Why Get an MBA?

The following excerpt is from a special series I’m running on “Ahead of The Curve,” which documents tales and experiences from a two-year journey at the Harvard Business School. Learn more here.

Personally, I don’t know why anyone would get an MBA unless they valued (i) meeting cool people, (ii) was a requirement for their job, (iii) learning about business (notice–it’s not learning how to excel in business). More on that here.

Some careers, it makes sense for an MBA; yet with entrepreneurship, it’s do or die.

Below, Mr. Broughton discusses changes he’d make after attending the top business school, Harvard Business School:

If I were dean for a day, however, there are changes that I would make to Harvard Business School. The first would be to bar professors without business experience from teaching entrepreneurship. Critics have accused the MBA of teaching academic rather than practical business skills. Or, as one of my classmates put it, we were being taugh to be expert diners rather than chefs, always ready with criticism, useless with a chopping knife. But in my experience, the case method, the frequent visits from businesspeople, and the opportunities in the second year to write papers on businesses and industreis provided a good balance between the academic and practical. If I had had to endure any more Crimson Greeting games, I might not have lasted at the school. It was fine to be taught finance, strategy, accounting, and process by academics. I could not imagine a better guide to supply chaing management, for example, than Zeynep Ton, and she had risen straight through academia. On balance, though, I preferred the professors with experience beyond academia–Oberholzer-Gee, Reidl, Porter, Lassiter–and entrepreneurship was the one subject that could not survive being taught by a walking textbook. It required professors with credibility to describe the visceral aspects of business survival.