Step into the vibrant world of the MBA Book Club as Pola Lem, Maria Wich-Vila, and Caroline Diarte Edwards explore Poets & Quants’s first-ever Career & Admissions Bestseller List. This lively discussion is packed with insights from timeless classics like “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and contemporary career guides such as “What Color is Your Parachute?” Perfect for MBA applicants and business enthusiasts, the episode is a deep dive into literature that has shaped generations of leaders.
One of the key takeaways from their conversation is the enduring relevance of Dale Carnegie’s principles on human relations and influence. Maria emphasizes how these skills can be instrumental during business school and beyond, as networking becomes crucial for career advancement. Caroline highlights the importance of Richard N. Bolles’s guidance in “What Color is Your Parachute?” for those at crossroads in their career paths—something many MBA students encounter.
Additionally, the hosts discuss the significance of campus visits for prospective students. Caroline shares her belief in the unparalleled value of experiencing a school’s atmosphere firsthand, offering insight into whether it’s a cultural fit. Whether exploring the electric atmosphere of a campus or engaging with literature that offers timeless business lessons, this episode encourages MBA hopefuls to seek out diverse experiences that enrich both their personal and professional growth.
Episode Transcript
Note: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain minor inaccuracies.
[00:00:03] – Pola
Hello everyone. I’m Pola Lem with Poets and Quants. Welcome to our weekly podcast, Business Casual. So I’m joined as always, as usual, I guess I should say, by my co-hosts, Maria Wikvila and Caroline DRT Edwards. And as you know, Maria’s the founder of ApplicantLab and Caroline was head of admissions at INSEAD and is co-founder of Fortuna Admissions. So Maria and Caroline, I actually met another couple of listeners today while I was at Warwick, and I’m just back from a whirlwind tour of that campus and had some chats with the dean and students and academics. So that was a lot of fun. Um, and I actually also, relevant to our chat last week, sat in on part of a class today where we saw an AI, or actually got to use one of those AI agents to test out, not an interview, but putting ideas to a board. So Mr. AI Board Member and I had a little chat during this class. So, and I am on my way back from Warwick, on the way to Coventry where you get the train back to London. I was chatting with my cab driver who actually said, I told him we were going to record a podcast and he said, you’d better not do that with your hay fever.
[00:01:35] – Pola
And then I told him we’re doing video also. And he said, oh yeah, maybe not.
[00:01:40] – Caroline
I thought you were gonna say your cab driver was a listener.
[00:01:46] – Pola
No, that, that would be much better. No, he just said, don’t do a podcast. Today. So Caroline, how did your day go?
[00:01:55] – Caroline
Good, thank you. Yeah, just getting started. I had a good discussion this morning with a colleague in India and Toronto. Fortunately, we’re a relatively small team, but we seem to have managed to cover pretty much all time zones. So I have a lot of calls at different hours of the day, but it’s all good. I enjoy working with people around the world.
[00:02:17] – Pola
And Maria, what’s new since we last chatted? Where in the world are you?
[00:02:22] – Maria
I was just, I was just gonna say the sun never sets on the Fortuna. Mm-hmm. Uh, yeah, so I right now am in Durham, North Carolina. I’m attending a conference. It’s an admissions consultants and admissions officers conference this week. Uh, it’s the AGAC, Annual AGAC Conference. Uh, this year we are being hosted very nicely by Duke University. The Fuqua School is hosting us, and then we’re gonna be there for 3 days, and then on Friday we’re gonna head over to, uh, UNC Kenan-Flagler. So it’s a time once a year where we get together. We admissions discuss— admissions consultants, we discuss amongst ourselves what we’re seeing in, in the ecosystem, and we share back and forth notes with admissions officers from various schools. So it’s a very, very busy but a very productive week, and I, uh, I’m very excited to be here and to learn from my colleagues and my, my counterparts in admissions.
[00:03:10] – Pola
Yeah, lots of, lots of travel among everyone. That’s, that’s good stuff. Yeah, I feel like I was thinking on my train back that these campus visits I’ve started to do feel like they’ve brought me back to undergrad a little bit. I mean, obviously I’m not a prospective student, but especially in springtime, I think I’m reminded of that experience of touring a campus, you know, when you’re talking to students and looking around, trying to pull together some sort of opinion of a place based on really quickly formed impressions. And that got me thinking, Caroline, how often do prospective MBA students actually get to visit a campus in person? And does that matter, say, if you’re doing an online MBA? And what sorts of things should applicants look out for to figure out whether a place is the right fit?
