Business Education

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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Is it Possible That MBAs, Like Wine, Need Aging?

September 10, 2010

It occurs to me that I’ve had many good experiences, with hires and colleagues and business contacts, with people who had MBA degrees and years of experience. And I’ve had generally bad experiences with young MBAs fresh out of business school. You could guess the reasons. Arrogance and entitlement come to mind. Maybe it’s a [...]

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Is Getting an MBA Wasting Time and Money?

September 7, 2010

What if the “is getting an MBA worth it” question isn’t really a matter of money? What if it depends on who you are, where you are, what resources you have, and what you want? Penelope Trunk posted Why an MBA Is a Waste of Time and Money recently on BNET. She lists seven reasons, [...]

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Entrepreneurship vs. Education Is A Trap

June 22, 2010

Today I’m shocked to find myself not agreeing with a TED talk titled Let’s Raise Kids to Be Entrepreneurs. With a title like that, what’s to disagree with? I’m embedding the talk here too, because I’ve done that on several others, and I’m not going to stop when I disagree. Still, it’s a damn movement [...]

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