The Personal MBA^TM

Here’s a smattering of recent articles about the true worth of traditional MBA programs:

Just Skip It

Penelope Trunk of the Brazen Careerist shares five signs that the MBA is becoming devalued: “The best thing you get out of business school is a good job afterward. But how do you know you wouldn’t be able to get that job without business school? … The bottom line is that very few careers today really require an MBA. If you’re getting one for a career that doesn’t require it, you might look more like a procrastinator than a go-getter.”

Wall Street and Opportunity Costs

Spending two years in b-school used to be cost-of-entry to get a job in the lucrative financial services market… it isn’t anymore. Gabriel Hammond raised $5 million to start his own hedge fund instead of going back to school to get an MBA: “Like other young people on the fast track, Mr. Hammond has run the numbers and figures that an M.B.A. is a waste of money and time — time that could be spent making money. ‘There’s no way that I would consider it.’”

Heidegger, not Homework

Matthew Stewart has a doctoral degree in philosophy, but spent seven years working as a management consultant and shares his experiences in The Atlantic: “The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter… the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like ‘out-of-the-box thinking,’ ‘win-win situation,’ and ‘core competencies’… It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?”

Phrase of the Day: “Jumping the Shark”.

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I’ve recently returned from a week-long business trip to Geneva… it was a great trip, but it’s good to be home!

This post by David Seah, paper productivity designer-extraordinaire, is about the value of using a journal to take hand-written notes about things you’re currently studying. Writing your notes out by hand forces you to distill your thinking before you put pen to paper, and the act of writing is a form of reinforcement that can help cement the material in your head, where it really matters:

There’s so much material out there now that the task of learning is equated with finding resources: the right teacher, book, or online tutorial is perceived as the “magic bullet” that will get things done. However, what I have forgotten is that the process of distilling these ideas into a form that I can invoke at will is necessary as well. It’s my missing link…

I went out and bought [a notebook] and pasted a paper label on the front of it. The idea is to start recording the same kind of notes that I used to do in the 7th through 12th grade; looking back, it was a highly productive period of time for me, though I didn’t recognize it then. I’m thinking of just writing down really basic things that are currently mystifying, by hand, for reference in this book.

I know there are plenty of reference books and online sources that purport to do this already, but do you think any aspiring wizard would buy their spellbook off-the-shelf? NO WAY! They would be told by their cantankerous mentors to go find a sturdy book and pen, and transcribe their spells themselves by hand. Because that’s the way you learn, and that’s the way you bind the magic to yourself.

I highly recommend this method to anyone who is currently in the process of working their way through the PMBA. It’s a simple process that works wonders.

I also recommend checking out David’s “Printable CEO” paper productivity forms. I use the Emergent Task Planner and Project Projector on a daily basis, and I find them extraordinarily useful for planning my daily and weekly tasks. Enjoy!

Check out this fantastic, in-depth interview with John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods. The interview is ostensibly about Mackey’s shift in political beliefs that resulted from growing his business from a small natural food market to a large corporation with a market capitalization of $5.45 billion, but there’s a lot of core business knowledge to be gained from the interview as well. (You know the interview is good when the CEO comments, “You’re asking me the most difficult and complex questions that I have ever been asked in any interview before.”)

Here is John’s perspective on the value of reading, particularly reading books whose premise you don’t currently understand or agree with:

I’m committed to understanding, realizing, and experiencing truth. It is essential that we read books that disagree with our own personal viewpoints — that challenge us, stretch us, upset us, and break us out of our comfortable world views, whatever they may be. I’m far less interested in being right or belonging to some school of thought than I am in personally learning and growing. Most people are afraid to open themselves to new ideas and new viewpoints because they are afraid it will require them to change. And they’re right — it will cause them to change. However, I enjoy this kind of change because I see it as personal growth.

During the course of the interview, Mackey brings up a fundamental issue that’s been a topic of spirited conversation among businesspeople all over the world: is the primary purpose of a business maximizing profits for shareholders (i.e. the Milton Friedman view), or is it appropriate for a for-profit business to prioritize other purposes over immediate shareholder returns? Mackey’s view is well-articulated and thought-provoking:

[Read more]