MBA vs. MRW (Master of the Real World)

Bruce Eckel writes an interesting piece about MBAs, and this is my reply:

George W. Bush had an MBA. Perhaps that's all that needs to be said.

I'll preface this with the disclaimer that I'm sure there are brilliant people out there who have MBAs and have found their education to be invaluable. I just have never personally worked with one.

Re: FexEd, I love this FedEx commercial because it echos my experiences--if somebody has an MBA they haven't been taught to figure it out, they've been taught to spend $120,000 to learn how to do something. Watch this hilarious Fed Ex commercial.

In my experience at two corporations, MBA's are not taught creative thinking. They all seem to be taught to draw a square with four quadrants, in which anything can be mapped. This looks very official and tends to mean absolutely nothing and generate no insights other than, "That looks very official, don't it?"(Every single MBA I've ever worked with, no matter where they went to school, has drawn this same grid, every single one, and in no case has it ever been useful).

Every new MBA who would appear, highly touted ("She has an MBA from Stanford... Harvard... Wharton...) would either 1) have no real world experience at all and even their theoretical knowledge was dated or just useless, or 2) come in as a VP from somewhere else, where they also somehow managed to get by endlessly drawing their chart without ever having to reach real connections or results--all they did was play management games.

In one example, an MBA/Former VP at Oracle came into a company that sold software to mostly individual and small business clients. Coming from Oracle, she had no experience with this market at all.

She proceeded to spend over $80,000 on a "magalog" marketing project, a small mailer that was ostensibly a magazine but was really a catalog, hence the ungainly name.

All the content was supplied by the online magazine I created and edited, so the content portion of the budget was nothing. Where the $80K went is a mystery (though I'm sure the postage cost a lot).

In the end, her $80K project brought in 14 orders, which means it cost $5,700 per sale for each $400 box of software, which, even an MBA should be able to figure out meant a less of $5,300 per unit. If you're an MBA I'll wait for you to draw that into the square chart. Got it? Bad, huh?

Clearly flush with success, she left soon after, for a better job at a bigger company, her MBA as shiny and Stanfordy as ever.

For me, educational "credentials" are meaningless. They only say somebody made it through a school, was able to pay for it somehow and pass the tests. It doesn't really mean they've learned or are good at what they do.

Yes, it looks impressive to go into a doctor's office and see their diploma from Harvard Medical school. But it's their real-world experience that I care about. How many patients have they seen? How many have they diagnosed (correctly?).
Going to school does not make you a master of anything. Doing whatever it is, repeatedly and correctly in the real world does.