GMAC event centred on the Focus Edition this year, but the first since launch so there was some actual test-use data that they could share. But what struck me as most interesting was something that there wasn’t yet any data on. The Focus Edition includes a whole raft of positive changes, mostly centred on reducing the test length. But it also includes a change which takes it straight into Paradox of Choice territory. The new test now allows users to go back and review their answers, and to change up to three of them. On the face of it this seems to be a good change. In reality, though, with GMAT test takers famously time-poor, this might muddy the waters a little. What does this mean for the average test taker? It’s always been important to minimise distractions when taking a test, and it might be prudent to avoid being distracted by choice. Ultimately, your strategy probably shouldn’t change to that best employed in the GMAT Classic: know how long you have for each question and stick to that. If you race ahead thinking you can come back to it later you risk finding yourself becoming more anxious and distracted as the test goes on. Don’t get me wrong; the GMAT Focus Edition has introduced some really important changes which mean that the GMAT remains the gold standard in graduate management admissions testing. But in providing more choice, it might also be providing more distraction. Maybe with this change it shouldn’t be called the GMAT Focus Edition. Then again, maybe that is the right name. If you want to do your best, it’s probably best to focus. Inner Circle MBA #mba #emba #mbaadmissions #gmat

Taking the first step in your MBA journey can be hard. The Paradox of Choice often makes us feel less comfortable with our decisions when there are a large number of options available, and choosing where to do your MBA is no different. The best thing to do is to take that first step and find out more about some of the options available to you. You’ll probably find that the mist clears a little.   One of the best ways to find out more about MBA programs is to attend an Access Online event where you can speak with Admissions Officers from a wide range of business schools all at the same event, as well as speaking with others who are on the same journey as you are. If you’re a European resident there is an Access Online event on 22 November which is specifically targeted at the journey you are taking and the kind of questions you might have.   Head to https://lnkd.in/eaQDDBBx where you can find out more and sign yourself up to attend. It all gets a little bit easier after you take that first step.   Inner Circle MBA | Access Online Events #mba #mbaadmissions

Leaders are told to be authentic, and that’s not a bad thing. Sometimes the focus should be elsewhere, though. An authentic leader can inspire results based on their vision, but the leader who promotes authenticity within the team allows every team member to grow into their own talents, and therefore inspires results through many visions. The secret sauce of a team’s success is harnessing the skills, efforts, and expertise of everyone working in a way that is true to them, and delivering the thoughts and efforts of many to the benefit of the organisation. Inner Circle MBA #leadership

With first round interviews for MBA programs underway it is important to focus on what an interview represents. Firstly, it’s a two way street, in which you and the school are evaluating each other. More than that, though, the interview is another opportunity for you to provide evidence of your value. Answer their questions, and do it succinctly, directly, and authentically. But then think about how each question relates to what you bring, and bridge to the message you want them to leave with. Remember, the interview is as much for you as it is for them. #mba #mbaadmissions

The leadership journey is often taken via a path of providing solutions. Companies are often short-termist in approach, driven by the need to make quick returns: to client, to customer, and to shareholder. Solutions – not questions – are therefore the currency most valuable to senior leadership and the quality most often rewarded. It stands to reason, then, that many leaders arrive at their position conditioned to solving problems, providing answers, finding solutions. This is a missed opportunity. As a leader it is important to ask questions, and to understand. The why comes before the how. There is a time and a place for providing solutions. It comes after understanding the problem. Inner Circle MBA #leadership