8 Ways to Escape the MBA Debate

Skip the Confusion and Discover What No B-School Prospectus Will Ever Tell You
An MBA can make or break your career the cost-benefit analysis can feel like an endless loop. From speaking to graduates of the worlds top schools as well as those who have deliberately decided to avoid an MBA, this analysis presents eight steps for finding clarity in the confusion. In a labour market where the most successful people tend to design and create their own unique career paths, it presents a framework for making a choice that works for you long-term.

Easily the most helpful thing I've read while contemplating enrolling in an MBA. Condenses piles of insight from those who have tackled this question before, and have come out the other side, for better or worse. Offers framework to navigate to a personal and wholly conscience decision. Invaluable read for anyone wanting to make the best possible choice for their careers. - Aaron, 29, Engineer (London) The book takes the reader right to the questions that truly lie behind the MBA debate, once it comes up in your life. It helps with a clear process to get out of the mental confusion that everybody faces once they have to deal with that difficult and life changing decision. It does not provide you a prefixed answer to your personal MBA debate, which only you can solve for yourself, but confronts you with sharp questions and invaluable insights from insiders that will help you create your own individual and satisfying answer. - Dirk Lehmann, 28, Project Manager (Germany) "An absolute masterpiece. This is an essential read for anyone who has a slight inkling they may do an MBA. A creative and insightful breakthrough that really supported me in making a decision on the MBA debate." - Hayden Leith, 26, Consultant (London)

About Escape Guides

Escape the City is a global community for people who want to do something different with their careers. We help talented and ambitious people escape or avoid corporate jobs. Come join us at www.escapethecity.org.
Life is short. Really short. Too many capable and passionate people spend far too long doing work that doesnt matter to them in big faceless corporations. What a tragedy. There are so many fights worth fighting, so many problems worth solving. We deserve more. The conventional corporate path is seductive. Money, the perception of security, structure, hierarchy, bureaucracy. We believe that comfort kills ambition. We believe that no one wants to wake up in a couple of decades having missed the chance to do something amazing. Youre not crazy if youve got that nagging feeling that there must be more to life than your current employment. You are definitely not alone. All around the world people are waking up to the fact that there is an alternative. Escape the City is the beating heart of that alternative. Escape the City has over 120,000 members and in 2012, we became the worlds first online platform to crowd-fund nearly a million US dollars to continue developing a platform that connects our members with the worlds most exciting job opportunities. Finding work you love typically begins with educating yourself on the options available. There is so much rubbish career and startup advice out there. So many unhelpful myths. Our guides are where we help you grapple with that huge, scary, unmanageable yet exciting question: What Next?" Our guides teach what we wish wed learnt back in 2009 when we were stuck in our own corporate jobs, sitting glumly on the Tube wondering how on earth to get out. We hope you enjoy them come join us online to get further involved with the Escape community. Esc love, Rob, Dom, and Mikey

About the Author

Adele Barlow joined Escape the City as Community Manager before becoming Education Director. Previously, she co-founded an award-winning social enterprise in education and technology. You can read more at www.adelebarlow.com

Table of Contents
Introduction 1. Meet Your Internal Negotiators 2. Define Your Decision Criteria 3. Find Your Heroes 4. Assess the Real Value of the MBA Option 5. Assess the Real Value of the Alternative Option 6. Start Where You Plan to End 7. Accept Your Prediction Limitations 8. Educate Yourself

Introduction
I hate feeling stupid. Its probably one of my least favourite feelings and because I hate numbers, I often feel it whenever Im around finance guys, like I was one Friday night at a birthday party thrown by a friend of mine. These two guys were joking about their bosses at Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan respectively. I noticed the name-dropping and the way that one of them gave an animated monologue to the rest of the party guests. What was he trying to prove? I wondered, as he launched into a long, overly theatrical analysis disseminating his bosss flaws. I had always assumed that MBA programs were filled with guys like this. They seemed one-dimensional and hollow, aspiring Masters of the Universe who knew how they wanted to be perceived, but not who they were. I thought that Id never need an MBA to prove to myself that I was just as intelligent as they were but I found myself questioning this assumption in my mid-twenties, as I began to notice that the friends who were making career strides were the ones who took the time to significantly invest in their own education. It was convenient and reassuring to keep telling myself that I didnt need an MBA; that I had chosen a career in startups and that in this land, an MBA wasnt required to succeed. I liked this narrative because it meant that I didnt have to sit the GMATs or go through the long-winded process of applying to business school. Yet the more aspiring Masters of the Universe I met, the more I started questioning whether or not I had enough education to compete with them without an MBA. Did I really have what it took to succeed without that piece of paper? I knew that I shouldnt do things just because of how they looked on my CV but I also suspected that an MBA would be more than just another line on my CV the degree would be an eighteen-month experience that could fundamentally shift the on-going trajectory of my entire career. Did I really want to spend two years of my life around people like those guys at the party though? Not particularly. But I wanted to feel like I could battle them in a boardroom and win. It wasnt out of spite or bitterness it was more like a competitive spirit in me that wanted the satisfaction of winning an intellectual jousting match. The voices inside my head encouraging me to consider an MBA got louder and louder, so late one Tuesday evening I found myself surfing the web, sifting through the available dates for sitting the GMAT. As I looked at my Google Calendar in one browser window and the GMAT dates in another, I forced myself to recognize that this wasnt just about booking a two-hour time slot.

No, this was going to mean hours of practicing sample GMAT tests. This was going to mean giving up a lot of other space in my diary. This was going to mean taking a solid, significant step towards doing an MBA, instead of just daydreaming about it. Did I really want to do this? And if so, why?

