Simon Munroe has a background in consulting and technology and has worked with some of the biggest names in British media. About to graduate from his MBA at The University of Bath School of Management he reflects on his time at the business school.
Simon is originally from London and worked there all his life until he relocated to Bristol after his wife was offered a job in the city. The 43-year old has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Brunel University in London.
After a two year stint at PwC, Simon started "niche consulting" at MMT Consulting where he stayed for eight years. He then went to EMI music:
“Technology was becoming important in the music industry, both in the marketing and the supply chain. I specialised in digital and as a Program Director was working with tech people to make sure the product was delivered. In that role your gradually moves away from technology and into surrounding business issues. As a Program Director a large part of the role is working with board-level stakeholders to build business cases and implement organisational change.”
After leaving EMI to freelance at News International, Simon found that where once people in an organisation knew him well, being a freelancer it was harder to gain the same credibility. “When you go in as a consultant you are running a program with all the legal, financial and marketing operations. There were so many business areas but my background was very much technology and at times I felt quite exposed."
This is where the MBA came in. “I had been thinking about it for a while and in order to get credibility at the most senior level I had to do it.” With a simultaneous move to Bristol and end of his News International contract, Simon realised now was the perfect time.
Simon only looked at Bath School of Management as the location was perfect and it placed highly in the business school rankings. “When I went there I knew what I wanted to learn but I didn’t know how their teaching would work. Prospective students are encouraged to attend 'master classes' where you can talk to alumni and teaching staff and have a lecture from one of the academic staff. I thought it would be heavily business focused, but it was a lecture on storytelling in business and it was much more on the psychology side. I knew that although this was a business degree there would be so many more angles to what is involved.”
At Bath Simon found that a lot of the staff are doing consulting alongside their research on the side and that any theory is always explained in terms of their practical experience. “Students also encouraged to talk if you had relevant experience. People would say, ‘this is what we did at Motorola’, ‘this is what we did at Intel’.”
Simon found that the Bath MBA was less about learning new facts but more about making links in your head. “For example when we learning about Organisational Theory I would suddenly think of a project I was on four years ago and realise that was why it had or had not worked.” The MBA is not about remembering facts but “finding formal models to hang your experience on.”
Throughout the year there were many guest lecturers, “on every module we would have guest speakers coming in. We had the Chairman of Tesco, HR director of Eli Lilly. All came back to this whole notion of something you have just learnt you will hear how practical that is.”
The Bath MBA has the core modules in the first term; the finance, operations and marketing and they are all quite separate. “You are putting them in different compartments but around Christmas time you start realising the links between them and how theories and models from one discipline are relevant in the others. And then with the entrepreneurship module you had to cover everything and it all pulled together. None of these subjects were stand alone.”
For his dissertation Simon worked on strategy for content organisations that need to react to digital. “Through various contacts I went into music and publishing companies and interviewed managers. The flexibility allowed in the choice of modules and dissertation subject meant that, with help from the careers teams you can treat the MBA course as one big experience building careers exercise, focusing on where you want to be post-MBA, you can do a project in that exact area you want to move into. The companies in my dissertation I hope to do future consulting for.”
The Bath MBA does not end as soon as the year is over and the alumni are welcomed to come and sit in on the courses, as Simon explains “you have got to keep up with where thinking is going and the Bath MBAs course options are all focused on new areas of development or key new business ideas.”
After the Bath MBA Graduation next week, the graduation party and Christmas, Simon will be returning to consultancy in the same area he was in before. With the new “width of knowledge” from the MBA Simon says he has learnt “to think in different ways. I won’t know everything but enough to ask the right questions.”
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