How One Man Changed The Way We Think About Business Schools

Business schools love to share stories of successful alumni, and how the experience in the MBA classroom set them up for the career success that was to follow. So what would the admissions office have made of the man who has become the most influential commentator in the industry, disrupting the way we look at business education not once, but twice?

John A. Byrne spent most of his life as a journalist, editor and author covering the world of business. He wrote an unprecedented 58 cover stories for Businessweek magazine, is the only business journalist to have written covers for Businessweek, Forbes and Fortune, and of his more than a dozen books has two New York Times bestsellers to his credit, his collaborations with the legendary General Electric Chairman Jack Welch and John Sculley who had been hired by Steve Jobs to help him run Apple.

But what Byrne had never done until he was well into his fifties was to become an entrepreneur. Ten years ago, in August of 2010, Byrne launched PoetsandQuants.com, a source of news and features that has become the most influential business school website in the world. 

It is a classic entrepreneurial story, set not in a garage but from a couch, from which Byrne bootstrapped a multi-million-dollar business without a single dollar of investment or a loan. Within three months of Poets&Quants launch, the site was cash flow positive. By the end of the year, it was profitable. In its tenth year of operation, the site is riding a surge of record traffic and engagement, on its way to the most profitable year in its history, in the middle of a pandemic-induced recession. Poets&Quants

“The original idea,” says Byrne, “really was to build a Huffington Post-like website for business and economics. I was still at Businessweek as Executive Editor when I began conversations with the managing editor of Fortune and the former publisher of forbes.com. My thought was to create a supergroup of leaders from the three major business magazines in the U.S., a media version of Crosby, Stills & Nash. It didn’t quite work out that way.”

Instead, Byrne moved to the West Coast after leaving Businessweek at the end of 2009 and began work on Poets&quants.com. He knew the business school landscape well, having created and launched the first regularly published MBA rankings at Businessweek in 1988. “At the magazine, I also was the Editor-in-Chief of our online operations and I saw firsthand the immense advantages of digital media. The barriers to entry were low. The potential audience was huge. And the right idea in the right niche could serve a valuable service to an audience.”

He founded C-Change Media just outside San Francisco and launched the first of five websites. The immediate success of Poets&Quants caused Byrne to do a classic entrepreneurial pivot into higher education and subsequent websites for undergraduate business, executive MBAs, law schools and social enterprise. Since the start of Poets&Quants, some 30 million unique users have absorbed more than 200 million page views.

What makes Poets&Quants successful is Byrne’s journalistic chops. He has recruited a team of four writers and editors, plus a half dozen freelancers, to cover business education as if they were at the New York Times writing about politics or public policy. Old-fashioned scoops are a high priority but so is thoughtful analysis and perspective brought to every breaking news item, from his deep analysis of business school rankings to the costs and rewards of an MBA degree. Poets&Quants own annual composite MBA rankings, launched from day one, are among the most closely followed rankings in the world, right behind U.S. News & World Report and the Financial Times. In fact, in the U.S., a recent third party survey of MBA applicants found that more candidates rely on Poets&Quants’ ranking than Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, Forbes, The Financial Times or The Wall Street Journal.

At Poets&Quants, there are no sacred cows. In 2015, Poets&Quants broke the story of the dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business ongoing affair with a professor who had been married to another faculty member at the school. The coverage resulted in the dean’s resignation. More recently, the website has taken a critical look at the failure of the Harvard Business School to recruit and admit more Black American students (who have accounted for about 5% of the MBA population for three decades), its failure to hire and retain Black American professors as well as the paucity of case studies with Black protagonists.

Byrne likes nothing more than to be provocative if only to make readers think more deeply about an issue or topic. His irreverence is often on display in the headlines he writes. When Wharton hired a new dean in 2014, the headline on the story was “Wharton’s New Job Hopping Dean.” Earlier this year, when Purdue University decided to close down its MBA program due to declining applications and enrollment, Byrne’s headline read: “Purdue Pauses Its Money-Losing, Rank-Sinking Residential MBA.“

Beneath it all, however, is someone who strongly supports and believes in business education. “I’m an unabashed believer in the power of higher education,” says Byrne. “It is not only a ladder to social mobility but more importantly a path to a more fulfilled and productive life. While there are no guarantees in life, a graduate degree, particularly one in business, is an extremely valuable experience. It can and does change lives, both personally and professionally. So you won’t find a biggest support of the MBA degree anywhere in the world.”

This passion is clear for any business school candidate to see. As my co-host for the CentreCourt MBA Festival, which gives young professionals direct access to the Deans, Admissions Directors, Career Services Directors and alumni of the best business schools in the world, John can be found deep in conversation with attendees, discussing their backgrounds and ambitions, and building their confidence to pursue their hopes and dreams by investing in themselves through education.

To help these applicants Poets&Quants has been highly creative in its coverage, doing the first “smackdowns” that detail how one school compares against a rival, handicapping the odds of applicants who target the world’s elite MBA programs, introducing a ‘Meet the Class’ feature which profiles of incoming students at major schools, naming the ‘Best & Brightest’ MBA graduates of the year, launching both a Pre-MBA Networking Festival to allow new admits to meet with major MBA recruiters the CentreCourt events for MBA and Specialized Masters, and bringing video, podcasts and recorded livestreams in the mix. 

The site has also created a series of proprietary rankings of undergraduate business programs, online MBAs, and a ranking, with Inc. magazine, of the best business schools for entrepreneurship.

But it is the quality and quantity of business education news and analysis that stands out. The site’s daily coverage of the outbreak of COVID-19 and its impact on admissions, career outcomes and academic schedules has been second to none. Poets&Quants was the first to recognize that the pandemic would cause an entirely new extended round for prospective students who had lost their jobs or saw their opportunities diminish and would want to go to business school this fall. It was also the first to report that this coming admissions cycle would likely be among the biggest ever as young professionals returned to graduate school as the economy fell into a recession. Since the pandemic hit in March, traffic on the site has exploded, up 65% year-over-year.

“The success of C-Change is really the result of a good amount of luck and the hard work of an incredible team of people that I like to think of as family,” says Byrne. “I’ve been fortunate to find and keep a lot of fabulous people who have helped to grow, sustain and continually improve the business. I take as much pride in our team as I do in the positive influence we’ve been able to have on so many young people over these years.”