Why I Wrote This Book I knew I wasnt alone in asking myself these questions. Over the past few years, as the Community Manager and then Education Director at Escape the City, an online platform for people who want to do something different with their careers, I have watched hundreds of young professionals go through this complex decision process. Ive been carefully learning what makes a person want to apply to business school in the first place. You have arrived is a phrase that many of us spend our whole lives waiting to hear. The need to belong, to be seen as a success, to be engaged in work that rewards us, is primal. Its part of what makes us tick at a very deep level, driving so many of our choices and behaviours. Nobody will actually say that phrase to MBA students, but Im sure they feel it in the crispness of the suits they wear to their first recruitment function; the sound of the Deans voice as he welcomes them into the room of tomorrows leaders; the clink of the champagne flutes as they toast to the year ahead. This positive, rosy glow of an MBA was easy to imagine. As I set out on my own personal little feasibility analysis of whether or not to invest time into the application process, I found myself curious to know how an MBA might set a person back. I wanted to see the shadow debate of what business schools advertised on their websites. I wanted to read accounts of those who had rejected business school in favour of alternative options. I wanted to read criticisms of the MBA mentality. There are online forums where such critiques exist, but I wanted to hear accounts with more credibility than anonymous rants. However, since people often speak more honestly when anonymous, I did use material gained from online forums in this book, as well as many other websites. I combined these with face-to-face interviews and analyses of the most helpful websites I could find. I have questioned whether or not to do an MBA for a number of years. It took hundreds of hours of research to gather the information collated in this book, which ultimately helped me make up my mind about whether or not to apply for the program. The goal is that this also helps you to skip the confusion, make an informed decision, and learn the secrets that no business school prospectus will ever teach you.

The Climber vs. The Hippie An MBA isnt for everyone, but I have always thought of myself as the kind of person that it is for, because Ive always read business books for fun and Ive always loved

school. There has always been a professional climber inside me one who isnt fuelled primarily by salary or job title but one who wants to keep learning and exploring, if only to see the world from a viewpoint that can only be accessed through tough hikes. Yet whenever Ive approached the borders of MBA land whether its finding GMAT test centres or poring through the application forms there has been a voice inside me warning me to remember all the MBA dissenters that Ive met over the years. Ive spoken to them at the Escape the City events weve run, Ive heard them lecture at conferences, Ive run projects with them, Ive idolized them. They fuel the professional hippie in me the one who searches for meaning and fulfilment, prioritizing the scenery and the detours over the destination. Maybe everyone feels a little schizophrenic from time to time, but I often feel like I have fullblown Multiple Personality Disorder whenever I meditate too hard on whether or not an MBA is a smart option for my own career path, because the climber and the hippie usually end up butting heads inside my own. It would be an amazing chance to focus on learning about business what an intellectual adventure it would be, the climber argues. (Shes the bigger nerd of the two.) The hippie retorts, A person can learn just as much about business by being inside a commercial setting and taking time to read and network outside of working hours. As a female, it would give me more business credibility in boardrooms as I reach a senior level, the climber muses, to which the hippie replies, Female or male, experience and skills speak more than your credentials. I would meet like-minded, ambitious people what a network it would be, says the climber. The hippie snarls. A person can build a network without an MBA, plus so many MBAs can be networking douche bags is it really desirable to pay for the privilege of hanging out with that kind of person for two years? The climber pauses. It would be two years off to explore what it is that I really want to do with my life. This makes the hippie laugh. Nobody ever really knows what to do with their life a person just needs to expose themselves to a broad range of opportunities and continually self-assess. Then the hippie makes her strongest point yet. Fact of the matter: it costs a fortune! That money is an investment into my professional future, argues the corporate climber, envisioning the higher salary range and the glittering opportunities. You could take any funds that youd spend on an MBA and start a company, write a book, or buy yourself time off to read and network independently instead, replies the hippie; with that, the argument usually comes to a stand-still. I wrote this book in order to put an end to that internal debate. I promised myself that by the end of writing it, I would either be enrolled in an MBA program or I would have a specific alternative in place that performed the same function that an MBA would.

What You Can Expect My goal was that through clearing up my own confusion, I would be able to help you clear up yours. Instead of having to schedule thirty different coffees with alumni who could give you insight, Ive taken their wisdom and condensed it here for you, so that you can move forwards faster with your own MBA decision process. If youve ever wondered whether or not MBA graduates regret doing their program, youll get specific insights into how and why this was the case. If youve ever wanted to hear whether or not an MBA was genuinely useful in a career pivot, youll see specific cases where this happened. If youve ever questioned whether or not an MBA will help or harm your entrepreneurial career, youll find specific stories that demonstrate what many have already learned. When were done, youre going to be able to understand whether or not an MBA is for you and why. Youll have two sides of the story: the one that business schools tell you and the one that theyll never tell you. I went into this process with an open mind and I was surprised by the decision that I made by the end of it.

1.
Meet Your Internal Negotiators
About a week after I decided to start looking at GMAT programs, I discovered that Id found ways to drop the MBA debate into casual conversations with those whose opinions I respected. One evening, after finishing one of our Escape the City events, I found myself chatting with Ingrid, one of our members who worked in a corporate communications role at one of Londons biggest banks. Through the dim light of the bar I could see hesitation in her eyes, masked by the confidence that comes with ambition. She tucked her brown hair gingerly behind her ear while telling me about the questions she was asking herself. She was 27. Was this job what she should be doing with her life? If not this, then what? Would an MBA help her get to where she ultimately wanted to be? A mentor had put the MBA idea in her head when she had been struggling to find the right opportunities in her industry, she said. She had been sold on the idea for three reasons: shed be in a stimulating environment where shed be challenged to ask questions and learn; it would be an excellent opportunity to network and meet new friends; plus it would give her that extra one-liner on her resume and the credibility that she felt she lacked. Im not sure if I cant learn those things from just switching roles within my current company though, she confessed. When I think of my career, I try to visualize it as a company and I am the CEO who is driving its growth. The biggest questions are What do I want to produce? and What skills do I need to be able to deliver that? At first I thought that Ingrid and I had similar thought processes because we were both women. I often wondered whether it was my gender propelling me to want to do an MBA program. In professional situations where I found myself the only female in the room, I questioned whether I still felt the need to prove something that maybe I didnt actually need to prove least of all with a piece of paper. Yet even when I spoke to men going through the MBA debate, I found that we all thought along similar wavelengths. Another Escape the City member, Matt, was based in the USA at a major computing company as a senior consultant. He pointed out similar reasons for considering the degree as Ingrid. I read a lot of business books, magazines like Fast Company and Inc., and publications like HBR. I follow the lives and words of successful businessmen like Warren Buffett, Tim Ferriss, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Ramit Sethi, and other lesser-known and local ones. Some of them have MBAs. Some of them dont. He said that many of his friends had attended or were attending great MBA programs at some of the worlds top schools; he also had friends who had attended or were attending lesser-known programs. Talking to them about their experiences had clarified three main benefits that he saw to getting an MBA at a highly ranked institution.

