8 ms·

RIP, MBA - The economic crisis has exposed the myth of business-school expertise

57 points by winanga 18y ago

melvinram 18y ago
The MBA is not going to die anytime soon. As a society, we need ways to quickly and efficiently rank people by merit. The MBA today offers this exactly the same way a bachelors degree used to offer it. Most don't really use 90% of what they learn but it helps sort out those who are not willing to do extra. I don't have an MBA, nor do I plan on getting one. I don't see it as good use of my time but I still highly doubt that the MBA will die anytime soon.
- indiejade 18y ago
  It's definitely not going to die any time soon. The "M" in an MBA still stands for Master's degree. Master degrees are certainly not worthless. If the author of the article wants to disparage graduate level studies, he certainly ought to go after more than one particular brand of degree. The MBA hating is getting really old.
dtap 18y ago
Business schools are very self propagating. People who get them decide they are valuable and then convince others of the same which builds a bubble. There are certainly valuable skills (accounting, finance, marketing) that can be learned with experience. I have found everything could be picked up in a few weeks. I have moderately fallen into it, getting a BBA along with my engineering degree.
- hs 18y ago
  "I have found everything could be picked up in a few weeks." yes, business courses are really that easy i took accounting course back then, the first couple weeks it didn't make sense (too simple). i thought a better way (aka ABC (activity based accounting)) which was covered weeks later i sat on mba course later and most 'analysis' are too simplistic, mostly straight lines (remember 'beta' ?). complete waste of time. i feel that business in general is easy and not much to learn so schools just teach everything for the sake of teaching. out of the 1000 pages in many business textbooks, maybe only 100 pages are useful.
  - Frocer 18y ago
    What makes "business" so different from "sciences" is that most business skills are not hard skills. There are certainly a few -- such as accounting and finance (btw, corporate finance is not as easy as you think). "Soft skills" -- such as your presentation skills, your communication skills, client management skills, etc, are actually arguably more important. As a former consultant, I think soft skills is much more critical for your business success. Business classes are easier than engineering classes because the "hard skills" aren't nearly as complex, but keep in mind you pick up a lot of other skills that are even more important in business settings.
ryanwaggoner 18y ago
The author makes the classic mistake of confusing correlation with causation: "Hmmm...banks hire lots of people with MBA degrees, and this crisis started in the banking sector. The MBA degree must be the root cause of financial crisis!" Actually, now that I read through it again, I'm not sure it's even worth dissecting. It strikes me less as a merely illogical diatribe against business education as much as an intentionally misleading hit piece against something the author neither understands nor respects.
- weiser 18y ago
  Actually, the author is clearly stating the causal relationship. He is pointing out that free market fundamentalism is the cause of the crises and Business schools are the cheerleaders for free market fundamentalism. Now, I personally do not agree with that argument, but your criticism of author's argument is unfounded.
  - ojbyrne 18y ago
    Perhaps some B-schools are the cheerleaders, but I never saw it where I was. Economics departments are where that particular meme came from, and they don't actually teach economics in B-school except tangentially.
    - TomOfTTB 18y ago
      My experience is the same. I think people are confusing the macro (economics) with the micro (running an actual company). Business schools focus on the micro and in doing so very rarely address economic systems as a whole. To but it a different way economics is about how the rules of an economic system are created. Business school is about teaching the student to work within the rules already created in the existing system.
neovintage 18y ago
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a current MBA student during the day and developer by night. Its unfortunate that this article focused solely on the financial industry. I agree that some schools seems to breed more of what the author is referring to in the industry. Yet I think its a blanket generalization to all MBA programs. The MBA typically gets a bad wrap when any economic problems start to occur. Most people will then start to quote statistics that say most of the top companies do not have MBAs at the helm, so why do we need these MBA programs? What about those that have worked on Social Ventures during their MBAs? Are they guilty of wasting their time in an MBA program? I chose to get an MBA so that I could understand the business side of things more and to build a professional business network, the latter being the most important. You'd be surprised at the background of people you meet in school. Do I think that everything taught to me in the program should be taken as gospel? No.
- genesoo 18y ago
