Creative Industries Get a New MBA

This article is sponsored by the Ashridge Business School. Learn more about its new executive MBA program.

Hollywood filmmakers love good origin stories. Well, perhaps they might be interested in the origins of Ashridge Business School’s newest offering aimed at them and other creative professionals: the Executive MBA for the Creative Industries.

Ashridge Business School’s executive MBA beginnings

For over 50 years, Ashridge Business School has focused on educating working professionals. A pioneer of the part-time executive MBA, today the school is globally accredited by AMBA, EQUIS and AACSB. This is an honor shared by only 1% of programs globally. In addition to the executive MBA, the school also provides leadership development, working with over 6,000 managers annually from 850 different organizations with outposts in some five-dozen countries.

This year, Ashridge Business School is introducing a new program, which David Puttnam, a member of the school’s advisory board describes as, “In effect, the world’s first creative industries MBA.”

Puttnam sees creativity through a different lens than you might. As an independent producer, Puttnam oversaw production on Academy Award-winning films like The Killing Fields and Midnight Express. In the mid-1980s, he transitioned to CEO of Columbia Pictures. While many envision an erratic artiste driven by impulses and muses, the retired film producer’s views are more pragmatic. After decades working with and inspiring those in the creative industries, Puttnam views their work as disciplined, rigorous and even predictable. “Creativity is a muscle,” he says in an interview published on the school’s website, “a real muscle – you can exercise it and improve it constantly if you are thoughtful and intelligent and ambitious enough.” He feels the most important component in creativity is resilience.

He believes creative professionals’ experience in the last century is inadequate preparation for the current one’s demands. Exponential and often drastic, every industry disrupter or killer app leaves behind the unprepared who can’t cope with transition. “If you’d been a movie cameraman with one of those big, big cameras 30 years ago you could be reasonably sure that the piece of equipment you were working on would probably see you through your career,” Puttnam points out. “Since the creation of the digital camera, those changes are almost an annual event.” Today digital cameras, like the operating systems for cellphones, update regularly. Anyone hoping to succeed – or even survive – in a creative industry needs the skills to manage change.

Ashridge Business School’s Executive MBA for the Creative Industries is designed to prepare professionals for upcoming changes and help prepare them for corporate positions.

Distance learning for creative industries

Managing any successful business means communicating your company’s goals to a diverse group of employees. Creative industries attract a huge variety of men and women. Running an independent production company, for example, might mean working on a film based on the script of an Oxford-educated writer, directed by a Southern Californian-schooled director, starring an actor who never completed high school. Their contributions are supported by the labor of hundreds, even thousands, collaborating toward the execution of a single creative vision.

Puttnam and the rest of the faculty at Ashridge Business School believe the new program, offered online, is one of the best ways to prepare students in the creative industries to manage both change and other creatives. Puttnam notes that students will have access to creative professionals “at the top of their game”, along with numerous networking opportunities. Yet the retired producer also says that, “I believe passionately that if you look around the room at the people you are learning with, you may well find that you’re sitting there with people who can change your life.”

The new program includes three residential weeks at Ashridge and one abroad. The online components will utilize the school’s “state-of-the-art online learning platform, which enables you to study and network with your peers from any part of the world."

As business schools introduce online MBA programs they must overcome preconceived notions about distance education. Some equate it with for-profit or sub-par institutions. Advocates argue that far from being the 'bricks-and-mortar' university’s ugly stepchild, in the hands of motivated educators it can deliver superior results. Puttnam feels his online lectures offer better opportunities for interaction with students than a large, traditional hall.

Like digital filmmaking, distance learning alternately disrupts and complements the old order. Many bricks-and-mortar universities have been reluctant to adopt the online model. While the likes of Quentin Tarantino might label digitally shot and projected movies as “TV in public”, educators and the schools employing them can’t dismiss distance learning’s global reach quite so easily.

Building on an executive MBA

David Puttnam is not the only noteworthy creative professional involved with Ashridge Business School’s new executive MBA program. The school has also enlisted men and women who have worked in numerous creative industries including film, television, publishing, advertising, fashion and much more. These include fellow film producer Steve Abbott; Orion Publishing Group’s managing director, Katie Espiner; and Tony Orsten, the CEO of The Imaginarium Studios. As with the other executive MBA programs, they will utilize both case studies and their own areas of expertise during lectures.

Numerous students employed by creative industries have already earned executive MBAs. Today Marcus Arthur is president of BBC Worldwide, the main commercial arm of the BBC. Sponsored by his current employer, he notes Ashridge Business School for its ROI. “During the program,” Marcus recalls, “I gained real confidence in areas of business that were nascent for me and I was also able to improve both my soft and hard business skills.” Like many employees sponsored for their executive MBA, Arthur’s loyalty toward his employer has increased exponentially. Since graduation, he notes, “I have been promoted a number of times and have moved from being a mid-level executive to being on the management board. One of the major benefits for me from my MBA has been that my salary has quadrupled since I finished the program.”

In its quest to attract those in creative industries without a strong business background, Ashridge is reaching out to people just like Julius O'Dowd, who graduated in 2010. The commercial director for a major TV production company, he wanted to transition to the c-suite and hoped to find a program close to his London workplace. “The MBA program at Ashridge Business School is a passport to the corporate world,” O’Dowd says. “It taught me the language, tools and themes of big business and gave me a better understanding of the ‘big picture.’”

Since earning his MBA, he has also joined the BBC. He considers his promotions and current position as head of transition and transformation for BBC Engineering as a clear sign of the program’s benefits. “I gained a lot of confidence when presenting during my MBA, it made me go from a nervy performer to someone who enjoys presenting, something that I have to do a lot now in my role at the BBC,” he says.

Ashridge Business School’s Executive MBA for the Creative Industries is now accepting applications for the fall (autumn) cohort.

This article is sponsored by the Ashridge Business School.