Firstly, the validation for high-profile jobs: Organisations use MBA programs as their gatekeepers. An MBA is a ticket to the show. Secondly, networking, as a place to meet business partners, employers, and friends aligned with his life and career goals. Thirdly, an MBA would teach him the knowledge of how to manage a business. Both Ingrid and Matt were prototype Escape the City members they were working in professional roles in big cities in their mid to late twenties, pouring their hours into well-known corporate brands, knowing that this wasnt necessarily what they wanted to do forever but that it would do for now. They wanted adventures and they wanted to make the world a better place but for now they wanted to establish their careers. Our careers are the vehicles through which we experience the professional world and they are much more than a means to getting a regular deposit into our bank account. They are identity negotiations: the first question were often asked at a cocktail party or a group dinner is, What do you do? A career is also a power negotiation with the broader world. We are trading time and energy for resources and an MBA is a potential tool for earning us better rewards. Most of the people who consider an MBA tend to be intellectually curious, driven individuals who intend to lead fulfilling careers with or without it. But when the question of whether or not to apply to business school comes up, there follows a costbenefit analysis that seems to be at the core of the internal debate. The heart of this cost-benefit analysis is assessing the limitations of self-directed learning and networking and weighing the effectiveness of an MBA as a catalyst. You can learn independently. But how powerful is that learning compared to the power you could gain by collaborating with other intelligent, networked people? You can network independently. But how much more powerful is a pre-vetted network a group of others who have all been filtered by the highly discerning gatekeepers of elite institutions? When we negotiate whether or not to do an MBA, we are also negotiating what kind of context we ultimately want to place ourselves within what kind of person do we ultimately want to become? What are our deepest values? These are tricky questions, and it often comes down to acknowledging that whenever we make a decision, we are not the only person in the room calling the shots.

The real cause of the internal debate

Whenever we are making a major decision, we are caught in the question of how we want to pivot the story of our lives. We are rarely alone in the decision because as we write our story, we remain shaped by the narratives of our past. When I thought about Ingrids MBA decision process, I recalled how little I knew about her childhood, her family dynamics, or her colleagues. Maybe she had grown up in a class where she was always the smartest and the voices of her classmates had encouraged her to consider an MBA because she was always brighter than them. Maybe her mother had been the less dominant one in her parents marriage, strengthening her desire for power in her own career. Maybe her colleagues were 9

mostly male and perhaps this prompted her to search for a signalling device as she built her own trajectory. As for Matt, I was equally ignorant, although I knew that his father was an entrepreneur. Maybe he wanted to follow in his fathers footsteps or maybe a deeper desire for independence wrestled with that temptation. I thought about how the decision to do an MBA would probably be tied to a desire to lead because he had always positioned himself and had been perceived as a leader in the major contexts of his life. There are many other voices in our heads when we make a decision. There are the voices of our parents, the voice of our inner child, the voices of our childhood classmates, the voice of the place where we grew up, and the voices of our teachers. Knowing the voices we are dealing with can help us to discern which one belongs to us and us alone. This can help when we are detangling ourselves from inner conflict. We are not fundamentally in conflict with ourselves; we are simply witnesses to many conflicting viewpoints arguing with one another. The voice of our father may clash with the voice of our inner child. The voice of our ex-partner might clash with the voice of our current partner. The voice of our inner idealist may clash with the voice of our inner pragmatist. Such disagreements are normal and healthy as long as we can keep them in perspective and remember that such internal debates are generally a signal of intelligence (the ability to be aware of multiple viewpoints). However, a useful first step in detangling ourselves from the internal debate could be labelling the various sides of the debate. 1. 2. 3. 4. Who is in the room with you whenever you make a major decision? Who in your life might be pleased if you do an MBA? Who might be displeased? What is your relationship to each of these people?

Mapping out these answers can help us to understand our own internal landscape as we move forwards with our own decision.

The small questions informing The Big Question

The question of whether or not to do an MBA is not actually about the business program itself but is more about what we want to do with our lives. On the surface, the internal conflict around doing an MBA seems rooted in three questions: 1. Will this help or hinder me going forwards? 2. Is it worth the time and cost? 3. Is an MBA the best option? However, these are tactical questions that can only be answered accurately when placed within a wider strategic context:

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1. Where do I want to be in 5-10 years? 2. What am I ultimately hoping to deliver? 3. Are the values espoused by doing an MBA more important to me than all others? When I started viewing the MBA debate from that lens, I became a lot less attached to the outcome and instead started to enjoy the process of learning about what an MBA could give any person. I realized that most successful people would have been successful with or without one singular tool. Joel Petersen has been teaching at a business school for twenty years and is an MBA graduate himself. But in The $200,000 Question: To Get an MBA or Not?i he gives an honest evaluation of the true value of the degree as an investor and board member, he also works with many successful leaders and entrepreneurs who have done just fine without an MBA. As he says, Its important to acknowledge that many of the key factors that contribute to business success are the ones you learn at your mothers knee, and that others can only be picked up on the front lines. Petersen says that your determination is a key indicator of how rich your MBA experience will be. He acknowledges that the imprimatur of your school will also help open doors and get calls returned in the early years of a career but warns that this is not an advantage that will last forever. A decade down the road, where and whether or not you got an MBA will be less important than what youve done since. He talks about how business schools are great centres to absorb a variety of skills like finance, marketing, accounting, strategy and operations management; the better programs will teach students how to use those skills while theyre still there; the best ones will provide insight into strengths and weaknesses and can prompt holistic personal transformation. However, he argues, many MBA candidates have the drive that would have enabled them to succeed even if they had never attended business school and in fact many of them may have found success sooner without the degree. If youre an entrepreneur itching to get started, or a professional hungry for change and advancement, sitting in classrooms doing projects, taking tests and writing papers for two years may simply not be the ideal path for you, he advises. He urges those considering the degree to avoid just running the numbers, as the decision is a more complex calculation than post-degree earnings and how long it will take to recover your investment.