  @neovintage I totally agree with you. I am an engineer by training and is currently in the second year of business school. I would have to say this article has too narrow a focus and stereotype MBAs. There is a lot more to MBA than finance and people who sought for big payouts. I have come to business school to understand the business side of things. As an engineer, I just did not understand why this marketing people just kept asking me to make things that I don't see a value in. Business School is a place that allows people with motivation and the will to change the world to share ideas with each other. Of course, there are also some people who are more keen in getting a comfortable job and lead a comfortable life. But so far for me, attending business school has extended my horizon greatly (I did figure out that finance is not my cup of tea and technology is my true passion). I have learnt a lot about people skills, finance (to help me understand term sheets when I startup), business strategy and ways to grow businesses so my ideas can achieve the biggest impact on people's lives.
chime 18y ago
sigh I just got home from my evening MBA class after a full day of work. I'm the Director of IT at a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Florida and graduated with 4.0 in CS and Econ with Math minor as my undergrad. After my MBA, I'm hoping to pursue a CS/Math PhD degree and I consider myself a lifelong student with no desire to make millions. I mentioned all of this because I want to make it clear that my reasons to defend the pursuit of an MBA program is solely academic in nature and not based on the potential earnings or promotions. I could make a lot more by switching companies, networking, or working overtime. I don't have to get an MBA just to make more money. An MBA from a good university is HARD and enlightening work. Yes, the barrier to entry is pretty low and I've had the mis-experience of being in groups where 35 year old finance majors with 8 years of field experience didn't know how to use the Excel SUM() function. Nevertheless, the professors are extremely experienced, industry stalwarts from all sorts of background. Tonight an ex-IBM'er with 20+ years of Sales & Marketing experience across various IT sectors taught me about building customer value. Here on HN we see blog posts by know-it-all nobodies dispense wisdom on "10 ways to blah blah" and all of us discuss the merits and demerits of the post for hours and days. An MBA is a superset of that, formalized and organized. Yes, you can learn business skills anywhere, especially by running your own company. However, that does not mean you cannot benefit from decades of knowledge, wisdom, and research in every field from finance to management to marketing. The goal of a well-designed MBA program is to equip you with the knowledge and skill to make better decisions in addition to letting you employ your gut instincts and intelligence in your ventures. The problem with MBA programs is that too many people treat them as "bigger paycheck" tickets and smaller universities lower their standards to welcome anyone who can pay them $20K/year. This has the negative side-effect of making even the hard-working MBA graduates appear to be useless greedy monsters like this article portrays. > The reality is that business school is now chiefly a community of intention. It brings together people who share certain career aspirations—for the most part, to make big bucks—and occupies their time teaching them a few technical things that they don't need to know, along with a code of conduct that says, in essence, whatever is legal is ethical; and if it makes money, it's a positive duty. It's now clear that we would have all been much better off if, instead of cloistering these people on fancy campuses with world-class golf courses, we'd have sent them off to do two years of national service. This entire paragraph is a complete load of crap. Over and over our professors, books, seminars, and presentations mention that doing the right, socially-beneficial thing is the only way to go. We read cases about bad businesses, identify the good ones, and isolate the bad ones pretending to be good. Not once has any of my professors even so much as sugar-coated what Enron, Worldcom, Lehman, AIG, or any of the tons of other companies have done as being acceptable. Yes, profit and shareholder value maximization is the legal requirement for any public corporation but not at the cost of long-term corporate and social goals. Sorry about the rant but I'm pretty sick of the dumb-greedy-MBA stereotype. Everything I learn in school at night, I get to immediately apply it at my job the next morning. My advice to anyone reading this is if you have a technical background and have often lacked in management and leadership skills, an MBA from a good university will genuinely help you be a well-rounded entrepreneur. Don't have unrealistic expectations about suddenly being transformed into Steve Jobs but do realize that leadership skills can be learned and 360-degree knowledge of business operations (from tech to finance to sales) will make you a very valuable asset to any organization, including the one that you start.
aswanson 18y ago
I think what Clayton Christensen has contributed in terms of his theory of disruptive innovation at the Harvard program is valuable. An MBA trained under him would have an visionary adavantage in a startup situation.
- fnazeeri 18y ago
  I have a Harvard MBA and took Christensen's class. The guy has a major outsized ego and frankly I didn't learn much more in his class than I did from his book (other than he's diabetic, Mormon and likes to cold call!).
- ShabbyDoo 18y ago
  A friend with a fairly recent MBA from Harvard told me that such professors are highly sought after by students. The school has some sort of lottery/bidding system to allocate slots in those classes.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - jhancock 18y ago
