Hacker News Reader

Comment by tommynicholas | Hacker News Reader

No MBA was EVER designed for the R&D part of building a company. I'm constantly surprised at the myth that an MBA has anything to do with teaching you to start or even run a company. MBA's are designed to train middle managers because the modern "firm" realized great middle managers were really valuable (aka they'd pay them a lot) but hard and risky to train. That's where the MBA program comes from.

MBA's are ANTITHETICAL to entrepreneurship. That doesn't mean an MBA doesn't have value towards starting a company, just like a degree in economics or history aren't irrelevant to starting a company. But it's not what it's for, in fact, it's for the opposite thing.

View on HN

This is a gross generalisation (by which I mean, I think you are wrong). My MBA set me up perfectly to quit my job and launch a startup. Maybe yours was designed to turn out middle managers. Mine wasn't. I had ten elective subjects and they were all towards starting and growing a service business. And the core subjects have proved an invaluable primer in many matters of strategy and day-to-day operations, ones in which I would otherwise be winging it.

Launching a startup does not equal R&D. They have things in common but they aren't the same. And the only convenient thing, I believe, a full time MBA provides is a starting point to build your network.

On average MBA's are less likely to start a business than someone from the general population, you are the exception.

Than an average engineer? Maybe. An average someone from general population? Citation needed.

From FT: Overall, 19 per cent of MBA graduates from the class of 2012 started their own company.

This is the average over all schools in their global ranking, and the US has most positions in the top 25 [1].

Meanwhile, only ~300 persons for every 100k start companies per month in the US [2]. Even assuming none start more than one per four years (which is doubtful), that's only 14.4% of the overall population over four years.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/cbd9b418-314c-11e6-bda0-04585c31b...

[2] http://www.kauffman.org/~/media/kauffman_org/research%20repo...

This is irrelevant to my point, just to be clear. Whether they're effective at creating founders is debatable, whether they're designed to create founders is not.

You made a false and sweeping statement, and now you're doubling down on it with ever more preposterous absolutes. Your understanding is evidently limited to a grossly distorted and narrow perspective on the MBA curriculum.

In reality, business schools around the world turn out people who are qualified to start and run a company, and this includes R&D processes. Some people may choose electives that lead to middle-management, but others can and do choose electives in starting up, product development, service process design, negotiations etc etc.

I think you're continuing to misunderstand my statement. You're suggesting some MBA programs are good at producing founders. I have no idea if that's true and no opinion. The MBA and all traditional MBA programs were started to produce managers at large companies, there are no exceptions and it is well documented and easily researched.

You said, and I quote: "No MBA was EVER designed for the R&D part of building a company".

This is garbage. Unmitigated, sweeping, unknowing drivel. I understand your claim perfectly well, and you are flat wrong, and apparently from a position of zero awareness. I can correct you authoritatively because a) I have actually completed an MBA, and b) it was one that included comparative studies of R&D processes in the case work and a team-based competitive simulation of managing R&D processes. Along with a toolkit of knowledge that made company formation and launch much easier. This has, as I say, all been super useful in actually building my business.

Moving the goalposts to some nineteenth-century context and claiming it's the same thing is, as I said, simply doubling down on the wrong. Also irrelevant.

Your MBA program (or some other MBA program you know of) was designed to specifically to give people the skills to found companies? I doubt strongly that it was.

The only exception to this I know is Babson, but I'm not certain whether they qualify their entrepreneurship degree as an MBA or not. I think they don't, but if they do I may have missed the mark by 1. Otherwise what I said is correct.

See, there you go again. Changing your statement once more - this time to something that is so specific and twisted from reality to be meaningless, and pretending it is the same thing.

I think I'm done here; having presented real-world counterexamples, your claim, which was a gross and simplistic misrepresentation, is dead.

You think I'm moving the ball because you're convinced I'm arguing something I'm not arguing. You're convinced I'm arguing about the value of an MBA rather than why they exist and what they're designed to do. It's possible other people upvoting my original post also misunderstood my point.

You think I'm moving the ball to something meaningless because you want to debate the value of an MBA and I don't.

Just out of curiosity, where did you receive your MBA & what electives did you take that you found the most value from in regards to starting and growing your service business?

Melbourne Business School, class of 2015 (part-time).

The electives that have been most useful to this startup: "Entrepreneurship & New Value Creation", "Managing Service Businesses", "Negotiations", "Mergers & Acquisitions", "Business Law".

Amongst other outcomes, these units a) quite radically changed my perspective on matters pertaining to value creation & capture - which was especially surprising for someone with two decades meandering experience across many different product & service development gigs - and b) gave me the analytical tools & confidence I needed to put my ideas into practice.

It's not a generalisation it's a fact. The fact that it set you up well to launch a startup is a fortunate coincidence, period. MBAs not being designed to help people start companies is a matter of historical record it's not up for debate to be honest.

It's said of the Harvard Business School that it trains people for two jobs: President and Chairman of the Board.

..which demonstrated that it's primarily about the network, and not about what you're learning

If that's all true then why did Harvard open a school to train middle managers?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com