Cait Hurley is halfway through a two-year part-time Exec MBA at Cranfield. When she isn’t in classes there or doing her 20 hours of book work a week, she is a senior content producer at internet service provider Freeserve. ‘It’s very hard keeping up with all your work commitments and coping with the course as well,’ she says. ‘It’s paradoxical: the time commitment is quite overwhelming, but you can see that it is really going to be worthwhile.’ For her, there are specific reasons why the MBA is useful. ‘You have to master the business language. It means you will get taken seriously at work, but it also changes the way you think. There might be a bit of tension in the office when you come up with some new ideas – ‘Ooh, listen to the MBA student!’ – but if you’re serious about a career then it’s an important aid to getting on.’ The Harvard Business School Class of ’75 boasted the usual share of future high achievers and corporate heroes. But at no time during the seminars and lectures, case studies and special projects did one of those young MBA students, George W Bush,know that he’d be getting his own intensive training in crisis management and leadership a quarter of a century later Bush is the first MBA President of the US. His early months in office were marked by meticulous time-keeping, formality in meetings and generous delegation of duties. He brought business-like order to the sprawling West Wing of the Clinton era. He has already faced his greatest test. Will his record stand as a further advertisement for the MBA, or as evidence of its limitations?

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