Over the next weeks and months, I’m going to lead you through the main topics that the MBA syllabus covers, with a focus on how you can use these in your work as a software developer.

I’m aiming to help you:

• understand the concepts which are taught on MBA courses
• apply the models and processes to your situation
• communicate with the business using terms they’ll be familiar with

At a high level, “business” is a huge and nebulous concepts, but most MBA courses break down into around 6 core areas. Their names and the exact topics vary between institutions and courses, but they tend to cluster into:

• Finance & accounting
• Organisational behaviour
• Strategy & competition
• Marketing & sales
• Operations management
• Management decision making

Over the course of the next weeks and months, we’ll jump around these topics to try to keep things as relevant as possible; and also link the topics together. Everything in business is interconnected - finance is impacted by sales, sales depends on operations, marketing is influenced by the firm’s strategy and everything depends on people working together.

That said, let’s look at each area in a bit more detail, by way of a taster for what’s coming up.

Finance & accounting

Every organisation, commercial or otherwise, needs financial resources to operate. Finance is perhaps the most opaque function in any business - it’s a world full of arcane jargon and complex rules and regulations. Sometimes it’s easy to think that this is deliberate, and financial complexity definitely gets exploited sometimes - scandals like FTX or the 2008 financial crisis might not have happened in the first place if financial concepts were easily and widely understood.

The good news, though, is that you can understand the concepts and terminology used for the most important every-day financial processes used in organisations; and you don’t need mathematical skills beyond arithmetic and a basic understanding of how percentages work. We’ll cover topics like cashflow, depreciation, investment forecasts and more. Along the way, you’ll learn things like why companies can apparently be worth billions with bulging order books but go bankrupt for lack of cash; and why a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.

We’ll also look at how financing works - where companies get their money from; how startups are funded; and how to figure out a real value for stock options.

Arming yourself with a basic understanding of finance works means you’ll be able to interpret how your company is performing, the health of the competition, and whether that tempting offer of equity in a startup is worth the risk.

Organisational behaviour

The human brain is the most complex structure we’ve found so far in the known Universe, so it’s not altogether surprising that when people get together, things don’t always run smoothly.

Organisational behaviour is the psychology of how people interact in the business environment, and it’s perhaps the most useful topic you can understand if you want to improve the performance of your team and company.

We’ll look at motivation - what can drive some individuals to achieve vastly more than others in the same situation, and how this can change over time. We’ll explore the phenomenon of power in organisations, and why org charts never tell the whole story. We’ll examine how organisational politics emerge and evolve, and how you can navigate them effectively. And we’ll look at the psychology of teams - what makes some achieve outsize results, and others to implode completely.

Unhealthy and unhappy workplaces are often the result of organisational behaviour theories and techniques being used for ill. By understanding these, you’ll be in a position to recognise when this is happening, and know how to react. You’ll also be able to guide your team in positive ways, getting the best of people without coercion or exploitation.

Strategy & competition

Why do some organisations survive over long periods, and others disappear? How is it that Microsoft has been around for decades and is still operating today, but knowing the name Novell marks you out as nearing retirement?

Surviving as a company can just be dumb luck, but successful survival is usually down to being able to figure out what to do with limited resources. No organisation exists in a vacuum without competition - so the other key to survival is how to react to competitive pressures in your market.

Understanding markets and competitors is where models of strategy come in. You can use them to predict how entire industries will develop over time, or learn from the mistakes of failed companies. Just as natural phenomena like weather is caused by simple physics applied at a large scale, so company performance can be explained by strategic building blocks.

I find strategy fascinating because it’s relevant at both the macro scale of industries, but also at the micro scale of your individual career. Being able to predict which technologies might survive can help you avoid the trap of obsolescence, and applying strategic models to the way teams work

Marketing, branding & sales

There’s a famous quote from the founder of Unilever: “half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half”. That sums up the challenges of marketing your products and services - at some point, every organisation has to communicate with their customers.

Doing it effectively means being able to deal with the fact that different customers have different needs, are found through different communication channels, and respond to different messaging.

Done well, marketing and advertising can create new markets from almost nothing - for example, the long-established custom of presenting your intended with a diamond engagement ring is entirely the creation of the diamond producers, De Beers.

Knowing how customers and markets can be segmented, branding developed, and sales messaging created can be useful not just when thinking about what your organisation does - but also to help you objectively assess your competition or suppliers.

Operations management

In the software world, we perhaps know operations management best as “Agile” - but the theory and practice of efficient organisations goes much, much further. If you’ve ever wondered why some teams seem to achieve their goals effortlessly while others struggle to ship anything at all - operations management has the answers.

Operations management is about the “how” of the way a company creates value - how teams are structured, how they interrelate, how stocks and work-in-progress can be managed efficiently; and how you can ensure that the finished product or service maintains quality.

We’re exposed to operations management constantly in our daily lives - if you’ve ever sat frustrated in an endless call centre queue, you’re experiencing an operations management failure in real time. If your software delivery is crippled by constantly shipping bugs, then then operational management models can help you understand their hidden root causes.

Management decision making

Most of the problems in business - in fact, most problems full stop - stem from the fact that civilisation has advanced a lot faster than evolution. We’re living in a technological world with brains that haven’t really evolved to catch up. Our information processing and decision-making capabilities are still optimised for avoiding being eaten by tigers, not for processing complex multi-variant decisions that the modern world throws at us.

There’s a range of psychological approaches that can help to improve decision-making by being conscious of the internal heuristics and biases that our brains use. This has a flip-side, too - by being aware of how suboptimal decisions are made, these can be exploited. Online dark patterns are the result - and while I’m not advocating using this knowledge for “evil”, it’s equally useful to know how these patterns work so you can avoid them.

Bringing it all together

Understanding the theories and models individually in isolation will definitely help you in your day to day work, but where you’ll have the potential to make real transformational level improvements is when you begin to see how concepts from different areas interrelate and complement each other.

That’s also the key to success on an MBA course itself - academics love it when an assignment or exam answer draws on multiple theories to compare and contrast, and synthesise a bigger picture.

When we’re looking at one topic, I’ll try to link that back to other areas, and also focus on how the theories and models relate to the real world. Academic concepts are all well and good, but your focus as a busy professional software engineer has to be your day-to-day work. I’m convinced that knowing how to apply theories to real life is a valuable skill, and hopefully after seeing some examples of how this can work, you’ll end up agreeing with me.