Let’s begin with a fundamental truth—you don’t need a management degree to be successful in business.
Note: This essay was submitted by a successful entrepreneur who expressed a desire to be anonymous.
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Well, the theory base for the MBA is targeted toward people who are going to work in large corporate bureaucracies. You might say a start-up is a leaky rowboat, while a public corporation is an ocean liner. The captain of one probably won’t be a good captain of the other.
In fact, many billionaires who actually built a business from the ground up (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, David Geffin, Larry Ellison, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg) never got a college degree. But they got skill.
Well, the theory base for the MBA is targeted toward people who are going to work in large corporate bureaucracies. You might say a start-up is a leaky rowboat, while a public corporation is an ocean liner. The captain of one probably won’t be a good captain of the other.
I have an MBA and found it really helpful in teaching business classes in universities. However, it almost caused me to fail as an entrepreneur. Why you might ask?
But if you want to be an entrepreneur and build a business from scratch, a business degree, especially an MBA, may not make that much sense. There are exceptions, of course. The venture capital guys all have MBAs, and they like to see entrepreneurs with the same degree.
Paradoxically, we are seeing a mad scramble in the b-schools to add more Ph.D. entrepreneurship professors. You know the type. They have never, ever run a business and now they are supposed to tell students how it’s done. Unfortunately, most b-schools will not hire successful entrepreneurs who would be great teachers, mentors, and coaches because they don’t have Ph.Ds.
Reminds me of a blind man describing the nature of color. Or maybe a better analogy is that of a basketball coach who read the playbook but never bothered playing the game.
Even the best business schools cannot cover in-depth or may not cover at all critical business knowledge and skills. Unfortunately, along with my MBA came a delusional belief that I had been exposed to everything needed to be successful in business. This lasted until my first day at work.
I remember it well. The chief engineer sat me down and said, “I see you have an MBA.” Of course, I acknowledged this and at the same time felt a tinge of pride. This lasted until the next sentence when he said, “Well, we won’t hold that against you. Almost everything you learned, you cannot use here. But if you are ready, willing, and able, we will teach you.”
Despite my shock, I had enough presence of mind to nod. He then said, “Congratulations, you are now officially a project manager.” After recovering from the shock, I realized I had never been taught project management. Crap. But I did have to suffer through three classes in economics that I never have used.
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