Radio 4’s In Business presenter Peter Day: What you get from Harvard Business School,” he says, “is a wonderful network of people who were there with you and a set of tools that you can then use and bamboozle people with for the rest of your life. It is a habit of thought – conventional responses to conventional situations. Harvard teaches very much on a case-study basis, so it is always telling people how to respond to things that happened in the past”.
In my opinion: An MBA course could equip you with solid business knowledge (accounting, finance, organization behaviour, operations, research and such) to speed up achieving your career goals. See the earlier post that describes an MBA. The title is an extra qualification that can help you stand out or at least not be perceived less than your competition. On top of this you can meet interesting people and build a valuable network. Of course you don’t need an MBA to be a CEO and you can you can learn up the management knowledge through your working experience and have superior knowledge and skills compared to ‘MBA managers’. The cynical question is, will they recognize that where it matters?
So perception is important in this. And it is not always positive (certainly not these days were MBA graduates are being accused for causing the crisis). The journalist Philip Delves Broughton, who completed his Harvard MBA in 2006, has described his peers as: “swollen class of jargon-spewing, value- destroying financiers and consultants”.
However, the reasons for doing an MBA are:
1) Keeping up with the competition on the job market
2) Good ROI (Return on Investment)
3) Growing your network
4) Becoming an all-round manager
5) Acquiring skills that are mandatory for certain positions
6) Because it is mandatory for certain positions in certain organisations
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