[00:04:03] – Caroline
Yeah, I definitely encourage people, if at all possible, to go and visit in person, especially if you’re doing the in-person MBA. Might not be so essential if you’re doing an online program. It’s not always feasible. It depends on where you’re located geographically. If you’re applying internationally, that can be difficult for people to go and visit in person, but there’s still nothing that replaces, I think, actually getting on campus, chatting with people, soaking up the atmosphere, being able to sit in on a class and getting, you know, a firsthand sense of the vibe and getting that gut feel reaction to whether it’s a place that you really see yourself in the future. And so, yeah, I encourage people to try to— the schools will often organize events where you can tour campus, sit in on a class, meet a student panel. So they’re often structured events that you can sign up for. So it’s great if you can take the opportunity to do that because you’ll meet different people. You’ll meet some faculty, you’ll meet students, you’ll meet the staff, you’ll get a tour. So that’s usually a great opportunity to get a sense for the experience.
[00:05:13] – Caroline
Or if you can’t attend one of those official events, then often the schools will have more frequent, more informal tours that you can sign up for. But either way, I encourage people to try and get a little bit off the official tour as well and just go and hang out in the café or the canteen and just chat with some students and just ask them some questions about their experience, what they’ve liked, what they would change, what have been the best classes, any advice that they’d have for someone who’s applying. I think it’s great to have some of those discussions with people who are not part of the official marketing experience. Those can be really informative as well. And if you can’t do that, then of course there’s a lot you can learn online, but also do try to connect with current students and have some discussions, or recent alumni, to learn about their experience. I think all those discussions are really useful in giving you a sense for where is a good fit. And then if you do apply, it helps you to get a better sense for how you fit with the school and what you can potentially bring to the community.
[00:06:22] – Caroline
So it can actually make you a better candidate as well.
[00:06:27] – Pola
Maria, any On the flip side of that, any red flags you’d look out for, anything you wouldn’t want to see in a campus if you were a prospective student?
[00:06:39] – Maria
I think, you know, if you, if you encounter a bunch of students who seem to have sort of a very negative attitude about the place, if they’re lacking in energy, sort of feel like they’re going through the motions, I mean, most business schools admissions teams are very they— part of what they choose for is they’re choosing people who are going to throw themselves into a community and who are going to embrace all the opportunities. So you don’t often see this, but sometimes you might. At certain schools, you might see some people who are maybe a little bit not as enthusiastic. But I agree with Caroline. I think you should talk to people who— it’s great to start your investigations with the official school ambassadors, but realize that they were chosen to be ambassadors on purpose. and, uh, sometimes they might not tell you the cold, harsh truths about, yeah, actually recruiting was really hard this year, or yeah, actually you probably won’t get that job in venture capital, uh, or whatever those, those realities might be. You’re more likely to get that from just a standard student. So I don’t know that I’d look out so much for red flags because I don’t think a lot of schools have them, but I do think, uh, especially if you’re, if you’re trying to make some sort of a career change, one of the most valuable things, uh, on top of learning about the school’s curriculum and their clubs is to really ask around and, and see, are there people who have backgrounds like mine who were able to make the career change I want to make through this school, through the clubs or the classes or whatever?
[00:08:04] – Maria
So I think that’s, that’s a key question that I would want to encourage people to ask.
[00:08:10] – Pola
Hmm, I think that’s such a good point that the students that you meet who, if they’re taking you on some sort of tour, they’ve obviously, they’re obviously doing that because the admissions team has asked them to. So you are getting, you know, a pre-selected group of people. So try and get a more rounded view maybe by talking to some people you meet. So our main topic today is books, which is, which is a fun one. So we’ll be talking about books which you can read for the MBA or potentially even instead of the MBA, in addition to the MBA. So, uh, welcome to the Business Casual Book Club, in which we discuss the, uh, must-read business books this month. So Poets and Quants just launched our first-ever career and admissions bestseller list. So this is a monthly ranking of books which will help readers get into the MBA, get hired, and ‘Get ahead,’ as the tagline goes. So we’ve got lots of classics on the list. For instance, How to Win Friends and Influence People. That’s a title I think a lot of, a lot of us will recognize. There’s also Atomic Habits, What Color Is Your Parachute?
[00:09:34] – Pola
So these are the types of books you might see in an airport bookshop in a nonfiction section. They are not kind of these, these dusty academic tomes, but they’re very kind of accessible pop nonfiction is what I’d call them. So, Maria, have you read many of these on the list? Any you absolutely love or hate?
