At least that’s the impression you might get if you believe everything you read. I spend quite a bit of time reading academic and business forums and inevitably I see the same misconceptions everywhere I go. As an MBA graduate (and a DBA student) I take offense to many of the comments I read, some of which come from other MBAs! Unfortunately, there’s a problem with expectation management… So, I present my case to the jury…
Myth 1: The MBA will prepare you to immediately run a Fortune 500 company
FALSE! The MBA is an academic program designed to teach the fundamentals of business, not how to be a star performer. Throughout my education I met students who put in the extra effort to be the best alongside those who were there to put a credential on their resume. You can find this from EVERY SCHOOL; I don’t care what “tier” the school is in!
Myth 2: The MBA doesn’t teach the real world
TRUE & FALSE! An MBA teaches the principals BEHIND the real world. Understanding the concepts behind HOW the real world works, we can better understand the WHY. That said, I also learned quite a bit from my higher-level classes that serves me today (I live in the real world, by the way). Is this universal? Certainly not! There are still those who don’t care enough about their own education to learn. There are other industry certifications that teach the real world…many many others…
Myth 3: An MBA doesn’t teach ethics which is why we’re all in financial trouble
FALSE! Nearly every class I took throughout my MBA (as well as my Business minor in undergrad) had an ethics competency. But there again, if you don’t care about the material enough to synthesize it into something useful for yourself, you’ll never “get it.” Nothing I learned in my MBA taught me to scam my customers or bet against my own portfolio!
Myth 4: An MBA will take me to the top!
FALSE: YOU will take you to the top. An MBA is a great start, but it’s not everything. You DO need real-world experience, but that’s in addition to a solid academic understanding of the core concepts.
Myth 5: MBAs are Awful!
FALSE! The MBA is a Masters in Business Administration. Much like a Masters in ANY other area of study, there are those who succeed and those who do not. It won’t hold your hand through life or guide your morals. It won’t determine of you are ultimately successful or not. It won’t build a successful company or break an economy. That’s not what a Masters degree does…that’s what YOU do.
Myth 6: I don’t need an MBA to start a business!
TRUE! You don’t! You don’t need to be a CPA to do your taxes, you don’t need to be a certified mechanic to fix your car…the list goes on… But, if you want to gain a solid understanding behind WHY your marketing works, or WHY you’re successful so you can repeat that success, you need some sort of baseline knowledge that you can either get from rigorous studying at the public library (Good Will Hunting, anyone?) OR formal education through an MBA. Intuition only get’s you SO far, though there are exceptions to every rule (please don’t show me the list of non-MBA CEOs)!
It’s troubling to see discussion from those who graduated from business schools across the world preaching their lack of knowledge after business school. Many have said they don’t use even their MBA, as though it’s a tool to pull out when you need it. There was a lot of talk about how to “Fix” business schools to prevent economic collapses like we’re in now…but very little talk about how to fix the students and manage the expectations of a very valuable learning experience!