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Aspiring MBA wondering whether an MBA is useful for entrepreneurs

by | Aug 23, 2015 | Business, Business School, entrepreneurship, mba | 0 comments

The email below was written by my friend Deepak, who I’ve known for several years since connecting online during the “MBA student” era of this blog. In his email, he asked for my opinon about an article that he’d read about whether the MBA degree is useful for people who want to be entrepreneurs.

Check out my response to him below to see my view on his question. Some folks may not agree with me on the topic, but I’m just offering it as one MBA grad’s perspective on the question.

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Deepak wrote:

Hey Marquis,

Hope things are good. Y’day I was referring to the below article of Marshall Goldsmith that came out on inc.

Marhall, himself, holds an MBA from Kelley Business School.

http://www.inc.com/marshall-goldsmith/mba-worth-it.html

Regards,
Deepak

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My response:

Deepak,

Really interesting perspective. I understand where Marshall is coming from, but I don’t totally agree with him.

He makes a good point about getting degrees not being the same as getting wisdom and I can’t really argue with that. He’s totally right…wisdom is wisdom, whether you get it in a classroom or get it from reading and studying on your own. So, on that front, he’s pretty much spot-on.

Where I disagree with him is when he says that an MBA isn’t useful to someone who is an entrepreneur. He frames it in terms of someone who is currently an entrepreneur with a company that is selling some product or service and collecting revenues, but Inc. pushes it forward and seems to be making the inference that Marshall’s perspective would also apply to aspiring entrepreneurs. In both cases, to say that the MBA degree isn’t as useful as self-study understates the true value add from going to business school.

When I think of the full value of the MBA, the following ideas jump out at me:

  • Network: Both of one’s classmates and the business school’s overall alumni network for connections, insights, and business input

  • Access to advisors or investors: Most often, people get access to these kinds of folks through introductions and facilitating those types of connections is much easier when one can do so through MBA-related connections

  • Input from professors and other brilliant minds: If an entrepreneur wants to get insight from a leading mind in a particular industry or area of business and that brilliant mind happens to be a prof at a given school or somehow connected to that school, an alumnus or student from that school will have a MUCH easier time getting a response to a cold email than some random person off of the street

  • “Rubber stamp” that is associated with an MBA from a certain school: Getting an MBA from a top-tier school provides the holder with validation of his/her intellect, qualifications, etc.; If an aspiring entrepreneur walks up to a potential investor and says “I would like to talk to you about my startup idea…and, oh yeah, I have an MBA from Stanford”, I would bet that the potential investor would at least be willing to spend 10-15 minutes talking to him/her, especially if they are both alums of the same MBA program.

All in all, Marshall makes some good points, but, because he ignores the full value of the MBA degree, his argument doesn’t fully hold water with me. As I sit here and think about it, this would definitely make a good blog entry. Thanks for forwarding this to me. 🙂

Marquis