Day: April 9, 2021

What about an MBA, then?

I opened a rather large can of worms with my post about whether or not one should do a PhD last Friday, for the most popular question I have gotten since then is whether one should do an MBA – is it “worth it”?

Here are my thoughts on the subject:

  1. Just like the PhD, so also with the MBA. You are doing it to get a job, or get more money in your current job. You should be clear about this. You are not doing it to get better at business, or to start your own business. ((I’m talking about the median MBA candidate here))
  2. The major difference between an MBA and a PhD is that one is a marathon, and the other is a sprint. There is some satisfaction to be gained from simply finishing the marathon – but the point of a sprint is to win it. You need to be faster than the others – or the others need to be slower than you.
  3. And if that is true (and I think it is), and if your job is likely to come from the placements process, then “winning” at the placement process becomes oh-so-important. Or, here is another way to think about it – if you think that you CV will look better by being able to say that you got placed in a “good” company while in college, then your MBA degree is about “winning” at the placement process.
  4. And that, unfortunately, makes the acquisition of an MBA degree a zero sum game. You only win by defeating everybody else. Because you don’t get the best job offer by making sure that the others get the best job offers – there’s only so many best job offers to go around.
  5. Walk into an MBA education with your eyes wide open: that’s why you are there, to be the best in a zero-sum game. By definition, the MBA game is a cut-throat game. If that is the world you want to inhabit, then an MBA is a great education to acquire.
  6. Remember, though, that the education isn’t what you learn in class. That education, these days, you can get for free online, and it’ll be better than the education you get in your college. The education that you get is learning how to be demonstrably better than your peers while being part of the same community for two years. You then have to apply these learnings to your career.
  7. That makes the MBA one of those rare degrees where the quality of the college really matters. Not because the faculty is likely to be better, or because you will get better facilities, or because the library will be better. All that is likely true, but the reason you want to get into a “good” college is because you need to show that you have beaten the best, twice over. You first beat everybody else by getting into this college when so many others couldn’t, and you beat everybody else who got in by scoring more than they did. It really is the ultimate zero-sum game!
  8. An MBA with prior work-experience is worth so much more than an MBA with no prior work-experience. Identify the gaps in what you know about the corporate world by working in the corporate world, and then do an MBA.
  9. You do an MBA for the job, for your peer group and for what you learn in the classroom – in that order.
  10. If you are faintly horrified by what you have just read, don’t even think about doing an MBA. If you can’t wait to get started, you should definitely do an MBA!