The right choice can transform your career. The wrong one can be an expensive and time-consuming detour. - Joel Petersen, on MBAs

Chapter summary
1. When we negotiate whether or not to do an MBA, we are also negotiating what kind of context we ultimately want to place ourselves within what kind of person do we ultimately want to become? What are our deepest values? These are tricky questions, and it often comes down to acknowledging that

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whenever we make a decision, we are not the only person in the room calling the shots. 2. There are many other voices in our heads when we make a decision. There are the voices of our parents, the voice of our inner child, the voices of our childhood classmates, the voice of the place where we grew up, and the voices of our teachers. Knowing the voices we are dealing with can help us to discern which one belongs to us and us alone. 3. Many MBA candidates have the drive that would have enabled them to succeed even if they had never attended business school, and in fact, many of them may have found success sooner without the degree.

Exercises
1. Picture yourself in 10 years. What does your life look like? What kind of work are you doing? How do you feel? What type of people are you surrounded by? Write this down (you can imagine it first and then write it down or write it free form as you imagine it). 2. Who is in the room with you whenever you make a major decision? Who in your life might be pleased if you do an MBA? Who might be displeased? 3. What is an MBA giving you access to that you cannot achieve independently?

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2.
Define Your Decision Criteria
After realizing that the decision of whether or not to do an MBA was actually linked to the broader question of what I wanted to do with my life and where I wanted to place myself, I moved onto discussing the idea not just with fellow peers but with those who had decades of experience beyond mine. One of the first people who I usually turn to when I find myself in psychological quagmires is Rob Archer, a career psychologist who we often work with at Escape the City. Archer is not just any career psychologist. He used to be a management consultant. Maybe it is this fact that makes his message resonate especially deeply with the Escape the City crowd. He speaks directly to the battle that most members are grappling with: the kind that comes with being hardworking and successful and therefore having too many options (rather than too few). I sat in his office in central London one afternoon discussing an upcoming event. Sooner or later, we moved onto other topics and the MBA debate came up. He pointed out something that I had heard him say before. Before we can make a good decision, we need to know what constitutes a good decision. To do that, we first have to define our decision criteria. He paused. This means working out our values that which is most important to us. He went on to explain that until people know their decision criteria, they cannot recognize (let alone make) a good decision, and instead they get lost in a spider web inside their head, pulled in multiple directions without an anchor to guide them down a specific path. Our values provide us with gravity in situations where we feel rudderless. Reminding ourselves of the values that ground us also helps to focus our decisionmaking process. For example, factors for deciding to do an MBA might be: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Intellectual stimulation Like-minded peers Location (the chance to live in a new city) Prestige Career opportunities Access to alumni Salary increase

However, I had to question whether I couldnt get the intellectual stimulation, career opportunities, and salary increase in other ways. Was prestige really important to me? Did I really want to move to a new city? When I thought about how the MBA debate is just one fraction of the bigger question of what we want to do with our lives, I started thinking about how to frame the broader debate. This wasnt just about deciding whether or not an MBA was

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important to me in my career, what was most crucial to me? On the way home from the meeting with Rob Archer, I took out my iPhone and made some notes on my core values when it came to my career as a whole. When I thought about my past and current roles, the situations in which I had felt the most satisfied versus those where I had felt hollow, I realized that it was easy to spot my most important values in terms of career. Obviously these vary from person to person, but for me, the winning values as listed on my iPhone were: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Self-expression and creativity (freedom trumps status) The pursuit of excellence (prestige is sometimes part of this, sometimes not) Providing value (sometimes indicated by cash flow, sometimes not) Location independence (ideally, I can combine travel and work) Collaboration opportunities (the people are the journey)

When I defined the above, it became obvious why I had ended up in digital media and not in management consulting or in banking. Going forwards, I started defining my own MBA criteria. In my mind, a successful postgraduate investment would give me: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. A portfolio of work The opportunity to pursue excellence A chance to sharpen commercial acumen Location independence An excuse to work with interesting people

At the very least, it would increase my ability to build a better portfolio, to access avenues to pursuing excellence, to provide value, to achieve location independence, and to access better collaboration opportunities than I would otherwise gain independently of the investment. Only you can decide your own decision criteria. Until you do that, it is hard to know what a good decision might look like. Until you do the exercise, you do not have a basis upon which to judge the merits and disadvantages of each decision.

Using the MBA to pivot your career

If part of your decision criteria is pivoting your career, or catalysing your career ascent within a top-tier company, a traditional MBA might serve that function excellently. For example, Mike Bojanowski is an Escape the City member who worked as an Assistant Product Manager and Applications Engineer in Chicago before starting his MBA at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012. Getting an MBA can be an effective career pivot tool for several reasons. First, being in business school provides exposure to a lot of different career track options that many people may not have been aware of. During the first-year orientation at my program, the career services department provided an overview of the four primary career verticals that MBA students pursue post-graduation: marketing, finance, operations and consulting.

