Big bucks for an MBA? – Think again
Over the last decade, this has been a question that has haunted many and will continue to do so till the baton is passed on to something bigger and better, rather something more convincing. A Masters degree in Business Administration in its various forms i.e. MBA, PGDBA, DBA, DBM, MMS supposedly lands you more money, better pay and a settled life.
Lets try to get to the bottom of this. Entrepreneurship is on the rise and small and medium size businesses are flourishing often with a young top management that lacks certain traits that come with sheer years of experience and having been in diversified problem solving scenarios. On the flip side, large businesses are becoming segregated by region and the recent ‘Business Unit’ trend. All of the above need one thing in common, a skipper at the helm who can orient the team and generate what’s most important (green numbers and upward arrows) for the business.
But who’s to say an MBA has the required skills? A recent success story book ‘Connect the dots’ speaks of various businessmen without a traditional MBA who’ve made it big. One fails to understand how business can be taught over correspondence. Learning business is best done with simulation; namely group discussions and mock-up markets, not reading out of a book at a desk. Its best done while making mistakes under controlled situations, for example, an ad strategy having gone bad because one upset a certain community or substandard raw material from a substandard vendor and referring back to the mistakes while at the job.
What we gather from this is that Business and Business Management is an acumen, it’s both, an art and a science. Business Management is dynamic and there’s no ONE set of rules to figure it out. If there were, why would it be hard to crack the code? It can be improved by applying certain proven techniques and thinking out of the box, but one finds it hard to believe that a Master in Business Administration can truly be a Master by just a mere certification.
