Is Carlson As Good As Ross or Haas? Sri Zaheer Thinks So

The Carlson School of Management in Minneapolis

A FEISTY ADVOCATE FOR THE SCHOOL AND ITS STUDENTS

Her feisty advocacy for Carlson is partly a function of the deep investment she has made in the school. Both she and her husband, Carlson strategy professor Aks Zaheer, have been teaching at the school since 1991. Before being tapped as Carlson’s new boss, she had been the associate dean for faculty and research. Though their daughter recently graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School, the university would be hard pressed to find a more passionate spokesperson for the school.

Zaheer believes Carlson is often overlooked because of the media emphasis on the East and West Coasts, which she says gives those schools far more visibility. Another factor is the small size of the school’s full-time MBA program. This fall, Carlson took in just 107 students, up from 98 a year earlier. Zaheer wants to raise that annual intake to around 130 to 150, but will do so slowly “without any impact on student quality.”

Carlson’s other business programs tend to overwhelm the full-time MBAs. The school boasts 2,350 business undergraduates, 1,400 part-time MBA candidates, and 130 executive MBA students. Even its specialized master’s degree in human resources boasts 140 students, making the full-time MBA program the smallest of its initiatives. “The full-time MBA drives the excellence in the other programs,” she says.

‘WE ARE THE PLACE FOR REAL BUSINESSES’

In a world where most deans only talk off the record about their competitors, Zaheer has a rather bold and blunt style. As she sees it, “Stanford is for entrepreneurs. Wharton is for Wall Street. Harvard takes in consultants and investment bankers who go there to party hard for two years and go back to consulting and banking. We are the place for real businesses, whether it’s healthcare, consumer marketing, or agricultural business. We’re way better than Kellogg in marketing, and we’re among the top three schools in big data analysis.”

Sure enough, Carlson’s annual crop of MBAs goes into a far wider variety of industries than most. Some 28% of last year’s class landed jobs in consumer products, while 15% went into healthcare, pharma and biotech–the same percentage that went into finance. Only 10% of the class became consultants—the exact same share that went into manufacturing.

The reason for both the job success rate and the diversity has a lot to do with the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, which is home to at least 18 of the Fortune 500 companies, including 3M, General Mills, Medtronic, UnitedHealth Group, Target, Best Buy, SuperValu and Land O’Lakes. Several of the world’s largest private concerns also have their headquarters in the area, including Cargill, Carlson Cos. and Andersen Corp.

‘OUR STUDENTS HAVE RINGSIDE SEATS TO EVERYTHING THAT IS HAPPENING’

“Our students have ringside seats to everything that is happening in the world of business,” maintains Zaheer. “Wall Street is laying off 50,000 people this year. If you want to be an investment banker, go to Wharton. For folks who are trying to do something different with their lives, there is nothing better than our school.”

As one of the first business schools to put experiential learning into its MBA program 15 years ago, Carlson does an exceptionally good job of hooking up its students with the area’s name brand, hometown companies. It boasts four “enterprise” programs that allow teams of students to work on real challenges from client businesses.

This is not a week or two visit at a company. These projects span 15 months and absorb 10 of the 60 required credits for the MBA program. Students are placed on small teams managed by both a professional and academic director and put to work on real problems. Participating companies pay Carlson between $30,000 and $45,000 for the privilege of working with the school’s students.