IIT 2007 To MBA or not to MBA

This was one of the most interesting breakout sessions I attended. Although I'm not going through this dilemma myself, it gives me some amount of pleasure to sit back and watch others go through it, and make useless observations :-)

The four panelists for this session had impressive backgrounds with nearly a century worth of management experience under their belt. One of the panelists did not have an MBA (Soni Jiandani) while all others had (HBS, UTA, U of Iowa). All the panelists were highly successful people, e.g,. the non-MBA panelist once headed a $4B market in Cisco. I won't describe all the various points that were discussed, but will point out few salient topics which I found somewhat new or interesting.

• Overall, all panelists agreed that the answer to this million dollar question is actually a very short one: "depends". An opinion shared by most was that if you want to stay in a technology management role, then an MBA may not be useful/very-useful, but if you want to switch to a different industry, like media, finance, etc., then it is very useful.
• Another well known point that came up was how MBA is useful mainly for the networking aspect. The contacts you make in all the top business schools can serve you very well during the course of your career. However, one panelist did mention how some graduates fail to leverage this potential, so one needs to consider that possibility when making a decision.
• One panelist pointed out that Jeff Immelt once said that the professional network you build in your engineering job in 5-10 years time can be made in B school in three months time.
• Talking about networking, the panelists had widely different opinions about whether they learnt anything in B school apart from the professional network they made. The general consensus eventually though was that most of the knowledge you acquire in B school can be gotten through specific, short terms courses (e.g., executive MBAs) outside of B school.
• The non-MBA panelist on the panel made another interesting point: most business situations are unique, and school learning in general doesn't help for solving real world business problems. In other words, her emphasis was on experience.
• The last question was the killer question. Each of the panelists had to mention one mistake that they made when they were trying to decide whether to do an MBA or not do an MBA. The two serious answers were:
• The non-MBA panelist described how she underestimated the importance of short-specific courses to fill her knowledge gap during the course of her career - the knowledge that people usually get during their MBAs. She wished she could go back in her career and correct that. Still she was 100% positive that she didn't need to do an MBA.
• One panelist mentioned how he went for an MBA without getting any job experience first, due to which he made some terrible mistakes in his MBA, e.g., underestimating the importance of network building. He also mentioned that lot of the coursework didn't make any practical sense to him until he graduated and experienced the industry.