Listen Up: Your Guide to MBA Podcasts

While it can be hard to find a moment to unwind as you’re pursuing your MBA, podcasts offer a great opportunity for you to relax and stimulate your mind at the same time. But with so many outstanding options out there, it can be difficult to find the right kind of podcast that is just as relevant to your everyday life as a professional and an MBA student as it is enjoyable to listen to, and even potentially educational.

We’ve compiled this list of 5 standout MBA podcasts to help guide you on your search for the perfectly fulfilling leisure material. The options we discuss here can help you increase your productivity, deepen your knowledge of urgently important workplace issues, draw you in with a remarkable narrative of fraud and poor decision-making, and more.

Mike Vardy, creator and host of The Productivityist Podcast, wants to help you be more efficient, creative, productive and fulfilled in ways that can improve not only your MBA coursework, but your personal and professional lives more broadly. In this weekly podcast, Vardy and his guests offer advice on everything from making to-do lists and organizing your workspace to setting goals and establishing processes to make your work manageable, achievable, and even enjoyable.

All MBA students, particularly working professionals who take their classes either part-time or online alongside numerous other responsibilities, can benefit from being more mindful about the way they set priorities manage their workloads. The Productivityist Podcast is a fascinating, engaging listen that can help you get the most out of yourself and successfully complete everything that’s required of you, both in your MBA program and on your trajectory toward your dream job.

The Broad Experience bills itself as “A conversation about women, the workplace, and success.” Begun in 2012 by writer and public radio reporter Ashley Milne-Tyte, The Broad Experience is essential listening for all professionals, regardless of gender, who need to understand the complex sociopolitical factors that structure the issue of gender in the workplace.

The Broad Experience consists of interviews with a range of guests, from everyday people to published experts, engaging with the very real experiences that women face across disparate careers. Topics covered include transparency and fair pay in the workplace, challenges faced by military spouses in the workforce, negotiating as a woman within the social dynamics of the workplace, and returning to the workforce after a gap period for family or any other reason. And with an average runtime of only 20 minutes or so, these immensely informative episodes are easily digestible during whatever time you have to spare in your busy schedule.

An in-depth examination of the spectacularly public collapse of heralded medical testing startup Theranos, The Dropout podcast offers a powerful object lesson in precisely what NOT to do when you decide to run your own business. Podcast creator and host Rebecca Jarvis of ABC News follows disgraced Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes from her early days as an undergraduate at Stanford University, through the meteoric rise of her company that promised to create a device capable of conducting a battery of life-saving medical tests from a single drop of blood, to her eventual indictment on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Over a seven-episode podcast comprised of in-depth reporting and new and archival interviews with former Theranos employees, investors, regulators, and defrauded customers, Jarvis builds a compelling narrative of a truly dysfunctional company. All MBA students, but particularly those with an interest in entrepreneurship, should pay attention to each of the glaring mistakes Holmes and Theranos President and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani made along the way. Learn what to avoid in your own organization by diving deep into Theranos’s bullying mistreatment and wrongful termination of employees, the almost slapstick spectacle of the company attempting to hide their lack of a medical testing infrastructure from federal regulators and their ultimate delivery of fraudulent results to their customers.

The Masters in Business podcast, hosted by Bloomberg Opinion columnist Barry Ritholtz, features a star-studded set of business luminaries discussing some of the hottest topics of the day. Billing itself as a look into “the people and ideas that shape markets, investing and business,” the Masters in Business podcast skews toward finance but covers issues of interest to all thoughtful business professionals, from investment trends to watch out for to technological changes transforming markets and beyond.

All MBA students, regardless of academic focus or career goals, can benefit from the insights explored on this forward-thinking podcast. Every industry is impacted daily by the dynamic market forces and innovations discussed in detail by the knowledgeable experts collected here, and anyone hoping to make a real impact in the coming years can benefit from their experience and vision.

Hosted by Ken White, associate dean of MBA and executive programs at William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business, Leadership and Business consists of 20-minute discussions of strategies, tactics and information geared toward helping you become a more effective leader, communicator and professional. In each episode, Dr. White is joined by a subject matter expert on a particular topic who can offer unique insights into how to grow your leadership potential.

Leadership and Business explores a quirky array of subjects, tying each of them back to its key mission of discovering leadership and management insights within them. You can learn about leadership in the context of baseball management, hear strategies for growing a business via the history of electric guitar innovator Fender and engage with subject matter aimed specifically toward MBA students like tips for recent business school graduates. With its eclectic approach to management, Leadership and Business is truly an appropriate podcast for the revolutionary leaders trained in William & Mary’s Online MBA program.

The revolutionary business education offered in the Online MBA program at the Raymond A. Mason School of Business has been designed to help you grow both inside and outside the digital classroom. For more innovative thought leadership from William & Mary’s business experts, check out our tips for using social media in the workplace.