[00:09:59] – Maria
I haven’t read a ton of them, but I have read a few. And the, the one that I— from this list that I recommend over and over and over again is The First 90 Days. What it basically is, is a roadmap to when you join a new organization, you kind of have to start hitting the ground running and start delivering feedback pretty quickly— or sorry, delivering, delivering feedback. Sorry, you have to start delivering value pretty quickly. But you might not necessarily get the feedback right away. You just might be expected to know, like, well, this is how we do things here. And this is what we, this is what we’re about here at this, you know, Acme Corporation. And so the First 90 Days, I think, is a really thoughtful roadmap for you to walk that fine line between hitting the ground running and making that impact, but then not coming in like a bull in a china shop and accidentally tipping over the cart and, you know, ruining everything. And then everyone’s like, you’re an outsider and you don’t fit here. Uh, so it— I think it really provides a great roadmap for how to, how to walk that fine line.
[00:10:58] – Maria
And I have recommended that book and I have given it as a gift many, many times over the years whenever someone’s starting a new job.
[00:11:06] – Pola
Ooh, yeah, that is actually one that I saw and thought I should absolutely read that because coincidentally, right, I’m in my first 90 days of this job. So, it seems like a really useful one. I confess, so I’ve read two of these. One is How to Win Friends and Influence People, which I think is all right. I mean, I think maybe you can tell I’m not the hugest fan of this one, but I think it’s aged well given it was written at a really different time. Dale Carnegie, I think, is the author, and, you know, this one’s what, from the 1930s, ’40s? It’s like, you know, practically a century old now, but it does feel a little bit cheesy at times. You know, the big takeaway that I think of when I see people doing this is say someone’s name in conversation. Everyone loves the sound of their name. And I think to myself, oh, you’ve obviously read that book, right? But, you know, it’s got some useful takeaways and some stuff that still feels relevant today. The other book that I’ve also read is Never Split the Difference, which is kind of an interesting take.
[00:12:25] – Pola
It’s all about negotiating, and it’s written by an FBI negotiator, Chris Boss. And this one, again, it’s kind of a mixed review for me. For the most part, I thought this was a really interesting book. Sometimes the tone grates a little bit for me, but for the most part, I think that the scenarios are really interesting, real-world negotiating scenarios that he’s referencing and kind of reframing in a business takeaways sort of way. So That’s me on, on this list. Caroline, which ones have you read and any you love or hate?
[00:13:10] – Caroline
Yeah. So, I read a few of them. So, I’ve also read How to Win Friends and Influence People. Actually, my husband credits it with having had a big influence on him when he was a teenager. So, he describes how he was this incredibly academic, incredibly nerdy, introverted teenager and someone gave him this book and it really helped him learn how to connect with people more effectively. And I know he recently gave it to one of our teenage children. So, I think it can be a useful guide, especially to people who are at that sort of formative stage in their life when they’re figuring out how to connect with the outside world beyond just their immediate family and a small group of friends, and teenagers are at that sort of critical point where they’re thinking about college, thinking about what they’re going to do in their future lives. And as you say, it is quite cheesy, but I think it’s got some good lessons about how to really connect with people, how to build a genuine relationship that’s not just transactional, but based on some real sort of caring values and Talks about things like, you know, listen more than you talk, which is quite obvious to us now.
[00:14:34] – Caroline
But if you’re, you know, at that younger age, I think that that is a great lesson to learn. So, another book that I think is a good read, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and that’s been a huge bestseller, obviously. And so, he talks about The value of small changes and of breaking things down so that rather than setting yourself like this enormous goal of going from being a couch potato to I’m going to run a marathon, uh, just break it down into maybe a couple of times a week I’m going to put on my running gear and then perhaps I’ll be more likely to go out the door and run for 10 minutes. Right? So just breaking things down into smaller goals that are more achievable. And he talks about also, um, something I found useful is, is his concept of stacking habits. Um, so, uh, for example, um, say, um, you have the habit of everyone brushes their teeth, right? Well, hopefully everyone brushes their teeth. So you could do something at the same time as brushing your teeth. So for example, I had an ankle injury and I do my, ankle exercises every day while I’m brushing my teeth because I’m going to be brushing my teeth anyway.
