A Brave New MBA

Venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and other innovation-minded folks are always knocking the MBA. Some (ala Guy Kawasaki) say that an MBA is actually a mark against you. I disagree.

These naysayers seem to have forgotten that science and technology aren't the only products of innovation--education has changed too. Their illusion about MBAs is that we are a bunch of type-A, PowerPoint savvy, conformists, who all want jobs at McKinsey or Goldman, but would consider a startup only if no other offers come to pass. They hold fast to the archaic idea that all we do is sit around reading Harvard cases and "solving" business problems with Porter's Five Forces (well maybe that's what they do at Harvard).

Those notions just aren't true anymore. They may have been at one time and they may still be for some MBAs, but not as a matter of course. My MBA hasn't just been about learning how to innovate--even better, it's been about actually doing it. I've had the opportunity to manage a small venture capital fund, and in so doing I've assessed hundreds of business ideas, plans, and models. I've been able to share my writing again, through this blog, the Cornell Business Journal, and VentureViews (BRV's newsletter). I'm now working on my second business plan (the first one didn't pan out but the learnings were invaluable). I've studied the psychology of consumer behavior, which I will take to the next level this semester with a graduate psych course on automatic decision making. I've examined disruptive technologies under Don Greenberg. I've spent my summer at Novell working on a multi-million dollar strategic alliance. I could go on.

The point isn't that we don't read cases or learn the MBA staples (finance, accounting, economics, strategy...). We do that. But we do so much more, and I for one feel armed to innovate in ways that I couldn't have dreamed up before stepping within the walls of Sage Hall.

Hellos and Goodbyes

It's a fresh start, the beginning of a new semester, and yet in some ways I feel like I'm already saying goodbye. We're transitioning club leadership to the first years, picking what for most of us will be the last classes in our academic lives, and looking beyond business school to our future careers. I'm choosing my last semester's classes in an attempt to make sure I'm fully armed with the knowledge I need, while also satisfying my purest intellectual curiosity in a way that only academia can do.

While finalizing my class schedule online, I imagined the details of a course that I might design and teach at the Johnson School in some parallel universe where I was the professor and not the student. The course would be titled "The Business Novel" and it would survey works of fiction that reveal truths about corporations, markets, the economy, ethics, and generally all the human issues that affect business from Wall Street to Main Street. It seems to me that fiction has the ability to teach us those moral lessons that financial statements, press releases and even history cannot. Authors--good ones--somehow channel the sublime through their characters, and by studying them, we can find inspiration, a sense of fairness, even wisdom.

So what would be on the reading list? Atlas Shrugged would no doubt be the central work (I just read it for the first time over break and I was moved in a way that no excel spreadsheet could ever conjure). There'd be current works too. The Economist just profiled a new book called The Privileges, which is apparently the "morally ambiguous" tale of a fabulously wealthy private equity mogul. I haven't read it, but the subject matter certainly seems pertinent for MBAs who are about to be unleashed on the world to make bundles of money.

Parallel universes aside, I'm glad to be back and looking forward to my final semester at this very special place!