    if Harvard were interested in spreading the good word, they could have taped the lectures and had them online by now. I'm sure you don't need to be in the same physical room to get 90% of the good man's lessons.
    - dangoldin 18y ago
      You can always read his book and email him any thoughts or questions. You'd be surprised how often you get a response.
ShabbyDoo 18y ago
I have an MBA from a school that sometimes makes the Top 50 lists. I had some extra scholarship semesters available as an undergrad and was allowed to partake in the MBA program concurrently. The MBA experience shaped the way I think about problems as much as my undergrad in computer engineering. A good program teaches students to think through problems using an economic framework while engineering school promotes a technical one. Both are valuable (as are many other ways of thinking). Here's a specific example: Is Amazon's new EC2 dedicated instance pricing a good deal? A naive analysis requires simply adding up the sum total of all costs and comparing the difference. What's wrong with that? 1. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. How much more? That depends on your unique circumstances. You're a start-up? It's really expensive to spend money today. You'd much rather pay more later when your concept is proven out. Are you GE and can borrow at rates only slightly higher than the government? Then, a dollar now isn't much different than a dollar tomorrow. So, you have to establish what's referred to as a discount factor to compare payments made at different times. 2. The dedicated instance program has characteristics of an option. You have the right but not the obligation to purchase server hours. So, your economic model has to allow for the future decision to switch over to the per-hour model if prices drop drastically. 3. The "strike price" (using the term loosely) of the option is fixed even though Moore's law is likely to hold over the life of the option. Is paying $500 now for the right to purchase server hours for 70% off a good deal if server hours only cost 1/5th of what they do now at the time of the option's expiration? How steeply can prices decline so that you are still at the point of indifference between paying up-front and paying later? 4. A quick analysis of the marketplace for on-demand computing suggests that it is quickly becoming commoditized (at least at the basic levels). Price competition for commodity-like goods is tremendous, so we should expect prices to drop as more competitors emerge. Even if Moore's Law didn't hold, one shouldn't evaluate the option based on today's pricing. 5. The option doesn't appear to be transferable. What discount factor does one place on purchasing something valuable that he can not sell? I actually put together such a model. Even under optimistic Moore's Law cases and high discount rates, dedicated instances are a good deal (presuming you will use all three years with certainty or can transfer your rights).
T_S_ 18y ago
No, we are all down. It's really a question of who's down more. Go over to wilmott.com and you will see the ex-physicist quants getting all defensive too. Not to mention the finance theorists. Oh, and don't forget the economist-philosophers like Laffer and Greenspan. MBAs shouldn't be trusted to make important decisions, and neither should the rest of us apparently. Maybe check with Mom first next time.
azgolfer 18y ago
I think he's confusing several issues. Markets are self regulating, normally. But when the government intervenes with pressure to loan to people who can't afford the loans, then has Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee the securities (so the lender is not directly at risk), they become much less self regulating. Funny that people think this crisis is a reason for more government intervention. Conservatism has had a lot of bad press for the last 40 years, but maybe those old conservative bankers weren't such a bad thing.
davidw 18y ago
This would be a good place to mention a book I enjoyed reading recently: "Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School" https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594201757?tag=dedasys-20 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594201757?tag=dedasys-20 (yes, it has my affiliate link) It's written by a pleasantly cynical, yet curious Englishman. It's pretty interesting to hear about the whole experience, the mindset, and some of the people involved. A particularly relevant (for me) passage: "Rubenstein looked like any other Wall Street elder statesman, in a blue pinstriped suit and owlish tortoiseshell glasses. But the moment he spoke, eh revealed a droll, self-deprecating wit. The difference between corporate leaders and those who start their own businesses, I had observed, was startling. The latter come across as so much smarter and independent-minded, so much less prone to platitudes, so much more comfortable in their own skins. There seems to be an anarchic streak in anyone who has taken a real risk in his life. And even when it has to burn its way through a pinstriped suit, it shows." That sort of hints at one of the "problems" with teaching business - there's lots of useful stuff you can learn, but there is also some natural, innate talent there, that doesn't necessarily correspond to doing well at an MBA course. So perhaps it's best to get out there, get some experience, and then just do it.

