Maybe Business School Is Not Crucial (Part I)
by irina on May 26, 2009
in Uncategorized
I have been thinking a lot about business school lately. Working in a consulting firm, I am surrounded by people who choose to go to business school. The choice is almost unanimous and seldom disputed. That is what you do when you work in consulting. You get a prestigious job after college, spend 2-4 years working, do well by your managers, take on some in-firm leadership opportunities, spend your free time volunteering at a non-profit and gear up for business school applications. Then you paint a holistic picture of your accomplishments, send in a few (hopefully) strong recommendation letters and sail off into the sunset in your top 10 business school sweatshirt.
It is almost undisputed. It is just what you do.
And business school always loomed on the horizon. Until I recently started to actually think about it. The impetus was going to XX Factor conference at Stanford GSB a few weekends ago. A well-orchestrated marketing event, it nevertheless provided gourmet food for thought. As you think about your applications, the hosts recommended, think of what you want in life, which skill sets you enjoy using and what kind of career path you want to pave for yourself. Think about what you want to do.
And then I had to think about it. Without holding myself back. What do I want to do? I want to make enough money so that I do not have to worry about it (and not have any reservations about buying a $3,000 plane ticket to go see my grandparents in Ukraine). I want to find a job I enjoy doing so much that I cannot wait to get back into the office. I want to not be in $150,000 or more debt even before I buy my house and (probably) get married. I want to move to Moscow and work there for a year and prove to the world that I can make it there.
Why do people go to business school? At the conference, satisfactory answers from my fellow attendees were scarce. I asked an ex i-banker turned private equity banker:
“Why do you want to go to business school?”
“Well, I want to start my own business and I do not think I have the skills to do that.”
“Well, why go to business school? Why not just talk to entrepreneurs who have started their own businesses?”
“Well…um…”
Her eyes got shifty. So I let her move on to people with whom she could talk about how much she liked the presentation and how the students on the student panel seemed to really have a great time at the GSB.
The final straw came when I met Brandusa. Both Eastern Europeans, we found a common language within five minutes. Brandusa stated explicitly the thoughts I was afraid to think. Maybe business school is not the right answer. Maybe, as Fran Maier mentioned, “momentum” is just as important. The momentum to do what you are doing well and make enough money in that way.
So I got home from the conference jaded, but relieved. Suddenly, I had two years “back”, two years free and business school looming on the horizon just a little bit less. I tweeted my thoughts out into the Twittersphere and received a wealth of responses. To be continued.
I can only speak for myself when I say this: the very last semester of my college career I dropped out of CSULB for an opportunity to start my own restaurant business. Although I miss the carefree, controlled life that college gave me, and I wish I had only stuck it in there for a little longer…I don’t regret a thing. I learned so much more in the school of hard knocks than I did my entire college duration. I probably have $1 million in intellectual capital (waiting for it to materialize, lol!). When I approached the companies that I am Director of Franchise Development for now (consulting for franchise expansion in the US and globally), I was pitted against a guy who was an undergrad and business school graduate, interviewing for the same consulting position. I talked with him in the hall, and found out he only knew how to run a $10 million company from an instruction booklet aka textbook. Please. I came into the interview, knocked it out of the park, and though I think my personality has some say in it, the company CEO later told me that experience overrides intllect. “They have it partially wrong: ‘Knowledge is NOT power’ it is only ‘potential power’ “APPLIED knowledge is power’”
Take that, i-banker that couldn’t answer your question, lol! I have no plans to go to biz school, but I do have plans to go back an finish that last semester. I want to be known as someone who finishes what they started. But your experience clearly shows the brainwashing of “the right thing to do” and that so many peoples’ lives are driven by default and not by design. Fight the machine, Irina!
by the way: nice site revamp! keep giving me a hard time about not starting my blog, k? =)
Thank you for your comment, Paul Tran 92! Ok, I guess it is Paul Tran now :-). I think it is great to realize that it is all about experience, as long as you have some way to get your foot in the door and you are smart enough to take advantage of a good job. And by smart, I mean you learn as much as you can, you do a good job, you use all resource available to you and find resources that are lacking. The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that I want to go to business school (I hope Harvard and Stanford do not read this when I apply in four years :-)). I guess I will just have to see.
But I think it is important to have this discussion more than we have it. People are either convinced that they need to go for their careers or they do not even think about it. There should be a discussion so that people make informed decisions.
I’m interested to see what you do. I was accepted into the grad school I wanted and then declined at the last minute because I got a job I loved. And just grew from there. I haven’t ever looked back.
Amber,
Thank you for your comment! It is great to hear from someone who did not choose the grad school route. How is your job working out?
Also, your baby looks absolutely adorable in your profile picture!
You have to share this post with my roommmate, who you met, Melanie. She served as the two-year president of the National Association of Women’t Business Owners in New York. She and others in her organization are successful business owners who never attended B-school.
I have no idea why people go to business school. Most successful entrepreneurs I have met (and I’ve met a lot) have no inclination of ever having wanted to go to business school, yet almost anyone I’ve talked to who is in business school actually believes they are there to learn how to become a successful business owner. I guess you learn things in business school like how to write a business plan, how to properly market your product, how to research your product, etc. Those are all things that most business owners I know actually do on a daily basis though it’s something that is not learned in a classroom. Knowing how to run a business successful depends not just on book smarts but on intuition and general business acumen, which is not something that you necessarily learn in a classroom setting. If you talk to any business owner and ask them how they started, they will most likely tell you a story that involves how they had this idea/vision/dream/brainstorm, and took it literally and pretty much everyone they knew thought they were crazy yet they followed their dream and did it anyway… any were successful. They didn’t have a business plan, they didn’t have a marketing plan, they didn’t have a financial goal, they didn’t even know if their idea would work. What they did have was a belief in their product, a belief that they would succeed and a notion that failure was not an option, though if that did happen then they would just figure out what they needed to do to succeed and try again.
The moral of the story is that the key to successful entrepreneurship is that you don’t necessarily need to know all the mumbojumbo of what you are SUPPOSED to do, you just do what you THINK is right, follow your instinct and hope for the best… AND surround yourself with people MUCH smarter than you are (maybe those people that have gone to business school!).