Economist

The Economist is wrong about MBAs

Tim Trampedach Opinion , ,

I came across an article in the Economist today called “Think twice” which makes the argument that it may no longer be worth it to get an MBA. It’s written by a Harvard MBA and frankly, I think Philip Delves Broughton is only out to try to sell more of his book “What They Teach you at Harvard Business School”. He sounds fairly bitter and his argument is roughly as follows:

  1. Supposedly more and more students are finding the promise of Business Schools to get you ahead “hollow”, meaning they’re not fast-tracking you into careers, networks, money, etc. Duh, you have to work for it especially in a global economy with lots of motivated students who weren’t born with a silver spoon.
  2. B-Schools are desperate for money and professors are after your money to fund their “threadbare” research. Sure, for some it’s just bodies in the door, but in the end all that’s doing is setting market-clearing prices for a good which people want.
  3. Some companies don’t have MBAs in their leadership rank have been successful, e.g. Apple., and companies are no longer looking for MBAs who just come with spreadsheets. Wrong, we come with Powerpoint, because we only do strategy. 🙂
  4. Overall the financial ROI of all MBA programs is bad. It’s only good at the top ones. More on this later.
  5. There’s no point to getting a disparate network of friends since you like have singular focus on a career. I don’t like people either.

Since I’m writing this, I obviously disagree. On the highest of levels, I disagree with the notion that an MBA should be embarked upon solely for financial gain and thus distilled down to ROI (return on investment), unless investment includes many other subjective factors like fun, network, brand, inspiration, knowledge, etc.

I don’t disagree because I have an MBA myself and I don’t plan to disagree line by line further, since hat would be fun for me to write, but I’d bore you and it leads to tons of anecdotal argumentation. Instead, I want to debunk a couple things and then provide some advice on setting goals and using metrics to measure them, i.e. not just financial ROI.

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