[00:15:54] – Caroline
So then I remember to do my ankle exercises, which I would otherwise forget. So it’s little things like that, like small tweaks, quite practical strategies, which I think are actually quite valuable to driving changes in behavior. And he talks about how small changes also really compound over time and the benefits of that sort of compound interest that you get on changing small behaviors. And I would also recommend his newsletter as well. It’s got little bite-sized pieces of advice that are useful for reflecting on and can be useful. So yeah, so that’s one of the ones that I would recommend. I also remember reading many years ago, Keith Ferrazzi’s book called Never Eat Alone. And actually, I was thinking that that could be a great book to get for one of my nieces who is, who has, is at a point where she’s thinking about what is the next stage in her career. And as I was talking to her at the weekend about before she starts looking for a new job and she’s, she doesn’t need to look for anything straight away, but the value of networking and how she needs to be proactive in building her network and how valuable that, that can be in laying a foundation for her job search that she’ll probably be doing more proactively in a year or so.
[00:17:25] – Caroline
And I think that that book has some great ideas about building a community and, and not just sort of thinking about things in a very transactional way, but thinking really about what can you do for other people and, and building that network proactively before you’re actually going to you need it. The time to start networking ideally is before you actually need to start calling on those people to, to do you a favor, whether it’s giving you an introduction or having an informational discussion about what they’re doing and, and how you can get into their sector, or advice they may have for you. Try to build that, that network before you actually need it. So, uh, so yeah, so that’s, that’s another one that that I enjoyed and that I would recommend to others.
[00:18:19] – Pola
Yeah, this sounds like some good tips there, except for I’ll have to say doing something while brushing your teeth. I, my partner, personal anecdote, but he always reads his phone while he is brushing his teeth and I’m standing there like, can you not just brush your teeth and not do something else at the same time? Do you have to be on your phone while brushing your teeth? So that’s a bugbear of mine.
[00:18:42] – Caroline
Multitasking.
[00:18:44] – Pola
But, uh, so, So Maria, I’m curious, you know, these books— I obviously don’t come from a business background, so these appeal to me. Um, they kind of, uh, are very friendly for the likes of people who haven’t necessarily taken courses in, you know, executive leadership or finance or any of these MBA, uh, relevant topics. But are these do these feel largely redundant if you’ve done an MBA? Are these things that you would learn from your classes anyway?
[00:19:19] – Maria
No, I don’t, I don’t necessarily think that they’re redundant because I do think that the MBA— a lot of these books, when you, when you look at the titles, they are a lot about personal influence, and they’re very tactical, very much like, okay, Never Eat Alone, so make sure that you have lunch with someone and you offer to help them. Or The First 90 Days, like, the first 10 days of the job, do this. The First 30 Days on the Job, do this. So they are kind of very pragmatic on a day-to-day level. And I think that a lot of business school courses are a bit more at the higher level, the more strategic level. So I don’t, I don’t think that these are redundant, uh, at all. In fact, I’m curious. I might want to read now Never Split the Difference, because one of the things that at least I learned in negotiations class in business school is you absolutely split the difference. So I thought that that was, uh, I was like, oh, that’s, that’s an interesting title. I might have to, uh, I might have to read that one. But no, I don’t— I think these are an excellent complement to what you would learn in an MBA program.
[00:20:18] – Pola
Yeah, I guess the flip side of that question is, so I’ve been reading, speaking of books, I’ve been reading a book about NVIDIA founder, Jensen Huang, and there’s a good anecdote about him grilling this exec, management executive, who he disagreed with by asking him, what are your favorite books on management? Name me a couple. And this executive comes up short, um, and then Huang proceeds to tell him, you know, this, this, and that are my favorites. Uh, so clearly he’s one case where educating yourself with the help of books is supplementing, uh, the MBA in this case. So I’ve got kind of a loaded question for you, Caroline, uh, because your answer might advocate putting business schools out of business, but If someone’s very bookish, likes learning, self-directed learning, are they able to get from books what an MBA might otherwise give them?
[00:21:20] – Caroline
Yeah, so I would imagine that there are books that you could put together, especially for the foundational curriculum on an MBA program where you need to learn about accounting, finance, marketing. You can actually look at the textbooks that are required for those courses. A lot of these courses have accompanying texts that, that of course are available to anyone. So, I think that you can get a lot of the foundational knowledge through self-study, whether that’s through textbooks or management books or online courses. Of course, what you’re missing out on is that classroom experience, which really brings it alive and helps you to put it into context. So it, I guess it depends what you’re looking for. And then of course, the MBA, with the MBA, as well as the classroom experience, you’re getting the whole peer learning as well. And the learning that takes place both in the classroom as well as through the teamwork and then through all of those late-night discussions. So, yes, I think you can get some of the bare-bones knowledge that you would get on an MBA program, but it’s definitely going to be more limited than, than the learning experience that you would get at a school.
