Guest Post: Prospective MBA Students: Other Undergraduate Majors to Consider Beyond Business

This guest post is contributed by Alvina Lopez, who writes on the topics of accredited online colleges; She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez @gmail.com.

For budding entrepreneurs who have their eye on an MBA after completing their undergraduate studies, you may think that majoring in business or marketing is your only option. The fact of the matter is that MBA programs accept students from all undergraduate majors. What matters more is demonstrating an entrepreneurial mindset through work experience during or after your college years. So if you know you want to pursue an MBA, but you don't necessarily want to study business as an undergraduate, here are a few majors to consider that foster the same entrepreneurial skills you'll need as a potential MBA student:

1. Economics
Although economics is a pretty broad discipline, it focuses on the system that undergirds nearly every aspect of business. While business and marketing classes typically do cover economics, majoring in ECON will enable you to have a very well-developed understanding of how human behavior and money work in tandem on both a local and global scale.

2. English
While English may seem like an extremely far-fetched option, the skills you learn as an English major are absolutely integral to the successful running of a business. Having a lot of technical knowledge about how businesses are run is helpful, but the best business leaders are those who can communicate confidently and clearly. In English courses, you'll learn how to form a coherent argument on paper, and you'll also learn how to analyze different concepts from various viewpoints. These conceptual and communication oriented tasks are perfect preparation for an MBA

3. Engineering or any other technical field
Let's face it the future of business is all geared toward technology, and if you have a technological bent, then it would be a good idea to hone your expertise in such fields as electrical engineering or computer science. In business school, you'll learn everything you need to know about business, so bringing with you a background in an unrelated technical discipline will give you an edge above the competition and deeper insight into an industry in which you may want to consider doing business.

These are just a few majors you may want to consider if you know you'll eventually be applying to an MBA program. In fact, an article in BusinessWeek noted that it may be a better idea for future MBA students to opt for a non-business related major as an undergraduate. MBA programs, and the business world in general, needs leaders who are well-rounded. Pursuing an academic discipline that interests you, coupled with some work experience, will be the perfect preparation for a future MBA.

Book Review: Winners Make It Happen by Leonard Lavin

Alberto Culver's flagship product is VO5

I recently read Winners Make it Happen. The biography charts how Leonard Lavin engineered the rise of the Alberto-Culver into a global beauty products company. It's a story about innovation in a changing media landscape, but also of good old-fashioned tenacity

From the start, Lavin was able to combine innovative new products that customers would want, while exploiting the opportunity that was the arrival of television advertising. An early example of an innovative product that Lavin latched on to is the antiperspirant spray. Antiperspirant was only available only in cream form until then. Lavin realized that a "non mess" formulation would be attractive to consumers. However, the an innovative product was not enough.

The medium of the television offered an entirely new way for distributors to "get the word out" about products. As an early adopter of television advertising, Lavin was able to take advantage of this marketing innovation. Lavin says products would "fly off the shelves" the Monday following Sunday night's What's My Line show sponsored by the company. It was this effective marketing, combined with an innovative product, that led to blockbuster sales for Lavin.

Lavin also followed a growth strategy that has similarities to Kellogg's Levy Center's preference of buying already successful companies and mushrooming them. Initially distributing and marketing a product called Stopette, the first spray deodorant, Lavin exited when he felt a sense of mistrust developing in the relationship with his partner. He sought out new bigger and better opportunities. In this way, he and came across VO5.

Lavin's outstanding quality is the degree of his tenacity. Starting from a story as a child where he witnessed a famous baseball player place a wager against his own team, Lavin demonstrates again and again that the only person you can bet on is yourself. For example, in his early sales pursuits, when he visited stores to sell products, he would escalate his sales call to store buyers of greater seniority in the stores; he was adamant that he would get each sale. One of the initial investors in Lavin's acquisition of Alberto-Culver was someone he met at an airport. What started as a causal conversation later became meetings where each brought opportunities to each other. In the end, this became a business partnership.