STOP! Don’t do that MBA!
Some thoughts on why I think MBAs are no longer relevant
Seriously!
Give yourself some options…
This is the perspective of a guy who studied business at University (finance to be specific), has a Masters in Finance and has only ever been involved in starting and /or running small businesses for the last 5 years. That’s just so you know where I come from.
Let’s start with two of the most commonly stated reasons for pursuing an MBA. These are not mutually exclusive however.
“I want to make a career change”
Fair enough. I completely empathize with you. You were sold an idea as a teenager, which led you to study what you did at University, which then led you to taking your first job in a field which you thought would fulfill you in every way possible. And it has not lived up to your expectations. You aren’t all that happy, you are not necessarily excited to get out of bed every morning, and you aren’t earning anywhere close to what you think you are worth. I get all of that. Been there, done that.
“I am doing an MBA to build my network”
So this is one of those business cliches which nobody really agrees on. What on Earth is a ‘network’ anyway? Is it a group of people you hang out with on weekends, and with whom you like to get wasted? Is it comprised of people you can tap into for your next big career move? Is a network more valuable if there are people you can go to for advice and mentoring? When do you think this MBA ‘network’ will actually come in handy?
To my mind, you can’t really study business. I mean, you can read, discuss, solve case studies and write essays like most people do at B-School, but that would not equip you with skills where you would be comfortable taking make or break decisions when actually placed in situations which require tough decisions to be made. Which is what 80% of business is all about. Decisions. Hour after hour. Day after day.
If you want to develop serious, cutting edge business skills, there really is only one way to do it. And that is to put yourself in situations where you are constantly assessing the dynamics of different situations, where you have (or have borrowed) money to lose if you get things wrong and where variables change with every passing day.
Take marketing for example. I don’t have an MBA, so you may call me out on this, but you are likely to study a number of ‘theories of marketing’ as part of your MBA curriculum. I did as an undergraduate studying finance (!). These theories had me believe that marketing was all about ‘4 Ps’, and that having an understanding of these ‘Ps’ would make me a good marketer. But now, after having done a fair amount of marketing online and offline for my own businesses, I can safely say that what I studied was actually a pile of horse poo compared to what ‘marketing’ really is. If you were to talk to people doing marketing at the world’s most dynamic companies, you would find that what they teach you on an MBA (any MBA) would fall far short of what is required to succeed as a modern day marketer. And so it is with most other business subjects you study in an MBA. The reason for this is that in the business world, academia lags behind practice, often by many years. Academics only study what has already been implemented by companies. They rarely put themselves out there to come up with new ways of solving business problems. So what you learn at B-School is usually already commonplace in industry, and in many cases irrelevant.
Getting ahead in the business world involves being able to do things faster, cheaper or better than the competition. Or coming up with new ways of doing things entirely. Being able to execute a strategy faster or better than the competition involves a lot of trial and error, experimentation and learning. Failing forward is the catchy phrase that describes this mindset well. While an MBA might give you exposure to some of the strategies used by the world’s best companies, it won’t actually give you the skills to be able to implement anything when you have to get shit done in the real world.
Still here? Great!
MBAs came into being when the world’s largest companies needed some reasonably smart people to oversee basic business operations such that they could grow to dominate the markets that they were operating in. Think IBM, Coca-Cola, Unilever etc. Back then, higher education was mainly technical in nature, or you studied Arts. Business was, and still is, somewhere in the middle of the technical/ non-technical spectrum. But we didn’t have the internet, so acquiring knowledge beyond the scope of what you studied at University was hard to come by. You either required a hell of a lot of initiative to spend hours at a library picking up new skills, or needed a willing mentor to teach you the tricks of the trade. So Universities around the world started offering courses on a number of aspects related to business, which perfectly met the needs of large companies which needed middle management — and the MBA was born.
The world is slowly but surely coming round to the idea that making learning a lifelong companion isn’t just for the nerdier members of society — it is mandatory if you want to stay relevant in your industry. Already, in sectors such as tech, you are more or less redundant and useless if you don’t stay up to date with the latest trends. In fact, I am slightly wary of learning coding because every time I start (with gusto) and get to a certain level of proficiency, the language / framework I am learning is added to the fast growing list of outdated technologies. And then I get put off. And I quit.
