Thinking about time, I remember an extraordinary schoolteacher I had – one of those really formative people in one’s life – who liked to tease us with paradoxes of one sort or another. He asked us to reflect on time and how we saw time in our own lives and, as always, had a way of making us think differently about something we thought we already understood (that is what the best teachers do).  We can all recognise time, he said, as the tick-tock of the clock, a comfortable (and comforting) way of recording the passing of time (this was in the pre-digital days when we did have ticking clocks!) But what about the tock…. tick? How do we account for that, in other words the unfathomable and immeasurable gap between the end of the last tick-tock and the start of the next? At the time (sic) I thought he was just being perverse or pedantic but I have come to realise that, behind the frivolous question, he was making a serious point. How we see time says a lot about how we see ourselves – it is a complex relationship because we can make of it what we will – a regular continuum, predictable and consistent or an undefined “space” that we can fill as we choose: time as lived experience, not just how we compute it but how we use it. In some ways this is a good metaphor for the MBA, a time for redefining time and reconfiguring experience.

At one level our students have little choice when it comes to time: the sheer volume of work means you have to run your life more intensively and more efficiently. It’s not just that you have to learn to work together (and work through things together), to develop trust, to exchange thoughts and ideas openly, to plan and prioritise, to separate the important from the urgent, to delegate and to deliver as a team rather than a group of individuals, vital though of all this is. All this can be labelled “personal development”, something which every self-respecting MBA programme must now offer.  But to pigeon-hole it in this way is to understate massively its importance and its impact – at least this is what we believe at Cranfield.

Every year I see students stand time on its head as, with less and less time, they do more and more. It’s as if the time pressures unleash potential many never knew they had, as they use their time creatively, surprising themselves as to just how far they can go, stretching time or shrinking time, whether it is about ski trips or regattas, international weeks or Burns’ Nights, sports teams or marathons, Net Impact chapters or business competitions, capstone conferences or job clubs, moments of quiet introspection or inspiration or simply just being there for others!  None of this could happen without a real sense of their interdependence. But this is more than just an intellectual exercise around the idea of teamwork and self-development: it goes to the heart of who you are, making you think about “how you learn” as well as “what you learn”, defining your sense of self by relentlessly forcing you to ask questions of yourself, challenging you to step outside yourself and to examine your ideas, attitudes, assumptions and even your values so you see yourself through new eyes and reconfigure your entire frame of reference. It can entail sudden leaps or gradual steps – a journey that, at Cranfield at least, involves real progression, from heightened self-awareness to increased self-knowledge to authentic self-actualisation through your relations with others. There’s nothing fluffy or superficial about it and it is more often than not revelatory – or, to use the jargon, “transformational”.

We don’t often talk about time on MBA programmes in the way that we talk about leadership or management or marketing or accounting but increasingly I think that developing a sense of dynamic time, the way you manage, marshal and master it, is right up there as one of the key outcomes (and, incidentally, something which no ranking in the world can begin to measure!) Maybe my old teacher really did know a thing or two when he exhorted us to pay attention not just to that old tick-tock but also to that tock…tick! I wish I had listened more!

To end, though, on a lighter note. The incomparable Groucho Marx is once supposed to have philosophised “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana”. Enough said!

And, in Olympic year, what a feast it was (quite literally), organised from start to finish by our fantastic students, with competitions in badminton, rugby, football, swimming, cricket, basketball, table tennis and many other sports, some friendly rivalry, good-natured gladiatorial combats and an overall result (a 5-5 draw) which satisfied honours and left egos unbruised on both sides.  More importantly it provided the perfect platform for the traditional Burns Night dinner and dance, a high-spirited occasion in every sense. The evening begins with the solemn entry of the haggis (which Wikipedia describes as a kind of savoury pudding, containing sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt). This surprisingly delicious “delicacy” is first paraded around the room with musical accompaniment by a Scottish piper in full ceremonial kilt and then extolled in verse (Burns’ poem: Address to a Haggis) before everyone tucks in to the full meal of haggis, neeps and tatties accompanied by a wee dram which, roughly translated, means turnips, swedes and potatoes with a whisky sauce – the perfect way to warm the heart on a cold evening. And then it’s in to the ceilidh, a highly energetic form of Scottish dancing where kilted couples dance in a ring and tread on one another’s toes!

Beyond the merriment, there is a genuine cultural exchange, not just in the enjoyment of more than 40 nationalities discovering Scottish cuisine and hospitality but also through the camaraderie of two great cohorts from two great schools meeting, networking, sharing and comparing experience, in a friendly, uncompetitive ambience. So for many of our London friends this was the chance to get out of the metropolis and to discover the joys of a rural campus.  Everyone I spoke to from LBS seemed genuinely bowled over by the warmth of the welcome, the diversity of our cohort, the joy of open spaces and the power of community.  Two different worlds, one MBA purpose –  London’s cohort may be three times larger than ours at Cranfield and they may have the city on their doorstep, but what they gain in immediacy, they perhaps lose in intimacy – the Cranfield “family”. So the lesson for us is to celebrate where we are in the Bedfordshire countryside because, as our students continually tell us, this is what lies at the heart of the Cranfield experience.

