It wasn't an MBA setting, it was a BBA, but here's an off-the cuff top 5 things that a programmer got out of business school. 1. Strategic Management: SWOT Ana

It wasn't an MBA setting, it was a BBA, but here's an off-the cuff top 5 things that a programmer got out of business school. 1. Strategic Management: SWOT Analysis. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. It's simple, but applicable almost everywhere. 2. Accounting... Feeling comfortable with the basic jargon and rules of business. Revenues, expenses, assets, liabilities, etc. 3. Marketing. Marketing is more than just advertising. Everything is marketing. A lot of marketing can be handled by running through checklists to make sure you haven't overlooked something stupid. Much in the same way that pilots always run through checklists before taking off. 4. Judging people based on shallow stereotypes is, well, shallow. I remember a cute-as-a-button sorority girl who surprised me by being really, really good at relational algebra. That prejudice is really embarrassing to me, because I always thought I was really enlightened. 5. Microsoft Excel is an amazing piece of software, in that it's simple to use, but has incredible depth of capability for solving very sophisticated problems. --- And as a free bonus, the things that weren't of value. 1. The "software systems" class was total waterfall indoctrination. Complete waste of time. 2. Networking (with humans). I'm an introvert, I made a handful of friends, but I was a self-employed non-traditional student with a wife and a child, and everyone else was around 19 or 20 years old. 3. Networking (with software). The professor teaching the computer networking class didn't really know his stuff. He was recruited into the position at the last minute, and got a bunch of basics wrong. Right now, there are dozens of Business School graduates who don't really understand how DNS MX records work, which I guess isn't a huge tragedy. 4. Business Ethics. I remember being horrified by the rationalizations that some of my peers were willing to make in our hypothetical scenarios. Many of them were willing to put workers in unnecessary mortal peril because they didn't feel they had any risk of legal liabilities. I'm sorry, but even really good lawyers can't bring people back from the dead. 5. The support staff and advisors were never very helpful or encouraging. The first advisor insisted that there was no way I could ever get into the (competitive) program with my substandard GPA. Ha! I showed her.