Can Creative Professionals Benefit From MBA? Looking At B-school Degrees Beyond Conventional Backgrounds

A quick glimpse at the B-school demographics in India reveals a striking feature of management education in the country. Across all the top colleges, the number of students from engineering and commerce backgrounds constitutes about 3/4th of the total students. While others exist, not much is known about what prospects art students and practitioners have after pursuing an MBA degree.

Unfortunately, today, there is very little talk about MBA degrees for creative professionals, such as actors, designers, artists, and performers. Moreover, contrary to what many artists and designers believe, art and business are not quite antagonistic. For instance, Vanya Mishra- a fashion model who became Femina Miss India in 2012, became an entrepreneur through a fashion discovery platform called SummerLabel and got enrolled in the PGPX degree at IIM Ahmedabad.  

According to the Harvard Business Review, there are 5 reasons why an MBA is beneficial for art grads. 

• It helps them to collaborate better at work. 
• Becoming more versatile in an interconnected world. 
• Communicate ideas clearly to stakeholders from a business perspective. 
• Develop entrepreneurial instincts. 
• Understand the dynamics of the global market and how global trends are shaped. 

Although in India, special attention is not paid to B-school degrees for creatives, there is a surge of approaches in countries in Europe and the US. Soon, as the views percolate, we will start seeing this trend in India as well. 

From The Theatre To The World Of Business

Knowledge of business is central to how an artist or a performer can monetize their art. Even though artists are stereotyped as perennially uncomfortable with business decisions, it is not difficult to imagine them tracking budgets, estimating sample size, and balancing financial statements as soon as they become successful as performers.

For instance, a Miami-born performer started as a dancer for a hip hop company in Los Angeles, California, when she was only 7. Now she is a student at UCLA in the Fully-Employed MBA course - a specially designed program for working professionals, and at the same time performs six days a week for the blockbuster musical Hamilton in Los Angeles.

 

 

 

 

 

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According to her, a conventional background is not the prerequisite to pursuing an MBA. In fact, she believes that having creatives around will make MBA classrooms more exciting and dynamic at the same time.

Even before taking up a fully creative field to work in, Sam Aberman worked for a startup producing raw chocolate. This was at a time when she was yet to audition for Hamilton.

"While we were making these raw organic chocolates from scratch, they were phenomenal," she said. "But we did not have an inventory system or anything," she added. As the startup grew, Sam got freedom from the manager to organize and manage the inventory system.

This experience made her realize that she had a talent for operations management. After that, she started preparing for GMAT and took admission into UCLA  Anderson. 

A Performer’s Journey Into Production

Although Sam Aberman discovered her knack for operations management while working with a start-up, for others it is much more straightforward.

One such example is Angel Mo- a Chinese-Canadian woman who had made a name for herself at a very young age for being a talented rapper. But now, after an MBA from Tsinghua University, Angel has become a producer with Alibaba-owned Youku - the Chinese equivalent of YouTube.

Angel discovered her love for rap music at the age of 12, and with Eminem as her inspiration, she started writing her own lyrics. She appeared on various reality shows in China, including The Voice Of China and Super Girl - a female-only singing contest, where she reached the top 10. She also appeared in the national rap competition The Rap Of China.

Once she noticed that the popularity of rap music is growing rapidly in China, she decided to take her passion to the next level by venturing into production. "If the audience is getting bigger, then on the production side we also need more resources and creatives to help create more content," she explains.

While at Tsinghua University, she started taking small steps into music production by founding an advertisement company - a step that was very different from her previous experience as a rapper.

“When I tell people that I used to be a rapper, they automatically assume that I'm not academically capable, which is not true," she said, and added, “I wanted to prove to them that I could study hard and get straight A grades at Tsinghua."

She scored an incredible 710 in the GMAT exam, which made her eligible for an MBA in some of the top B-schools in China. She chose Beijing because it is the hub of Chinese culture where people speak the native language and are down to earth.

Final Words...

Finally, there is a need to stress that B-school degrees are concerned with the management and distribution of resources. Even though it is a field dominated by engineers in India, MBAs are becoming highly relevant for people from all walks of life. For practicing artists especially, MBA is a gateway to turning their talent into an enterprise and managing it effectively. As a result, in India, more attention needs to be paid to students beyond engineering degrees as a lot of potential lies in there as well.

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