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Within each of these major corporate functions lie a variety of roles with unique responsibilities and skill sets. As an engineer who had worked primarily in smaller manufacturing companies, I was unaware of the difference between product management and brand management, or between corporate finance and investment banking. Business school provides an opportunity to dip your toes into each of these areas through the coursework and summer internship before finding the right fit for your full-time role. Having an MBA also increases your visibility as a job candidate, as many of the worlds most innovative companies routinely recruit on the campuses of the top business schools. During my internship search, I applied to several marketing positions at high-tech firms before ultimately joining Amazon.com as a product manager intern. Prior to coming to business school, I knew zero people that worked at Amazon, and I have a hard time believing that my experience in the manufacturing industry or my mechanical engineering degree from a relatively unknown university would have been enough to land me the job. However, as soon as I became a business school student I had an instant network of alumni that I could leverage, many of whom worked at Amazon. I was also able to meet directly with Amazons recruiters during their visits to my campus. Prior to returning to business school, I had tested the employment waters by sending my resume out to several head-hunters and recruiters, but the only jobs that I was considered for were very similar to the role I already held. As silly as it may sound, simply gaining admittance into a top business school instantly increased the worth of my resume. That being said, there are several drawbacks to trying to pivot your career while at business school. For one thing, the academic workload can be pretty heavy. Combine this with the multitude of club activities and social events that make being back in school so much fun, and youre not left with a lot of time for self-reflection. To make matters worse, the recruiting process starts way too early, at least for hyper-competitive industries like consulting and investment banking, and many companies start showing up on campus within the first month. It can be difficult to find the time to really weigh the different career options in front of you and make an informed decision. Finally, Ive found that, in some cases, the universitys career services department may actually hinder your ability to switch industries or career paths. One of the key metrics that is used to measure and rank business schools is the percentage of graduating students that receive a summer internship offer. As a result, the career services department is incentivized to ensure that every student receives an offer. For most students, it is easiest to get an offer in a similar role or industry to the one that you worked in prior to returning to school. This can lead some career counselors to nudge students back in the direction they just came from. However, Ive found that students that are persistent in their desire to pivot their career ultimately are successful.

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Go elite, or dont bother.

One member who had tried to use the MBA as a career pivot tool but didnt have much luck was Ed, an Escape the City member who worked as a systems consultant in IT before going to the University of Exeter. The MBA thing is like an industry in itself. Some universities the top ones, like Imperial they want a specific GMAT score and now I think I should have done that. Exeters a good university but the MBA itself doesn't require external qualification that's one of the things that attracted me, I didn't have to go for all the GMAT stuff. I worked as an IT consultant supporting trading systems. I didnt enjoy it but the money was good. I wanted to move to a different industry out of finance and thought that this might be a way out. Often, Ive found that companies are not willing to take a risk on you unless someone knows you're connected in some way. Companies aren't willing to take a chance just on the basis of what you've learned on the course. I did apply for quite a few jobs afterwards and you do get frustrated in the end. I wouldn't say that I regret doing the MBA but it took an entire year and it's a lot of work and I get the sense that it didn't enable me to get a decent role. If I'd known now what would happen afterwards, I wouldn't have bothered. I'd have been better off spending my time trying to start something earlier or at least doing something more specialist or doing low-paid jobs and getting experience in other ways. The advice Id give others is that it's all about the contacts. The only way an MBA is worth it is if you meet a really connected group of people that you're maybe going to work with afterwards, maybe set up a business with. It's all about the people you meet - that's what makes it worth it. But you have to go to the top schools to meet the top people. I know that the MBA is often advertised as a career change option but in my experience its not that effective in that sense. I mean, some people are in a good job and they want to go to next level of management and its worth it for those people. Companies pay for them to do the course, once they get the qualification they get the job. But in general, Id say that as a career change option it's not worth it, unless you're sure you're going to meet some really well connected cohort of people. The courses I think are worth going on cost a hell of a lot of money. For starting a business, I don't think its worth it. You'd be better off working things out on your own. It's an academic course you're writing tons of essays hows that going to help you start a business? Its irrelevant. People need to be aware. They can save themselves time and hassle it's a lot of work. 16

Having learned from Ed the false promises of schools that fall outside of the global top-tier category, I became more sensitive to the warnings that there is a vast gap between the worlds top schools and the lesser-known. That is not to say that those schools not on this list cannot provide valuable pivoting opportunities Eds story just made me more aware of the gap that I had already heard about.

The price of the MBA dream

While business school rankings are prone to change, the schools that consistently appear in the top spotsii tend to be: Harvard Business School (USA) Stanford Graduate School of Business (USA) University of Pennsylvania: Wharton (USA) London Business School (UK) Columbia Business School (USA) INSEAD (France/Singapore) IESE Business School (Spain) Hong Kong UST Business School (China) MIT: Sloan (USA) University of Chicago: Booth (USA) IE Business School (Spain) University of California at Berkeley: Haas (USA) Northwestern University: Kellogg (USA) Yale School of Management (USA)

The best schools also come with the heftiest price tags. Students at top schools are forking over more than $200,000 for two-year programs, when you take room, board and books into account. When I looked at the Stanford MBA siteiii I learned just how sure you really want to be about whether or not you can afford attendance before beginning the application process. The cost breakdown of Stanfords MBA program is as follows:
First-Year Student - MBA1 Nine-Month Academic Year September 16, 2013 - June 11, 2014
Single On Campus Tuition Living Allowance (1) Week Zero Expense Books & Supplies Instructional Materials Transportation Medical Insurance (2) $59,550 24,087 869 2,232 1,650 987 3,936 Single Off Campus $59,550 28,122 981 2,232 1,650 2,061 3,936 Married On Campus (3) Married Off Campus (3) $59,550 34,581 1,268 2,232 1,650 3,057 3,936 $59,550 39,415 1,418 2,232 1,650 4,137 3,936

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Health Fee

555

555

555

555

TOTAL

$93,866

$99,087

$106,829

$112,893

First-Year Student MBA1 with Study Trip (4)

Single On Campus Study trip $1,500 Study trip $4,000 $95,366 $97,866 Single Off Campus $100,587 $103,087 Married On Campus (3) Married Off Campus (3) $108,329 $110,829 $114,393 $116,893

Since my own decision criteria focused on freedom, collaboration, and location independence, accepting theses costs was a significant step for me. I was aware that this price tag meant that if I signed up to do an MBA, I would not just be paying with two years of my life; I would also be paying the two years after that or however much time it would take me to recoup my investment. By simply avoiding the hefty investment, I was debt-free. This allowed me more freedom to find projects where I could provide value and collaborate with those I wanted to work with, even if those projects took place at smaller companies with smaller budgets. Conversely, if I decided to take on new debt, I felt I might become limited to taking on projects only at companies that could pay me a certain amount so that I would have the funds to pay back the cost of my degree. Speaking to those who had consciously refused to go down the MBA route only reinforced this perspective they talked about how by simply refusing the debt they had a broader range of career options. By taking on such a hefty investment, they were committing themselves to earning back the amount they had invested. This significantly limited the scope of the roles that they could explore after the program. While debt is often perceived as leverage, I came to examine this opinion through predicting the various scenarios that might ensue post-MBA. The definition of leverage differs in relation to the ultimate goal. If salary or prestige is a key factor in your decision criteria, then the cost of the MBA might not be a significant factor; you might already have been planning to work inside a big company with high salaries on offer. However, if you are seeking a career in the creative or digital industries or you dream of starting up a business of your own, you might decide that the opportunity to freely explore and build relationships with those who might not be able to pay you a high salary might outweigh other factors.

