Saying "IT professional" I mean somebody, who is looking forward building career or business in IT. IT tech entrepreneur, business owner, CIO/CTO, etc.
Guy Kawasaki (an entrepreneur, author and the CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture-capital investment bank for tech firms) thinks the following:
I don't think an M.B.A. matters very much for starting a company. A much better educational background is an engineering degree. You can always hire MBA's, but if you don't have the ability to conceptualize and deliver a product, you've got nothing.
However, he does have an MBA himself. Even if he mentions that the value of an MBA for company starters is a negative $250,000.
Brad Feld (managing director at Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital) has his own thoughts.
If you want a two year break from life, go to business school. If you want to meet a bunch of new, generally smart, and always interesting people, go to business school. If you are a techie but like the business side of things, want to get an intellectual (and functional grounding) in business stuff, want a two year break from life, and want to meet interesting people, go to business school.
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If you are an investment banker or a management consultant, it’ll help. If you are looking to be a VC, it might help, but it probably won’t, as the population of people being recruited into the VC business continues to be very small.
Sounds like he agrees that MBA doesn't really help for entrepreneur who is going to do business -> VCs way, but still he insists that MBA does help for the personal growth at least.
But let's think for a second. If you are interested in being entrepreneur only, and you do not want to run the business yourself -- MBA really could be an option not to pursue, but to hire somebody with MBA. But isn't the best part of the whole entrepreneurship is running your own business? Of course, many people see startups as something to start it, get funding, cash out and repeat once and once again. Frankly speaking, I never thought this way about them - this is how "bubble" can happen, but not how business works. I prefer my business not to get any funds at all, but better to be profitable on it's own.
Nevertheless, MBA could probably be overrated.
Only 146 of the 500 executives reported having MBAs, a surprising number considering the hundreds of thousands of B-school alumni with enough experience to qualify them for top jobs. What's more, only 71 received MBAs from the top 10 B-schools, and two-thirds of those executives have degrees from just three institutions: Harvard Business School, Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
MBA still is pretty much a tool which helps you in your career. But entrepreneurs usually do not search a job, they prefer to create their own business. So, isn't this the case when top school MBA can give you nice knowledge and a huge debt also? Sure it will. We can also try to consider MBA as something what we buy to sell with profit. We can sell it to potential employer, we can sell it to get more social status, better salary.. If we are going to start our own business, then we will be buyers. In this case, do you think it's smart to get overpriced B-school education instead of just the same education?
Becoming a CEO will ultimately be determined more by your ability to scale social ladders than what you've learned in graduate school.
And stop once again. Do we really then need a formal MBA education? May be so called "personal MBA" will work better? Still it's an educational investment, which is not that huge and much more affordable by many people.
According to the advocates of the Personal MBA, all you have to do to measure up to the pricey MBAs turned out by B-schools is to keep gaining work experience, read a series of books at your leisure, and talk about them with an online community.
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The Personal MBA, essentially an online list of reading material and accompanying message boards, is part book club and part online community, where participants tackle the reading list one book at a time, then exchange thoughts and insights on the Web site personalmba.com. There is no diploma, dean, faculty -- or cost, other than whatever you pay for the books or a library card. Though still in its infancy, the grassroots PMBA is gaining a following -- and might be yet another ding in the armor of traditional MBA programs.
Personally I never attended MBA school, but I spent some time on a Personal MBA site and actually time to time some of posts their picked my interest. On the other side, list of books on the Personal MBA site is very nice!
Looking back to the comparison between top ranked B-schools and online/part-time and Personal MBA - as for me the main difference stays alumni.
Despite the cost, B-school professors and administrators say there is no substitute for the intangibles -- most notably the alumni and peer network -- that come from a traditional MBA experience. Not to mention the access to corporate recruiters and career advisement offices.
As for Personal MBA - it also inspires big companies to implement the same model for the employee training programs, but also works very well for the personal education, no matter what MBA or whatever else you want to pursue. Truth to be told, I love self-education. All my professional experience growth comes from self education. It helps to force yourself to work on you, also.
Although he had a great technical background in computer systems administration, Simon Janes, a tech entrepreneur who has read between 15 and 20 of the PMBA books, didn't have the business know-how to direct company strategy. Janes says reading the books helped him see his business through a management lens, instead of the technical one that he was used to.