[00:22:38] – Pola
One thing I, I was hoping you were, or I was expecting you were going to say there was the network. I mean, we’ve been talking a lot about that, right? So there, there’s also, yeah, there’s the peer-to-peer learning and then obviously coming out of the MBA, that group of people that stays with you. Are there any other books that you would add to this list, Maria?
[00:23:05] – Maria
Yeah, absolutely. There’s, there’s a book, uh, actually by some INSEAD professors that I believe Caroline might have personally worked with when she was studying there. It’s a book called Blue Ocean Strategy, and that book was really transformational for me in terms of help thinking through how do you— how does a new entrant in the market, you know, do you jump into the red ocean of very crowded existing competition, or do you create your own blue ocean? So I thought that that was a very mind-bending book for me. Another book that really changed a lot for me, my thinking, was Crossing the Chasm, which is a—
[00:23:43] – Caroline
it’s an old—
[00:23:43] – Maria
it’s now maybe 20 or more years old, but it was— it’s a book about startups and how do you, how do you cross that, that big gap between those early adopters who are fanatics and then expand to more of a broader audience. How do you make that jump? So, Crossing the Chasm is another amazing work that I recommend. I think it’s still relevant even today.
[00:24:07] – Pola
Caroline, any you’d add to that list?
[00:24:09] – Caroline
Well, yeah, I love the Blue Ocean Strategy book. Definitely recommend that one. To be honest, so, I remember reading a great sales book, but I can’t remember what the title of it was now. That was very useful. In the early years of Fortuna. So, I hadn’t really worked in a sales role before and had some great advice about how to think about sales and how to think about how you can solve people’s pain points and framing it in that way. Sorry, I can’t remember the title of it now. To be honest, most of my reading these days, I read a lot of fiction and I’ve read a lot of parenting books. The past few years. So, um, one day we could talk about recommendations for those. But, and actually, there’s a lot of great tips from parenting books that apply to management and business as well. So it— there is, there is some crossover.
[00:25:06] – Pola
Well, you actually anticipated my next question before we go, which is, outside of business books, what are you reading these days? Uh, any— anything good you’d recommend to us? That can be nonfiction or fiction. Caroline?
[00:25:24] – Caroline
Yeah. So, I’m reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez at the moment. So, a real classic, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for a long time. And actually, I read it because it had been sitting on my bookshelf and I’ve been reading on my Kindle mostly for the past few years. And then, one of my kids stole my Kindle, so I actually had to go back to the dusty old bookshelf and so pulled that one off. And I’m really thrilled. I’m having a wonderful time reading that one.
[00:25:53] – Maria
Is it your first time reading it, Caroline?
[00:25:55] – Caroline
It is, yes.
[00:25:56] – Maria
Yeah. Oh, I love that book. And interestingly enough, the book that I’ve been reading most recently is 100 Years of Solitude, uh, because the Netflix— and it is not my first time, I read it over, I read that book over and over again, um, because Netflix has made a very good television version adaptation of it, and the first half of the adaptation came out I think a year or so ago, and the, the next adaptation, the second half of the book, is coming out in a few months. And so I’m, I’m rereading.
[00:26:24] – Caroline
Great. Yeah, I was planning to read that next.
[00:26:26] – Maria
This is the, this is the Gabriel García Márquez corner over here. Pola, which, what Gabriel García Márquez book are you reading?
[00:26:33] – Pola
I think I once started on Love in the Time of Cholera and didn’t get very far, to be honest. You know, I’m more into the nonfiction, but I should definitely read more fiction. And I kind of like, it’s that thing of, you know, speaking of habits, just forcing yourself to put on the running shoes. Like I just have to, you know, force myself to start and then I’ll get pulled in. But I don’t know, I feel like I need, it’s like some sort of a fixation on I need a, it’s like a return on investment thing, almost like I need to pull some knowledge out of this and I need it to be true facts. And I, you know, I think I need to just relax a little bit and read.
[00:27:18] – Caroline
Give yourself some time off.
[00:27:20] – Pola
No, I mean, I enjoy nonfiction, but I think so. Actually, this is reminding me, we did. So when we were up in Scotland for the wedding, we got a book of Scottish fairy tales and folktales. So that one is, yeah, there’s a lot of death and sort of like some grim stuff. You read 2 pages and the person has died. But yeah, that’s a departure from my usual kind of stuff that I read. So we have just got through another week of our podcast, Business Casual, and please come back next week if you liked the discussion today. Possibly fewer books next time, but I’m sure it’ll be a stimulating conversation nonetheless. And check out poetsandquants.com. Thanks very much to my co-hosts Maria and Caroline, and thank you everyone for listening.
