Business Education

Hooray for this ‘A Lot of Life Left’ MBA

April 11, 2012

I got this question today on my ask-me page on my timberry.com website: I am currently in an MBA program at a local college. I have recently completed my third course. I have about five years management experience. I am 58 years-old. My wife is going back to college this summer for the graphic design [...]

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Helping You Teach Entrepreneurship

July 26, 2011

That was embarrassing … I was showing some people how easy it would be to modify the order of our online course curriculum, doing some quick links in WordPress, and I accidentally posted it. Sorry. I could have just deleted that post, but it’s instantly in the RSS feed for this blog, which compounds the [...]

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Meaningless Research Award: Americans vs. Entrepreneurship

May 16, 2011

Over the weekend I got an email from a polling company with the startling headline “College Students Aren’t Getting Entrepreneurial Skills.” I’m not going to cite the source here, though, because I want to poke some fun at the poll and its conclusions, and I don’t want to make it personal. But here’s an opening [...]

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MBAs Reinventing Management Is Like Locusts Reinventing Corn

May 5, 2011

I clicked over to MBAs Aim to Reinvent Management at BusinessWeek.com when I saw the headline. I expected to read about trends towards revising the standard MBA curriculum to deal better with community, environmental, and social concerns. Instead, it was MBA’s revising management: As part of a contest, MBA students were asked to suggest game-changing [...]

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The Nature-Nurture Debate on Entrepreneurship

March 21, 2011

Is entrepreneurship something people are born with, or do they learn it? Good question, I suppose, but not one I expect anybody will ever be able to really answer. Emily Malby does a good balanced job of reporting about it in Entrepreneurship: A Look at the Nature-Nurture Debate on the Online Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com). [...]

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Is Networking Friendship, or Just MBA Speak?

March 11, 2011

What do you think about this? The networking connections are one of the most valuable benefits of an MBA. Five to ten years down the road these people will either be running their own businesses or have high-level positions in large companies. That’s a comment to my post here and on Small Business Trends. I [...]

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What’s An Entrepreneur’s MBA Degree Really Worth?

March 9, 2011

[Note: I posted this first on Small Business Trends … I’m posting it here too because this is my main blog. Tim] I’m an entrepreneur. The last time I was an employee was in 1983. So what did I get from my MBA studies? It wasn’t about earning power. I quit the  fancy high-paying MBA [...]

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Beware of One-Size-Fits-All Business Advice

December 8, 2010

Last Tuesday I had the privilege of taking 10 half-hour appointments with student entrepreneurs developing business plans. The idea was listening, talking, suggesting, and maybe helping with a thought or two. What a kick that is. No wonder I love what I do for a living. I started each of these sessions with a warning [...]

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The Best Argument for Business Education…

September 24, 2010

… is having a better idea of what’s going on. It isn’t about making more money. It isn’t about becoming entrepreneurial. No. It’s about having a reasonable idea of the whole business, rather than just the specific function. If business education works — and I think we have to admit it doesn’t always — then [...]

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On Teaching Business With Business Plans

September 23, 2010

Remember that old saying about teaching people to fish, instead of giving them a fish? That applies to business planning as well: don’t give a person a business plan, help them do their own instead. I’m in San Antonio Texas today attending the annual conference of the Association of Small Business Development Centers (ASBDC), where [...]

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