Is a good education a key to success in the business world?
If by education you mean book learning and class attending, then the answer is no. If by education, you mean the totality of experiences in your life, then the answer is yes. For example, someone could never attend college and still be a great entrepreneur. And someone could get a Ph.D. in management and not be able to operate a Tea stand.
First let me ask you few questions.
1. Do you remember Ambani?
2. Do you remember Bill Gates?
3. Do you remember Lakshmi Mittal?
4. Do you remember Jamshedji Tata?
5. Do you remember Steve Jobs?
Well, you must have scored 5 out of 5. Great.
The question is Does an Entrepreneur Need an M.B.A.?
What is the value of an M.B.A. these days for young college graduates who want to start their own company?
Probably after spending Rs (INR). 800,000 on an MBA. This may not be the right question to ask. I don't think M.B.A. matters very much for starting a company. You can always hire M.B.A.s, but if you don't have the ability to conceptualize and deliver a product or a service, you've got nothing.
I have been studying whether MBA is necessary to be successful in career, especially an Entrepreneur career. The study showed that most of the World CEOs are MBAs, and it is big “WOW” for MBAs.
But then the underlying thing is that none of the most successful Entrepreneurs are MBAs. They are either college drop outs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, or they are simply very passionate youth Entrepreneurs like Kishore Binyani (founder, chairman of Future Group) or Ambani.
A key part of this success in an MBA is the return on investment is much faster but as you can imagine, but an Entrepreneur is much more than a future manager; he is creator of enterprises for the future and gives employment for lot of people.
Here's my take on the issues:
1. An MBA is great if you have a more traditional career path because it
1) Opens doors for you that could take years to open otherwise (if they could be opened at all and
2) Earns you a higher starting salary early in your career. That's why many MBAs pay for themselves fairly quickly.
2. An MBA also works well if you have a non-business degree and want to enter the business world -- as an entrepreneur or anything else. It can give you the basic knowledge you need to best manage your career/business.
3. For someone who already has a business background/degree and is going to become an entrepreneur, I don't see a whole lot of value to getting an MBA. It won't teach you any more than you'll learn in the "real world" and it will cost you in time and money. Yeah, it could open a few doors for you (maybe with alumni from your school), but that's probably it.
This will lead us to think that MBA is required to be a high spending CEO or a high profile Employee as the Entrepreneurs tend to hire MBAs for the Managerial roles. But if you have something to deliver to the world and if you are passionate about it, you don’t need an MBA. MBA is a waste of two years. And at the end of two years, you are left with little passion about work but are trained to manage other folks. Managing is a great skill to have to lessen risk in life. But to really do something World will remember for long, it might not be. Because World Remembers people who actually work but not the one who manages them.
So if you think, you are Entrepreneurial and can build company. Please don't do an MBA and please don't go and work under someone who once chose not to go for an MBA.
Don’t do the same mistake what I did “A good person is the one who not only learns from his own mistakes but also from other peoples mistakes”
Just start a company and do it as soon as possible.
