What Good is an MBA?

What Good is an MBA?. This is an important question to answer. Everybody has different notions of an MBA.

As I mentioned before,

The MBA as we all know is a course which we embark on for a specific reason. The reasons range from,

1. I need a better job.
2. Since everybody is doing it I better do it.
3. I want to enter a specific field.
4. I want to be the CEO/Vp of a organisation.
5. I want to educate myself to be able to be make a difference.

The MBA is not an end, it is a small part of a bigger journey which you have started and it is a tool which will help you "live that journey better".

There are many Why's? for doing an MBA and my Why? is :

I do not see an MBA as an education to manage a business but a "set of codified knowledge" which will help me to create, run and manage varied institutions which will help to bring about change in the society.

I chanced upon a blog by N G Wilson (via the Green Building Blog) on business and life. Wilson is an accomplished Entreprenuer who recently completed his MBA.

This is what he says about the MBA.

Many people get a degree, especially an MBA for career employment and promotion. They don't usually think so, but act as if when they get the degree, their career is made. This wrong notion will not do damage, but it will hamper the person IF he thinks that getting a degree is more important than learning the skills that the degree represents.

Which essentially brings me to what I really want to say:

Your degree will open a door, but how far you walked into the door ( which defines your accomplishment and success) will still depend on what you have inside - your skills , your creativity, your motivation, your initiative etc.

It will open doors in the sense that when you send your CV, people will pick you out easily from other ten applicants who may not have an MBA. It will open doors in the sense that the manager may be willing to give you five minutes more interview or ten minutes more time to present your case. But you get that job still because of what you were able to do, or accomplished -- in this case how far you can walk into a door that has been opened.

By and itself, it is not worth much, except when new. But if after ten or twenty years of work, if your work does not speak for itself, and all you can still boast about is that MBA you got so many years ago, then it may just highlight an expectation that you were not able to fulfill. Your MBA opening doors from you should mean that in the next 10 years of your work, you are expected to walk farther into the door than if you have not gotten one. That would be the true measure of your degree. In short, the value is not how high or far it places you initially, but how far it enables you to move forward.