gallatinrf

In IT? The usual 'sexy' suspects: Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, (maybe) IBM, Intel, Dell. Or perhaps better yet, go to one of the IT consulting firms such as Accenture, Deloitte But if we're not talking about IT specifically, then the usual suspects by far would be the major strategy firms (e.g. McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Booz), investment banks, VC/PE, hedge funds. Such is the type of student that tends to populates HBS. For example, of the 919 students in the HBS MBA class of 2014, a whopping 84 of them - or nearly 10% - have prior work experience at McKinsey. That's significantly more than the number who came from Google (22), Microsoft (10), Apple (7), IBM (9), Facebook (3), Dell (3), HP (4), Intel (9), Amazon (4) combined.

Oscar07, I believe the only important difference is an obvious one: marketing PhD's, natch, tend to place more readily into marketing departments, whereas OB PhD's tend to place more readily into OB departments. Some OB PhD's may also place into strategy departments, and some (micro)-OB PhD's place into pure psychology departments. On the other hand, I've never heard of a (behavioral) marketing PhD placing into a strategy or pure psychology department. {Perhaps it has happened, but it seems exceedingly rare.} Note, I am comparing micro-OB and behavioral marketing for I presume that those are the PhD fields that you are comparing. {Neither quant-marketing nor macro-OB share much in common with each other.} On the other hand, it is indeed true that micro-OB and behavioral marketing share much overlap, often times competing in the same job market, attending each other's seminars and publishing/citing each other's journals. What I recommend is that you take a sample of some of the "A-level" journals of each field and peruse the articles, or at least the abstracts. While by no means an exhaustive list, for micro-OB, we're talking journals such as Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (OBHDP), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP) whereas marketing would be Journal of Consumer Research (JCR), Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), Journal of Marketing (JOM), Marketing Science (MS). If you lack access to those journals through your current university, you may be able to obtain access to older copies of those journals thorugh JSTOR at your public library or through alumni access of your undergraduate college library. The goal is simply to determine what sorts of journals, and therefore which field (OB vs. marketing), seem to pertain more towards your research interests.

I agree with 95% of PhDconfessionals post. Certainly, networking and research opportunities should be exploited to the hilt for anybody interested in a PhD program. The best-performing PhD students are almost always those who enter the program with already-established research capabilities, possibly even with working papers, and are already well-known to the faculty and to the academic community at large. I doubt that I have much to add to her comments in this regard. Perhaps the lone point of contention that I have with PhDconfessional - and of which I'm not entirely sure that we actually disagree at all - is that business school PhD programs (or the business academic community at large) understand and value overall business knowledge. Sadly - and deeply ironically - this does not seem to be so. While overall business knowledge may not hurt you, it doesn't seem to help you much either. The truth is, many business faculty, especially the newer ones, simply don't know and, worse, don't care about real-world business. Nor am I the only one to say so. Rakesh Khurana noted in his magnum opus, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, that landed him tenure at Harvard Business School, that "many of the discipline-trained scholars joining business school faculties were not intrinsically interested in business" (p.311 - see Google Books link below). In his 2007 "Modest Proposal" piece in the Academy of Management Journal, Stanford GSB's Jeffrey Pfeffer decried business academia's "disdain for work that informs or that might inform professional practice", that "current review and status processes don’t particularly reward the production of knowledge that anyone cares about", and, that business schools, for all their ostensible focus on innovation and organizational design, would never hire somebody like IDEO founder David M. Kelley, despite the fact that "one could plausibly argue that IDEO, through both its design and its management practices and culture, has had more effect on management than scores of academic articles combined." Oddly, Kelley is indeed tenured at Stanford...in the engineering school (but certainly not GSB). As Pfeffer acidly noted: "The engineering school may have wisdom that many business schools lack." In the same spirit, Jay Lorsch of Harvard Business School published a 2009 piece in the Journal of Management Inquiry lamenting the "erosion of our faculty’s belief in the sanctity of relevance, which I think one can only attribute to an influx of discipline-educated faculty and to the shift in the belief system of the broader business academy." http://books.google.com/books?id=v3DfpKEsNREC&lpg=PA311&ots=cedgwTFf7x&dq=from%20higher%20aims%20%22intrinsically%20interested%22&pg=PA311#v=onepage&q=from%20higher%20aims%20%22intrinsically%20interested%22&f=false As ultimate proof of this, I would actually encourage interested readers to invoke phdconfessional's advice and carefully examine the backgrounds of business-school faculty at the top schools. Concentrate especially upon the junior faculty who, by definition, were hired under current hiring practices, rather than the established tenured faculty who are characteristic of hiring practices of long ago. While a minority of new faculty will indeed have MBA's, a strong majority will not, and indeed, many will have absolutely zero business experience whatsoever. Indeed, I might actually argue that real-world business knowledge may indeed hurt your academic business career by poisoning your psychology in the sense that such knowledge may deter you from pursuing research questions that are irrelevant from a practitioner's standpoint. Your less experienced colleagues, on the other hand, will have no such compunctions about pursuing such questions. And their peer-review referees/editors probably won't care either. The upshot is that your colleagues will probably publish more than you will. Then when it comes time for hiring/tenure decisions, they will be picked over you because they have more pubs. The research questions of their publications may be useless for the practice of management. But that doesn't matter, because all that matters is your pub count.