On my first ever trip to San Francisco I had the good fortune to be invited along to a CTO dinner where I ended up chatting with Brewster Kahle and Tom Gruber amongst others. At one stage in the conversation the whole gang started on the ‘MBAs are destroying corporate America’ narrative. After a while I felt compelled to speak up and say ‘I did an MBA’. Brewster rounded on me asking, ‘why would you waste your time on that?’, to which I replied, ‘know your enemy’.

A couple of key points emerge, along the lines of there are MBAs and there are MBAs, YMMV:

1. The course I did (with Open University Business School) was distance learning. I did it (mostly on my commute) whilst holding down a full time job (in banking IT at the time), so the calculus around cost and opportunity cost was very different.
2. Not all courses are preaching the same old formulae. Pick wisely and you’ll get exposure to leading edge thinking and the people driving it.