Chapter summary
1. Before we can make a good decision, we need to know what constitutes a

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good decision. To do that, we first have to define our decision criteria. This means working out the factors that contribute to qualifying a decision as an effective one; usually it is a decision framework that aligns with our values. 2. If part of your decision criteria is pivoting your career, or catalysing your career ascent within a top-tier company, a traditional MBA might serve that function excellently, as simply gaining admittance into a top business school can instantly increase the worth of your resume. That being said, there can be several drawbacks to trying to pivot your career while at a top business school. Firstly, the time for self-reflection can be limited. Secondly, the recruiting process can make it difficult to find the time to really weigh the different career options in front of you and make an informed decision. Thirdly, career counsellors can nudge students back into the direction they came from as some career services department can be incentivized to ensure that every student receives a job offer upon graduation, which is typically easiest to secure in industries where a graduate already has relevant experience. 3. The difference between the world's top programs and lesser-known programs can be fairly significant. However, the cost of top programs like Stanford can exceed $200,000. Depending on your financial circumstances, this can potentially limit your freedom in subsequent career opportunities: the MBA debt may mean that you only focus on finding roles with a high salary.

Exercises
1. What are your decision criteria in a postgraduate investment? (Examples could include self-expression, a greater balance between work and family life, the opportunity to travel and experience other cultures, meeting like-minded peers.) 2. What is the main thing you would be going to business school for selfreflection or as a ticket to gain admittance into top companies, or increasing your leverage in the industries you already belong to? 3. How would you finance your MBA education and what might be the repercussions of this?

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3.
Find Your Heroes
After speaking to Rob Archer, and falling into conversation about MBAs with more members at Escape the City events, I turned back to questioning those finance guys at the birthday party and wondering why they produced such a visceral reaction in me. I didnt think that my world-view was necessarily better or stronger than theirs. I realized that I clashed with them on an invisible, subconscious level because we seemed to worship different things. A lot of finance guys I met seemed obsessed with status and status markers driving the right car, living in the right suburb, being friends with the right people, wearing the right clothes. They were polar opposites of my creative friends, in ways that seemed difficult to pinpoint. You can tell a lot about a person by what they worship. Finance guys seemed to worship money whereas my creative friends seemed to worship art. We need both types to make a world work but I was reminded that if we are what we worship, knowing who we worship could remind us which way to turn whenever we found ourselves at crossroads. Our lives are narratives; the relationship we build with a hero is an admiration of their narrative. Simply knowing whom we admire helps us to propel our own narrative. The friends of mine who have chosen to pursue creative careers have often done so because certain creators inspired them. One of my heroes has always been Victoria Ransom, a Kiwi entrepreneur based in San Francisco. She grew up on a farm in rural New Zealand before she moved to America at 17 to attend United World College in Montezuma, New Mexico. This led her to studying psychology before working for Morgan Stanley. She joined her partner Alan Chuard to launch Access Trips in 2001, which ran instructional adventure tours. In 2008 after graduating from Harvard Business School she launched social media marketing software company Wildfire, developed it into a strong business with hundreds of employees and Fortune 500 clients like Pepsi, Publicis, Sony, and Unilever, and then sold Wildfire to Google for a reported $250 million. There are numerous ways to find heroes or people to admire. Personally I think the best place to start is on Amazon or Google reading broadly helps you to connect with industries beyond your own. Some lesser-known heroes who I also admire are Scott Harrison, of Charity: water; John Mackey, of Whole Foods Organics; John Wood, of Room to Read; Al Humphreys, an adventurer; Sheryl Sandberg, of Facebook; and Marissa Meyer, of Yahoo. I believe that keeping your heroes close to you helps you in your emulation of them something about the way they think obviously appeals to you. So keeping their opinions close means that as you shape your own choices, they remain one of the voices in the room with you.

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When I thought about my own heroes the ones I interacted with often for work; the ones who were everyday, accessible heroes I could see the common themes from my decision criteria coming through they embraced progressive values like freedom, collaboration, a global mindset, as well as the pursuit of excellence. I also noticed that none of them had chosen to do traditional MBAs. I reached out to some of them to ask why. I reminded myself that there were many directions in which you could point two years worth of time and energy, especially when I looked at their missions. There are so many things a person can do with a life and the direction in which these people had chosen to point theirs inspired something deep inside me.

Training social enterprise leaders in London

Tom Rippin is the Founder and CEO of On Purpose, a London-based social enterprise leadership development program. After some years researching cancer, Tom started his non-academic career at management consultants McKinsey & Company, where he worked across the private, public and non-profit sectors. He transitioned into the social enterprise space, first advising the CEO of Comic Relief on private sector matters and then working at (RED), the business founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver to help eliminate AIDS in Africa, where he was Managing Director for Europe and Director of Business Development for (RED) International. As well as running On Purpose, Tom is the Chairman of Spice, and a non-executive director at the Shaftesbury Partnership. Why I Chose Not to Do an MBA I went into management consulting after having done a PhD the original plan had been to become an academic, long story. As it happened, the company that I got into gave me credit for my PhD and so I was soon working at the level (and not long after beyond the level) that MBA graduates were taking into the same company. Although I occasionally thought it would be interesting and probably fun to do an MBA I like studying and it always seemed like a sociable thing to do from a professional perspective it seemed too indulgent. Even if I could find an organization that would pay for me, it would still take 1 or 2 years during which time I could be gaining real world experience that would likely stand me in better stead.

