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I think the point missed in here is that if you go into your MBA with a consulting, banking, etc direction, then you'll get all the lessons that go with that.

by brc 16y ago

I think the point missed in here is that if you go into your MBA with a consulting, banking, etc direction, then you'll get all the lessons that go with that. If you did an MBA with the express purpose of concentrating on making startups work, you'd concentrate on taking away the parts of that education that focus on entrepreneurship. It's fashionable to diss the MBA but they contain a non-trivial amount of learning about finance, capital markets, legal and other aspects of business that would take a long time to pick up just by going through a startup.

ryanhuff 16y ago
Agreed. An MBA is a strange animal. Two people coming out of the same school can have vastly different career goals, and have taken much different coursework. While the core courses may be the same, the real meat is often in the elective courses that allow you to focus on a specific area of business. A brand management person is going to exit business school with a much different skill-set than somebody who wants to do investment banking. The same goes for entrepreneurship. Its not enough to point to an MBA and make generalizations about how it prepares you for X or Y. The devil is in the coursework, the professors, and most importantly, the student.
- brc 16y ago
  I would just add to that - most MBA courses (well, mine, anyway, a sample size of 1) involve a lot of case studies. In many cases, you can choose the topic of the case study, just be getting approval from the assessor for suitability. Thus, you can decide to study GE, Digg or Microsoft, whether it's for marketing, industrial relations or strategy. When I went through I had a fellow student who was preparing to take over the family cleaning business with several hundred staff. A friend was a career airline pilot getting ready to step out of the cockpit and into administration. I also had career public servants learning on the public dime to get to the next pay grade. There was also aimless students who weren't ready to leave university because they had no direction in life. The things that these different groups studied vary a lot. The one thing that did come through, unfortunately, was a heavy reliance on Powerpoint.

by brc 16y ago

ryanhuff 16y ago

Agreed. An MBA is a strange animal. Two people coming out of the same school can have vastly different career goals, and have taken much different coursework. While the core courses may be the same, the real meat is often in the elective courses that allow you to focus on a specific area of business. A brand management person is going to exit business school with a much different skill-set than somebody who wants to do investment banking. The same goes for entrepreneurship. Its not enough to point to an MBA and make generalizations about how it prepares you for X or Y. The devil is in the coursework, the professors, and most importantly, the student.

brc 16y ago
I would just add to that - most MBA courses (well, mine, anyway, a sample size of 1) involve a lot of case studies. In many cases, you can choose the topic of the case study, just be getting approval from the assessor for suitability. Thus, you can decide to study GE, Digg or Microsoft, whether it's for marketing, industrial relations or strategy. When I went through I had a fellow student who was preparing to take over the family cleaning business with several hundred staff. A friend was a career airline pilot getting ready to step out of the cockpit and into administration. I also had career public servants learning on the public dime to get to the next pay grade. There was also aimless students who weren't ready to leave university because they had no direction in life. The things that these different groups studied vary a lot. The one thing that did come through, unfortunately, was a heavy reliance on Powerpoint.