57 points by winanga 18y ago

The MBA is not going to die anytime soon. As a society, we need ways to quickly and efficiently rank people by merit. The MBA today offers this exactly the same way a bachelors degree used to offer it. Most don't really use 90% of what they learn but it helps sort out those who are not willing to do extra. I don't have an MBA, nor do I plan on getting one. I don't see it as good use of my time but I still highly doubt that the MBA will die anytime soon.

indiejade 18y ago
It's definitely not going to die any time soon. The "M" in an MBA still stands for Master's degree. Master degrees are certainly not worthless. If the author of the article wants to disparage graduate level studies, he certainly ought to go after more than one particular brand of degree. The MBA hating is getting really old.

dtap 18y ago

Business schools are very self propagating. People who get them decide they are valuable and then convince others of the same which builds a bubble. There are certainly valuable skills (accounting, finance, marketing) that can be learned with experience. I have found everything could be picked up in a few weeks. I have moderately fallen into it, getting a BBA along with my engineering degree.

hs 18y ago
"I have found everything could be picked up in a few weeks." yes, business courses are really that easy i took accounting course back then, the first couple weeks it didn't make sense (too simple). i thought a better way (aka ABC (activity based accounting)) which was covered weeks later i sat on mba course later and most 'analysis' are too simplistic, mostly straight lines (remember 'beta' ?). complete waste of time. i feel that business in general is easy and not much to learn so schools just teach everything for the sake of teaching. out of the 1000 pages in many business textbooks, maybe only 100 pages are useful.
- Frocer 18y ago
  What makes "business" so different from "sciences" is that most business skills are not hard skills. There are certainly a few -- such as accounting and finance (btw, corporate finance is not as easy as you think). "Soft skills" -- such as your presentation skills, your communication skills, client management skills, etc, are actually arguably more important. As a former consultant, I think soft skills is much more critical for your business success. Business classes are easier than engineering classes because the "hard skills" aren't nearly as complex, but keep in mind you pick up a lot of other skills that are even more important in business settings.

ryanwaggoner 18y ago

The author makes the classic mistake of confusing correlation with causation: "Hmmm...banks hire lots of people with MBA degrees, and this crisis started in the banking sector. The MBA degree must be the root cause of financial crisis!" Actually, now that I read through it again, I'm not sure it's even worth dissecting. It strikes me less as a merely illogical diatribe against business education as much as an intentionally misleading hit piece against something the author neither understands nor respects.

weiser 18y ago
Actually, the author is clearly stating the causal relationship. He is pointing out that free market fundamentalism is the cause of the crises and Business schools are the cheerleaders for free market fundamentalism. Now, I personally do not agree with that argument, but your criticism of author's argument is unfounded.
- ojbyrne 18y ago
  Perhaps some B-schools are the cheerleaders, but I never saw it where I was. Economics departments are where that particular meme came from, and they don't actually teach economics in B-school except tangentially.
  - TomOfTTB 18y ago
    My experience is the same. I think people are confusing the macro (economics) with the micro (running an actual company). Business schools focus on the micro and in doing so very rarely address economic systems as a whole. To but it a different way economics is about how the rules of an economic system are created. Business school is about teaching the student to work within the rules already created in the existing system.

neovintage 18y ago

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a current MBA student during the day and developer by night. Its unfortunate that this article focused solely on the financial industry. I agree that some schools seems to breed more of what the author is referring to in the industry. Yet I think its a blanket generalization to all MBA programs. The MBA typically gets a bad wrap when any economic problems start to occur. Most people will then start to quote statistics that say most of the top companies do not have MBAs at the helm, so why do we need these MBA programs? What about those that have worked on Social Ventures during their MBAs? Are they guilty of wasting their time in an MBA program? I chose to get an MBA so that I could understand the business side of things more and to build a professional business network, the latter being the most important. You'd be surprised at the background of people you meet in school. Do I think that everything taught to me in the program should be taken as gospel? No.

