Wharton@Work

November 2024 | 

Investing in Wisdom: Michael Roberts’ Loyal Following

Investing in Wisdom: Michael Roberts’ Loyal Following

In this third installment of our Spotlight series, we interview finance professor Michael Roberts, who serves as academic director of and teaches in Corporate Valuation, Fixed Income and Credit Market Investing, and Wharton Finance for Executives. The latter is so popular with participants in the General Management Program that it’s become known simply as “the Michael Roberts program.” We ask Michael for his thoughts on his popularity, how he makes complex financial concepts easier to understand, and what he’d teach if finance was off the table.

Wharton@Work: It’s no secret at Wharton Executive Education that you have an enthusiastic fan base. Participants rave about and attend programs because you lead them, and encourage others to do the same. That’s not exactly a common occurrence for programs on credit market investing! To what do you attribute your popularity?

Michael Roberts: I'm sure there's a variety of factors that resonate with different participants. On the one hand, I try to make it relevant to what participants are at Wharton for. That alone garners a fair amount of interest because they know what I’m teaching is important for what they do, regardless of their role. I also think participants recognize that I put a lot of effort into making my classes engaging, and it's something I'm passionate about.

W@W: Has that effort and enthusiasm been a constant, or has your teaching evolved over the past couple of decades?

MR: It wasn’t the case when I started teaching finance. But I realized over time just how useful what I teach is in the real world, as my students like to say. I've seen its power and the impact it has both in personal finance and professional finance. That excites me, and I bring that energy to the classroom. And finally, I don't lecture. Instead, I moderate discussions among the participants, which means I'm not the only one talking. The discussions add to the relevance of the content and add to their engagement. They learn from each other as well as learning from me, and I learn from them.

W@W: You’re also known for using examples from participants’ companies and industries, illustrating complex topics with the kinds of situations they are dealing with and teaching the concepts they really need to know.

MR: I make it a point to do a couple of things. One, I learn everybody's name and see what company they work for before the first class session. It makes it a much more personal experience. I'm able to give examples by preparing in advance, but also on the fly using the companies of participants in the room. It’s another way I try to make it as relevant and as personal and as engaging as possible because now someone's in the classroom and I'm talking about an acquisition of their firm, or I'm talking about finding the cost of capital of their company, and immediately they kind of perk up and say, “oh, okay. This is really interesting.”

W@W: Some of the concepts you teach are pretty complex for people who have never taken a finance class before. But there are some participants who are already familiar with them. How do you get everyone on the same page?

MR: As a PhD student, I was taught to think in very high-level abstract terms to encompass all sorts of contingencies or possibilities. But that's not a great way to teach an Executive Education program. Instead, I distill finance to its intuitive essentials, which everyone's familiar with. That means costs and benefits and risk. That's finance in a nutshell. And once we have that under our belts and everyone's very comfortable with those concepts, I start showing how to apply them by engaging people in a conversation. We see how these same fundamentals get applied in a variety of different settings. And pretty soon people start to get it.

W@W: Did you have professors or others who influenced your teaching style?

MR: Yes, certainly. When I was a doctoral student, I had a couple of fantastic teachers who were able to distill incredibly complex material down to a level at which it was readily understandable. Then when I started teaching, I saw how a colleague moved around the classroom and engaged students. More recently, the evolution in my teaching has resulted from teaching executives in the classroom and through a lot of client private engagements, because for those people, there's a sense of urgency and a lack of comfort with an academic environment. They've been out of school for a long time that they just aren't in the mindset of going to class, doing homework, taking tests. They're working, they’re busy, and they’ve got 27 problems to solve. They want to know how I can help them.

The process of working with and teaching executives has really made me a much, much better teacher. It's forced me to make my material more relevant. It's forced me to explain it in a manner that will resonate with as broad a group as possible. We get such a diverse crowd in Executive Education, from CFOs to CEOs and CMOs, to salespeople, to lawyers, to HR executives. They're all over the professional spectrum with all sorts of different educational backgrounds, professional backgrounds, life experiences. It's the opposite of an academic setting where everyone's taking the prerequisite. So I had to figure out over time, 'How can I reach all of these different people to make sure everybody's on board and everybody gets something important out of it?' and that forced me to be a better teacher.

W@W: Have those lessons become a part of your teaching for undergrads and MBA students?

MR: One hundred percent. How I teach in Exec Ed definitely influences how I teach undergraduates and MBAs and vice versa.

W@W: If you had to teach a course on something that had nothing to do with finance, what would you want to teach? It’s no secret that you’re a big fan of Formula One racing, so would you teach driving?

MR: I'm stuck between math and physics. I don't think you want me teaching people how to drive. Not that I'm a poor driver, but I'm very far from a race car driver. I'd have a shot with math and physics, and I find those subjects to be very appealing because of the clarity and rigor of thought that goes into them. I really appreciate that.

W@W: What about the relationships you develop with the participants? Do they keep in touch after the program ends?

MR: I get emails all the time, which I love. I get emails ranging from other Formula One fans discussing recent race results to emails with questions about problems that they're confronting at work to emails expressing gratitude, which I really appreciate and which help me on my teaching journey. Some ask for my help in working through or thinking about challenges. I always thought that the best way to evaluate a program is to ask people about their experience a year or two after they completed it, and I do get that kind of feedback. That's the real value: I give someone tools and a better understanding of finance and that makes an impact for many years.