Your options to learn new ‘business’ skills are seemingly limitless. From Udemy and Coursera to platforms which focus on specialized skill sets (Harvard offers certification courses too), you are spoilt for choice when it comes to learning new skills. These options are available online, offline and often a combination of online and offline modules. If you are driven enough and really want to learn a new skill, the world really is your oyster. From different types of marketing, to negotiation to growth hacking, you can learn as much or as little as you like, for a fraction of the cost of a full time MBA. And you can learn at a pace that is most suited to you.
Let’s take the case of an ambitious and intelligent late twenty something who is looking to make a career change. The most obvious choice would probably be to do an MBA. But more and more people are now looking at the alternatives, since these alternatives are often a more direct route into a new industry. Interestingly, employers are increasingly looking to hire people who not only think out of the box, but have the experience to prove that they act out of the box too.
Like my friend Alexey Samkov, who recently finished a three month stint at Tradecraft. Alexey, like a lot of us, obviously did think of an MBA when he wanted to transition from finance— as a launch pad into a role which would give him more purpose and meaning, and which he would find intellectually stimulating. However, after a lot of research, he decided that a full-time and dedicated course such as the one offered by Tradecraft would give him the knowledge, experience and network that would most likely take him to where he wants to be. And he did this for a fraction of the cost of an MBA, and by spending just three months immersed in full-time and experiential learning.
That is just one example of many in my own circle of friends — of people who took the path less traveled (by not doing an MBA) to achieve their goals, by spending less time and less cash. But not less effort. My point being that there are so many amazing resources out there which will give you the precise skills that you need to make a transition from one industry to another, at least as far as business is concerned. You just need to be willing to look for them, and to dedicate yourself to learning skills on your own, as opposed to paying a lot of money and being handed a degree on a platter. I am not suggesting that getting an MBA does not require hard work — it does, but nothing compared to the work you have to put in to structure your own learning, and to hold yourself accountable to your own yardstick.
You have a much higher chance of standing out in a large pile of resumes if you can show that you have the initiative, drive and chutzpah to structure an education that feels right for you at a given point in time. And the internet now allows us all to do this, at a cost that is affordable to most of us. And for which we needn’t take out loans which will leave us indebted for years.
Think about that for a moment — you can actually customize a business education for yourself based on your interests, your previous experience and where you want to go.
No MBA on the planet lets you do that. The curriculum is pretty much set in stone — sure, you can choose electives and so on — but there is still going to be a lot of material in there which is simply not relevant to you. That irrelevancy has a very high cost associated with it.
Now to attack the ‘network’ argument. Facebook, Snapchat, Linkedin, Snapchat and Twitter combined offer anyone the greatest networking opportunity ever.
You just have to know how to use them.
Let’s take an example of another fellow Bengaluru legend in the making. Rohith Salim (who runs Lead With Data HQ), back when he was trying to figure out a way forward after setting foot in the motherland after more than a decade, met with the biggest of Indian start-up big wigs in the space of just a few months, through clever use of social media. His partner in crime at the time, Nikhil (who I am not able to tag here) now works for one of the city’s hottest start ups. And the way they went up about their business was by using their own network and the social web to land meetings with whoever would be kind enough to meet with them. They don’t have MBAs — but like Alexey, are both very smart, enterprising and know how to work the system.
There has never been a better time in MBA history to equip yourself with the skills and a network most MBAs could only dream of. Without doing an MBA!
You just have to acknowledge the opportunity that’s waiting to be tapped into.
And you need to get over your fear of rejection and reach out to people if you think they can help you. People are a lot nicer than you think.
To finish, I am not arguing that MBAs are totally useless. They make sense for some people. Some of my best friends have done MBAs. It worked for some, since they managed to make the transition that they wanted.The others were left very disillusioned. To be blunt, MBAs make sense for people with very specific attributes and career goals. If you’re not one of those, you need to start thinking beyond the accepted range of possibility as far as business education is concerned. Twenty years ago, the MBA was for everybody. That isn’t the case in 2017.
If you got into Harvard for their MBA and rejected it, you’d actually be mocked, ridiculed and ostracized for the rest of your life. The only way you could avoid such condemnation is by building a gazillion dollar company or setting up 1000 schools in Sub-Saharan Africa.
But my point is, you can do something off the charts like building a gazillion dollar company or building 1000 schools, without spending $200,000 and putting off working on something that interests you in the 2 years (or 1 year) that you would spend in an MBA program.
Over to you guys…
