MBA is fine, but experience is a wonderful teacher

Last week's "Headhunter Challenge" asked whether having an MBA made you more valuable. Here are some of his thoughts. His full commentary is at www.nwjobs.com/headhunter.

When I was in graduate school at Stanford, I took some courses in the business school. Having already locked myself in a research lab in the psychology department, I craved exposure to the real world.

And I got it in the biz school. It's where I met my mentor and shifted my career toward business. (My psych adviser was right: He said the biz school would corrupt me and that I'd never be taken seriously as a psychologist. Whoop-de-doo.)

But I never got an MBA because my mentor convinced me it wasn't worth it. So, you may as well know right now that I'm not a big fan of the MBA degree, though I recognize that lots of people (including employers) benefit from it.

Opinions abound on this subject, and mine is just that. All I want to do here is make some observations. If you find these helpful, great. If not, bring on the tomatoes.

An MBA can teach you how to apply some powerful tools in business. By taking the right courses, you will learn about all the tools you could possibly be interested in.

An MBA program will convince you that those tools should be applied extensively in business. Ever hear the expression, "He succeeded because no one told him it couldn't be done"? Lots of people run successful businesses without MBAs. You can learn what you need as you go along.

Companies invest enormous amounts of money on newly minted MBAs because they trust the product that MBA schools produce.

My mentor at Stanford used to say, "By the time MBA programs have glommed onto an idea from the business world and start to teach it, it doesn't work as expected because the real world has changed."

It isn't the degree. It's the people. Companies prefer to avoid that really tricky challenge: selecting the best people. So, they let MBA schools do the selection for them. That's not good.

Some of the smartest people I've met have MBAs. I think they succeed because of who they are to begin with, not because they got an MBA. I know mediocre business people who have MBAs, too, and I don't blame the degree for their mediocrity.

Once a year, the MBA is heavily marketed by leading business magazines that rank MBA schools by how much money their new grads earn. Marketing is always "in."

The people you meet in an MBA program can form the core of your business relationships for life, and that can pay off handsomely.

If you want to learn the essentials of an MBA education, go for it. If you want to don "the MBA halo," forget it. The cash value of an MBA diminishes as your career progresses, because it's the skills and relationships you develop that determine your real value.

Almost everything you learn in the course of an MBA program can be learned through individual courses and workshops that you can take as you need them. You'll never earn an MBA degree this way, but you'll have what you need to do your job well.

OK, time to let in the successful MBAs. Let the tomatoes fly.

Nick Corcodilos is author of "Ask The Headhunter: Reinventing the Interview to Win the Job" and host of www.asktheheadhunter.com. He can be reached by e-mail at seattle@asktheheadhunter.com or at North Bridge Group, P.O. Box 600, Lebanon, NJ 08833. Sorry, no personal replies.