I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine the day after he got his MBA from Pepperdine. He had been working as an engineer for about 20 years whe

I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine the day after he got his MBA from Pepperdine. He had been working as an engineer for about 20 years when he decided to go for the MBA. I had come across a number of MBA's in my business and was less than impressed. At one point I asked him: What's an MBA good for? His answer: Absolutely nothing. He then argued that an MBA devoid of solid experience in another field, well, just didn't get reality. Academic studies don't necessarily converge with reality, at least not perfectly. In his case, having spent so many years in various engineering disciplines the advantage was that he came into the MBA program with a great deal of context in reality and came out of it with knowledge that was well founded, modulated and qualified by the reality filters he had developed over the years. That portion of the discussion matched what I had seen. The only MBA's I had come into contact with that "got it" seemed to be those who went into the MBA program after having worked in the real world for a good while. Would I hire an MBA? They'd really have to show me that they get reality and are not living inside of some star-trek-ish distortion field.