The 12-Week MBA Philosophy
What is The 12-Week MBA?
The 12-Week MBA is an online leadership development program that focuses on the timeless and universal core of business management.
For the past two decades, Abilitie has created leadership development programs for some of the world’s largest and most admired companies. We’ve seen them expend enormous effort identifying, developing, and retaining people with business and leadership skills.
We designed The 12-Week MBA to match what those companies look for in their emerging leaders. Our program is short and sweet not because it skims the surface, but because it goes deep where it counts, helping participants develop the knowledge, skills, and mindset they need to step up to management. Not in two years, but right now.
What’s wrong with the traditional MBA?
In an age where disruption is the only constant, it’s difficult for the MBA to keep up. Today, many skills you learn in an MBA program will be outdated soon after you accept your first job. And much of what you learn won’t be relevant in the industry, company, and function you enter.
What you’re really enlisting for in a traditional MBA – with its two-year and around six-figure price tag – is access to a network of privileged people and a pedigree.
For some, that might be the right choice. But there are far more management positions than there are people with elite MBA credentials to fill them. And these positions ought to be filled by people with a greater diversity of backgrounds than those with the time and means to go through a graduate-school curriculum.
If you’re in the thick of life, in a place you call home, ready to leverage your industry expertise, and working in a company whose culture you love, you may want an alternative way to learn how to manage with a laser focus on the timeless and the universal.
A Special Learn to Lead podcast episode: The 12-Week MBA
Bjorn Billhardt is the CEO and Founder of Abilitie and Nathan Kracklauer is Abilitie’s Chief Research Officer. Together, they are the authors of the upcoming book entitled The 12-Week MBA. On this episode, Bjorn and Nathan talk about their journey over 20 years in the learning industry and the process of crafting the curriculum that serves as the foundation for Abilitie’s leadership programs. They also dive into the book writing process, the power of trust, and their advice for leaders at all levels.
What do you learn in The 12-Week MBA?
Stripping away the two-year MBA’s function-focused and industry-specific content leaves two topics:
- The Numbers: Understanding how managerial decisions create value; how we measure value using financial analysis; and how we use the language of finance to communicate inside and outside the organization.
- The People: How to cultivate everyone’s quirky talents to achieve great things; how to get a team to act as one even when we all bring different perspectives; how to shape organizations so they don’t just perform today but perform better tomorrow.
Ultimately, the true challenge of business is to see a company as a set of resources to optimize and a web of relationships to nurture at one and the same time.
How do you learn in The 12-Week MBA?
True “mastery” of “business administration” only comes with practice in the real world. A whole career’s worth of trial, error, and eventually, success. The 12-Week MBA accelerates that trial-and-error process. In the program, you will:
The 12-Week MBA takes place online in workshops, supplemented with self-study resources. The core experience runs across twelve weeks, and there are options to stitch together different modules to fit the constraints of your schedule.
Management is a calling. Our goal for The 12-Week MBA is to inspire you to embrace management while helping you develop the knowledge, skills, and mindset to do so confidently.