Impact investing in New York

Joanne Gan works in impact investing in New York, for Bridges Ventures. Previously, she was Kiva's Portfolio Manager for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, responsible for maintaining strong relationships with Kiva's partners and forging new partnerships in the region. Having grown up there, Joanne is passionate about the

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Asia-Pacific region, and spent six months volunteering with Kiva partners in Indonesia and the Philippines as a Kiva Fellow in 2010-11. She joined Kiva in November 2011, moving from the finance industry where she spent four years working as a corporate credit analyst at Barclays Capital and Lehman Brothers. Joanne holds an MS in Management Science & Engineering and a BA in Economics and International Relations from Stanford University. Why I Chose Not to Do an MBA I chose not to do an MBA because I am happy with my current career. Plus I have placed more emphasis on other experiences that are more learning by doing. Example: my desire to learn about and work in international development took me to my Kiva Fellowship where I volunteered with microfinance institutions in the Philippines and Indonesia for 6 months. At the times when I do contemplate my career, I ask myself "what excites me" and "what do I want to learn about". My answers to these questions guide the types of opportunities that I seek. This led me to my volunteer position with Kiva in Asia, my role at Kiva managing our portfolio in the SE Asia-Pac region, and my current job with an impact investment fund. It hasn't been a conscious choice, and something that I still consider every now and then. I guess I haven't deeply grappled with the decision because at the times in my life when I have thought about an MBA, the pros of getting one (networking, skills/classes, 1-2 year hiatus from work life, signalling effect of an MBA) have never outweighed the cons (studying and taking the GMATs, huge financial cost, loss of income, unclear impact on my career). Following my undergrad studies, I completed a Masters in Management Science and Engineering. While different from an MBA, I took certain strategy, finance and marketing classes similar to some business school classes. Doing this early on has I'm sure in some way diminished my desire to pursue more graduate studies.

Building an international media business in London

Courtney Boyd Myers worked at General Assembly, The Next Web, and Forbes before launching her own company, Audience.io. She is one of Business Insiders 30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech and is currently a member of 10 Downing and Tech Citys Advisory Board and a mentor at Seedcamp, Ignite100, and BBCWorldWideLabs. Audience.io is content development meets social media, SEO and SEM. As the Forbes piece covering her stated, Its really her navigation skills and her network that Myers offers most attractively. Think a 21st century Sherpa of intrepid international startups. Why I Chose Not to Do an MBA

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There are skills worth learning in an academic environment, like how to operate on a brain or how to discuss Descartes accurately at a dinner party. Then there are skills much better realized in a real-world learning environment. If you want to learn Italian, move to Italy. If you want to learn how to run a business, join a company that will give you an incredible amount of responsibility and learn as much as you can while also getting paid! I've always looked at my career choices as educational ones. I say I got my Masters in Journalism at Forbes Magazine; my Masters in the Internet at The Next Web; and my Masters in International Business Development while opening up General Assembly in London. Now, I have the skills to run my own international business focused on media and content strategy. I'm still learning every day, but it's much more beneficial to be learning business skills on the job than in a classroom.

Teaching tomorrows entrepreneurs in London

Rob is a practicing entrepreneur who has in the past led a venture capital backed startup, with clients including Sony, MTV, and Aardman. He is also a graduate of YCombinator, the Silicon Valley incubator whose better-known funded companies include Airbnb and Dropbox. Rob writes about early stage startup strategy at The Startup Toolkit, provides startup support via Founder Centric, and is kicking off his next startup. These days, hes a founder of dex.io and also writes, speaks, and facilitates workshops. He formed a group of founders who provide curriculum support to accelerators including Microsoft, Orange, Springboard and Entrepreneur First. He also leads our Startup MBA program at Escape the City, and watching him in action reminded me that often the best teachers deliberately avoid academia because theyre out there in industry, practicing. He wrote a book The Mom Test about talking to customers and figuring out if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you (available at this link: http://momtestbook.com).

Why I Chose Not to Do an MBA Why wait 2 years to start a business? That seems kind of crazy. You'll learn far more from spending that time on a trial-by-fire than paying your dues in a lecture hall. Plus, putting your first company out of business is probably cheaper than getting an MBA. Entrepreneurship is a craft, like woodcarving or pottery. You learn it by doing it. The theory helps avoid some stupid mistakes, but that's something from a book on the train or a weekend workshop or a conversation with other founders over a couple pints. Will you learn something from an MBA? Yeah, definitely. Will it be more than what you could have learned outside of one? No way. At least, that was my thinking. Plus, building stuff is fun and potentially profitable. Sitting in lectures is neither.

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Chapter summary
1. Our lives are narratives; the relationship we build with a hero is an admiration of their narrative. Simply knowing whom we admire helps us to propel our own narrative. Keeping your heroes close to you helps you in your emulation of them something about the way they think obviously appeals to you. So keeping their opinions close means that as you shape your own choices, they remain one of the voices in the room with you. 2. One reason not to do an MBA is expressed by ex-McKinsey consultant Tom Rippin: "Although I occasionally thought it would be interesting and probably fun to do an MBA I like studying and it always seemed like a sociable thing to do from a professional perspective it seemed too indulgent. Even if I could find an organization that would pay for me, it would still take 1 or 2 years during which time I could be gaining real world experience that would likely stand me in better stead. 3. There are many ways to build an education outside of business school. As Courtney Boyd Meyers says, "I've always looked at my career choices as educational ones. I say I got my Masters in Journalism at Forbes Magazine; my Masters in the Internet at The Next Web; and my Masters in International Business Development while opening up General Assembly in London. Now, I have the skills to run my own international business focused on media and content strategy. I'm still learning every day, but it's much more beneficial to be learning business skills on the job than in a classroom.