genesoo 18y ago
@neovintage I totally agree with you. I am an engineer by training and is currently in the second year of business school. I would have to say this article has too narrow a focus and stereotype MBAs. There is a lot more to MBA than finance and people who sought for big payouts. I have come to business school to understand the business side of things. As an engineer, I just did not understand why this marketing people just kept asking me to make things that I don't see a value in. Business School is a place that allows people with motivation and the will to change the world to share ideas with each other. Of course, there are also some people who are more keen in getting a comfortable job and lead a comfortable life. But so far for me, attending business school has extended my horizon greatly (I did figure out that finance is not my cup of tea and technology is my true passion). I have learnt a lot about people skills, finance (to help me understand term sheets when I startup), business strategy and ways to grow businesses so my ideas can achieve the biggest impact on people's lives.

chime 18y ago

sigh I just got home from my evening MBA class after a full day of work. I'm the Director of IT at a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Florida and graduated with 4.0 in CS and Econ with Math minor as my undergrad. After my MBA, I'm hoping to pursue a CS/Math PhD degree and I consider myself a lifelong student with no desire to make millions. I mentioned all of this because I want to make it clear that my reasons to defend the pursuit of an MBA program is solely academic in nature and not based on the potential earnings or promotions. I could make a lot more by switching companies, networking, or working overtime. I don't have to get an MBA just to make more money. An MBA from a good university is HARD and enlightening work. Yes, the barrier to entry is pretty low and I've had the mis-experience of being in groups where 35 year old finance majors with 8 years of field experience didn't know how to use the Excel SUM() function. Nevertheless, the professors are extremely experienced, industry stalwarts from all sorts of background. Tonight an ex-IBM'er with 20+ years of Sales & Marketing experience across various IT sectors taught me about building customer value. Here on HN we see blog posts by know-it-all nobodies dispense wisdom on "10 ways to blah blah" and all of us discuss the merits and demerits of the post for hours and days. An MBA is a superset of that, formalized and organized. Yes, you can learn business skills anywhere, especially by running your own company. However, that does not mean you cannot benefit from decades of knowledge, wisdom, and research in every field from finance to management to marketing. The goal of a well-designed MBA program is to equip you with the knowledge and skill to make better decisions in addition to letting you employ your gut instincts and intelligence in your ventures. The problem with MBA programs is that too many people treat them as "bigger paycheck" tickets and smaller universities lower their standards to welcome anyone who can pay them $20K/year. This has the negative side-effect of making even the hard-working MBA graduates appear to be useless greedy monsters like this article portrays. > The reality is that business school is now chiefly a community of intention. It brings together people who share certain career aspirations—for the most part, to make big bucks—and occupies their time teaching them a few technical things that they don't need to know, along with a code of conduct that says, in essence, whatever is legal is ethical; and if it makes money, it's a positive duty. It's now clear that we would have all been much better off if, instead of cloistering these people on fancy campuses with world-class golf courses, we'd have sent them off to do two years of national service. This entire paragraph is a complete load of crap. Over and over our professors, books, seminars, and presentations mention that doing the right, socially-beneficial thing is the only way to go. We read cases about bad businesses, identify the good ones, and isolate the bad ones pretending to be good. Not once has any of my professors even so much as sugar-coated what Enron, Worldcom, Lehman, AIG, or any of the tons of other companies have done as being acceptable. Yes, profit and shareholder value maximization is the legal requirement for any public corporation but not at the cost of long-term corporate and social goals. Sorry about the rant but I'm pretty sick of the dumb-greedy-MBA stereotype. Everything I learn in school at night, I get to immediately apply it at my job the next morning. My advice to anyone reading this is if you have a technical background and have often lacked in management and leadership skills, an MBA from a good university will genuinely help you be a well-rounded entrepreneur. Don't have unrealistic expectations about suddenly being transformed into Steve Jobs but do realize that leadership skills can be learned and 360-degree knowledge of business operations (from tech to finance to sales) will make you a very valuable asset to any organization, including the one that you start.

aswanson 18y ago

I think what Clayton Christensen has contributed in terms of his theory of disruptive innovation at the Harvard program is valuable. An MBA trained under him would have an visionary adavantage in a startup situation.

fnazeeri 18y ago
I have a Harvard MBA and took Christensen's class. The guy has a major outsized ego and frankly I didn't learn much more in his class than I did from his book (other than he's diabetic, Mormon and likes to cold call!).
ShabbyDoo 18y ago
A friend with a fairly recent MBA from Harvard told me that such professors are highly sought after by students. The school has some sort of lottery/bidding system to allocate slots in those classes.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- jhancock 18y ago
  if Harvard were interested in spreading the good word, they could have taped the lectures and had them online by now. I'm sure you don't need to be in the same physical room to get 90% of the good man's lessons.
  - dangoldin 18y ago
    You can always read his book and email him any thoughts or questions. You'd be surprised how often you get a response.

