“If we cannot make a profit, that means we are committing a sort of crime against society. We take society’s capital, we take their people, we take their materials, yet without a good profit, we are using precious resources that could be better used elsewhere.”
- Konosuke Matsushita(1894 – 1989), Founder of Panasonic Corporation

What makes the Oxford MBA different? Many people try to answer the question; school director in journal interviews, alumni in seminars, and even applicants in admission interviews (how unfair). And yes, your intuition is right; it is damn hard to come up with a good answer without actually doing the programme. But after eight weeks in Michaelmas, the first term, I feel my grab on it.

Asking right questions, not just one, but all possible intellectual questions from holistic scopes is what I learned in past weeks. Although the first term is designed to lay a foundation of business knowledge, lecturers kept asking tough questions. This is to introduce a scene in one of the core courses.

A standing ovation does not come to an end. I even hear some sobbing. Can you believe this? I am in the last lecture of accounting class. Now I recall the professor raising a question in the first lecture, “what is financial reporting for?”, and the class replying in ways that “it is to represent reality in business.” or “it is to perform a comparative analysis over companies’ performances.”

True, accounting can be dull, tiring, and not anything more than arithmetic operations. The professor nodded, “Yes, many business schools teach accounting only by introducing accounting rules and calculating ratios, but not in Oxford. We are going to challenge that idea.”

It was just incredible how quickly we learned. In week 2, those who had never opened Yahoo! Finance started asking right questions in an income statement of Oxford Biomedica, a biopharmaceutical venture hatched in Oxford. In week 3, we learned how to give a double-entry for stock options for executives and discuss dark-sides of it. In later weeks, the topics extended to recording future profits from a palm tree in Malaysia, politics among IASB board members, accounting practices in NPOs, reasons for establishing huge accounting institutions in China…

All lectures, cases, and homework demanded tough critique; “How can we trust the business knowledge we are learning now?” And in week 8, at the very last lecture, the professor is sending us a farewell. “Although it depends on situations,” he said, “account-ING is not just a representation of reality because people make the reality. As a manager, you will have to do some creative accountings in the future. How do you account for your business activity? Please do your good accounting.”

For more than a decade before the business ethics came on top of the must-be-taught list in business schools, the Oxford MBA has taught how good and evil the business knowledge can be. As Oxford intellectuals, we are ought to ask right questions on both sides.

“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
- Steve Jobs, delivered as the commencement at Stanford University, June 12, 2005

As you may know the remarkable speech made by one of the most successful business persons in this decade, it must be the feeling all of my fellow classmates shared today. Through the induction events in the 1st week of our life-changing year, we came to recognize that everyday counts (psychologically AND physically), not just because it is a one-year MBA programme, but also because we will have an unimaginable number of notes in our datebook.

So, what took me here? Being born and having spent all years in Japan, a beautiful island country, I bought a one-way ticket to overseas, the first one in my life. By then, I had come to believe that Oxford MBA is my destined course for many reasons: it has truly global and matured student body; it maximizes students’ experiences through the University brand and academic rigor, it pursues excellent business education from holistic perspectives, paying special attention to social goodness.

These beliefs were naturally proved through the induction week. We were told that the class of 2009-2010 consists of 240 students from 48 countries, 29+ years old on average. We were taught how to leverage the incomparable Oxford brand and academic challenges. We were thrilled by a director’s welcome speech, mentioning a number “30,000”, which is obviously not the amount of salary increase that we expect at the exit of MBA, but the number of children’s death per day caused by hunger and disease.

Now, here we are. The gate is opening and it is time to take off. I know that the 1st week functioned well enough to raise the expectations at the highest spree. Even so, I am still comfortable in saying that this year’s experience will meet them.