It’s about the strength of the bond that they form with their peers: everyone knows one another, not just superficially by name but at a much more profound level as they don’t just study together and then disperse to different corners of an urban landscape, they socialise together, play together, party together and partner together.  And when they finish their MBA, they stay together: it’s definitely one of the reasons why Forbes identified our alumni as some of the happiest on the planet! Certainly it was heartening to see how our friends from LBS could empathise with this: London’s not just burn(s)ing, many are burning to come back to renew the combat! A big thank you to all the students and partners who made this such a memorable weekend – I felt privileged to be a part of it.

Let me say at the outset that I think rankings are, on balance, a good thing. It is just that they have become too much of a good thing! And that there are simply too many of them. Some are quite rigorous, others are really sloppy and fatally flawed (details can be supplied, if required!) The best provide useful information and insights, the worst, one suspects, are simply knee-jerk journalistic responses to boost flagging sales. We in business schools play the game, (we have to) crowing about our successes and shrugging off our disappointments. For we all know that rankings do matter because they are what drive applications. But, while they may be a guiding light for prospective students, they should not be thought of as the Holy Grail. As the great American humourist, Tom Lehrer, once remarked: “Always remember that the light at the end of the tunnel could just be an oncoming train!” So be enlightened but not dazzled!

Let me give an example close to home…. Only 10 days ago Cranfield was ranked No.1 in the world in terms of alumni satisfaction by Forbes (survey of non-US schools). Fantastic – great publicity, a positive message for prospects, students, faculty and alumni alike. So of course we will shout about it. But what does it actually mean? Most satisfied – in terms of what and in comparison to whom? – their programme, their post-MBA experience, their job satisfaction, their network, their salaries, their skills and competencies? Well, probably a combination of all of the above but, delighted as we are to receive such an accolade, we’re not quite sure what it means beyond confirming our conviction that our alumni had a jolly good return on their investment.

So, the argument goes, let’s look for more concrete measures of quality and here the Financial Times lays  claim to having the most rigorous and “objective” methodology. But hold on a second…. Is it all just about so-called objective measures? If you just measure the things that are easy to measure, how do you know that you are measuring the things that really matter to you?  Do you actually care how many articles a particular member of faculty may have published in an arcane, academic journal if a) their research has no relevance to you, b)you may never be taught by that faculty member c) when you are, you discover that for all their academic brilliance, he/she is not necessarily the brilliant teacher you expected or d) that person has never actually worked in business? But how can you measure inspirational teaching or even business experience without a degree of subjectivity, even though these may be actually the qualities you want to find on your chosen programme? In the Financial Times you simply don’t ask the question.

Dig a little deeper still and you will discover that the criteria that really affect a school’s FT ranking depend to a very large degree on financial measures – specifically, the differential in salary between the time you start your MBA and three years’ out. Fair enough – to a point – the Financial Times is after all a financial newspaper targeting, primarily, people in the financial services industry.  But the picture is a little more complicated still. Is uplift in salary actually quite so “objective” and clear-cut as it seems at first glance? Not quite. When my niece started her MBA at Harvard she was 25 so when she emerged at 27, small wonder she was able to report an exponential salary increase. But in Europe MBA students tend to be older, programmes tend to be shorter and the outcomes tend to be different. Here at Cranfield our students have an average of 7 years’ experience and a median age of 32 and they come to us often with a healthy salary to match. Of course they expect to increase their earning potential as a direct consequence of the new skills and competencies they develop through their MBA but not really by two, three or even four times when they’re not starting from the same position. But is this really a reason for classing school X as a “better” school than school Y? And the picture’s even more blurred if you are one of those people who start your own business when you finish your MBA: you’re hardly likely to be paying yourself mega-bucks two to three years into your new venture. Yet surely it is one of the key missions of a business schools to generate entrepreneurs? But this gets you absolutely no brownie points in the FT; in fact it works against you!

Of course this sounds like a moan and to some extent it is. We all would like the world – and the rankings – to align with what our particular school does (and actually Cranfield does rather well in just about every one of them). And of course, we (and you) are quite free to make our own choices – we could simply decide to admit much younger students and expect to see a climb up the rankings as steep and rapid as those younger alumni would climb up the salary scale. If we choose not to go down this road, it is not because we are stubborn or arrogant (though we may be both!) but because we believe in our model, we believe in our talented students, we believe that there is a place for more experience and we believe that there should be more than one set of values for measuring quality.

So, yes, as we await the future, let’s celebrate the rankings for stimulating the debate and for ensuring that no school can rest on its laurels: let’s use them and be aware of them but beware of them too. They may ask the questions but they don’t always give the full answer!