ShabbyDoo 18y ago

I have an MBA from a school that sometimes makes the Top 50 lists. I had some extra scholarship semesters available as an undergrad and was allowed to partake in the MBA program concurrently. The MBA experience shaped the way I think about problems as much as my undergrad in computer engineering. A good program teaches students to think through problems using an economic framework while engineering school promotes a technical one. Both are valuable (as are many other ways of thinking). Here's a specific example: Is Amazon's new EC2 dedicated instance pricing a good deal? A naive analysis requires simply adding up the sum total of all costs and comparing the difference. What's wrong with that? 1. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. How much more? That depends on your unique circumstances. You're a start-up? It's really expensive to spend money today. You'd much rather pay more later when your concept is proven out. Are you GE and can borrow at rates only slightly higher than the government? Then, a dollar now isn't much different than a dollar tomorrow. So, you have to establish what's referred to as a discount factor to compare payments made at different times. 2. The dedicated instance program has characteristics of an option. You have the right but not the obligation to purchase server hours. So, your economic model has to allow for the future decision to switch over to the per-hour model if prices drop drastically. 3. The "strike price" (using the term loosely) of the option is fixed even though Moore's law is likely to hold over the life of the option. Is paying $500 now for the right to purchase server hours for 70% off a good deal if server hours only cost 1/5th of what they do now at the time of the option's expiration? How steeply can prices decline so that you are still at the point of indifference between paying up-front and paying later? 4. A quick analysis of the marketplace for on-demand computing suggests that it is quickly becoming commoditized (at least at the basic levels). Price competition for commodity-like goods is tremendous, so we should expect prices to drop as more competitors emerge. Even if Moore's Law didn't hold, one shouldn't evaluate the option based on today's pricing. 5. The option doesn't appear to be transferable. What discount factor does one place on purchasing something valuable that he can not sell? I actually put together such a model. Even under optimistic Moore's Law cases and high discount rates, dedicated instances are a good deal (presuming you will use all three years with certainty or can transfer your rights).

T_S_ 18y ago

No, we are all down. It's really a question of who's down more. Go over to wilmott.com and you will see the ex-physicist quants getting all defensive too. Not to mention the finance theorists. Oh, and don't forget the economist-philosophers like Laffer and Greenspan. MBAs shouldn't be trusted to make important decisions, and neither should the rest of us apparently. Maybe check with Mom first next time.

azgolfer 18y ago

I think he's confusing several issues. Markets are self regulating, normally. But when the government intervenes with pressure to loan to people who can't afford the loans, then has Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee the securities (so the lender is not directly at risk), they become much less self regulating. Funny that people think this crisis is a reason for more government intervention. Conservatism has had a lot of bad press for the last 40 years, but maybe those old conservative bankers weren't such a bad thing.

davidw 18y ago

This would be a good place to mention a book I enjoyed reading recently: "Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School" https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594201757?tag=dedasys-20 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594201757?tag=dedasys-20 (yes, it has my affiliate link) It's written by a pleasantly cynical, yet curious Englishman. It's pretty interesting to hear about the whole experience, the mindset, and some of the people involved. A particularly relevant (for me) passage: "Rubenstein looked like any other Wall Street elder statesman, in a blue pinstriped suit and owlish tortoiseshell glasses. But the moment he spoke, eh revealed a droll, self-deprecating wit. The difference between corporate leaders and those who start their own businesses, I had observed, was startling. The latter come across as so much smarter and independent-minded, so much less prone to platitudes, so much more comfortable in their own skins. There seems to be an anarchic streak in anyone who has taken a real risk in his life. And even when it has to burn its way through a pinstriped suit, it shows." That sort of hints at one of the "problems" with teaching business - there's lots of useful stuff you can learn, but there is also some natural, innate talent there, that doesn't necessarily correspond to doing well at an MBA course. So perhaps it's best to get out there, get some experience, and then just do it.