Exercises
1. Who are your top five heroes? (Some ways to search for heroes: use Google or Amazon to search the categories or industries that interest you, use Twitter as a mechanism for accessing new networks of industry peers, read a broad range of websites and magazines to learn about interesting figures.) 2. What can you observe from comparing their careers? Make a list of the ways in which their narratives overlap with one another and notice the common themes that emerge. 3. What would your heroes say about your MBA debate? Picture yourself at a dinner party with these heroes and listen to their imaginary input on your upcoming decision.

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4.
Assess the Real Value of the MBA Option
Having reminded myself of my heroes, I was beginning to feel clearer about the direction I generally wanted to head in, with or without an MBA. Then I met Emily. We sat in Costa Coffee in Farringdon, about to go into a General Assembly course that we were both taking. Emily was a few years older than me, petite and blonde, and she had recently graduated from Harvard Business School. I started asking her about her perceptions of the two courses, wondering how she would compare the two, and when we started discussing the benefits of the MBA shed recently completed, her answers surprised me. Earlier I talked about my hero Victoria Ransom. I was amazed to learn that Emily not only knew Victoria (theyd been in the same intake at Harvard) she had almost flatted with her. They were friends. She referred to Victoria as Tor and I realized that maybe the best thing about doing an MBA, as she said, would be meeting likeminded females who were strong, independent, and ambitious. Out of all of the MBA students I talked to, all of them agreed that one of the absolute highlights of their degree had not been the network or the friendships theyd gained it had been the chance to develop truly meaningful connections with people who pushed them to become better. In my mind, I had always imagined that being surrounded by MBAs might force a person to lose perspective on life outside of the business school bubble. I thought about an article called Being an Entrepreneur Sucks which talks about the air of importance that is so often associated with the stereotypical MBA graduate: There will be a time in each founders life when they hang out with their old high school buddies. One of those high school buddies will have an Ivy League MBA and, with that, the answer to all of your problems. Or so they will believe. If that elite friends MBA was as elite as advertised, you can expect them to have the most fluid and insightful of answers to everything. They are the masters of business, even if they have yet to start one on their own. They have pedigree, consistency, a clear path, and enough debt to say that theyve sacrificed for selfimprovement.iv Emily confessed that she had shared similar suspicions. Honestly, I expected to hate it. I came from a slightly more creative background, so I expected the people to be incredibly arrogant and cold and like clinical numbers machines, and they were the most inspiring bunch of people. In my experience, my classmates were very, very smart. They were very dynamic, quite thoughtful, quite ambitious people. Being surrounded by them was like being super charged with adrenaline. You have this view of MBA stereotypes, that they're like loud-mouthed

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gung-ho jock types, and I guess they dominated some air time in some situations, but they were the minority rather than the majority. I found the people to be super inspiring. I learned a huge amount from them, which was really great. I made amazing friends, which I really, really didn't expect. You tend to accrue friends at specific moments in your life, so at school, at university, possibly at work, and then a few others if you're lucky. At a personal level, it was a really unexpected chance to make new friends. Most people seem to stop making a lot of friends around 25, and actually suddenly there you are, "Hey, I've got 100 new friends, or I've got 5 really close new friends." Thats amazing. This opportunity to build genuine friendships seemed like one of those hidden benefits that few business schools talked about. I had never thought that an MBA might be the kind of place where someone like Victoria Ransom could become not just a friend but also a potential housemate. In The 10 Most Under-Rated Reasons Why You Should Get An MBA, Eric Jacksonv (who completed a Ph.D. in Management at Columbias School of Business) talks about the things that most people can overlook when it comes to the MBA. Emily reaffirmed these as I spoke to her about it. Jackson talks about the opportunity to reflect on bigger issues the chance to make lifelong friends who will accomplish great things in their careers going forwards and whose friends, in turn, will probably be both influential and inspiring as you progress with your own career. He talks about the luxury of realizing how little you know about business, as well as the chance to think about the global economy and not just your own little corner of the world. He talks about the opportunity to refocus yourself: Even though youre in your midto late-20s, the clock is ticking and your career window is closing. You cant reinvent yourself at 30 and then 35 and then 40. The people who really go far in their business careers focus. This is what I had consistently heard from Emily, as well as Bowen, who was completing his MBA at Stanfords Graduate School of Business.

Opinions of b-school: before and after

Emily had harboured suspicions about Harvard before she had completed the program and then found something quite different to what she expected. I was curious as to what Bowens perceptions of Stanford were before the program compared to when he graduated. When he first got accepted, he wrote a blog post called Why I Chose Stanford which talked about his reasons in choosing the school. His reasons for choosing Stanfords program were as follows: - Nice: like all top business schools, the school attracts people of amazing talents (amongst my classmates are NASA space scientists, high street fashion entrepreneurs, military officers and senior movie executives to name just a few). One thing that stood out to me, however, was that the Stanford GSB people were exceedingly NICE. 26

The general consensus at the school is that business should not be a zero sum game and that b-school education is about increasing the size of the pie rather than your own slice of it. Which leads nicely into my next point - Collaboration: due to the belief that everyone can get a better outcome by working with, and not against, each other, amazing things happen at the school. The school also actively encourages this by allowing the enforcement of the Grade NonDisclosure Policy and taking courses from other faculties is EXPECTED. - Change: people who go to Stanford GSB generally have an innate desire to change the world. Unlike most people who want to change the world however, these people have insane talents, incredible drive and ruthless execution to ensure their dreams come to fruition. Failure is seen as a natural part of the process, the important thing is to think BIG, start SMALL, fail QUICKLY and scale FAST! - Ecosystem: I don't know the ecosystem of other entrepreneurial centres like Boston so can't comment on how it compares, but the entrepreneurial ecosystem that Stanford has built up over the last 70 years is nothing short of breathtaking. They have so much institutional knowledge, industry connections and infrastructure, that everything I thought were "obstacles" melt away as merely excuses to not do something. - Inspiration: yes the program has amazing teaching staff (Schmidt, Condi, Grove, Joe to name just a few); yes the student body is amazing; yes Silicon Valley is an amazing place to be to be inspired. After he had been at Stanford for over a year, I was curious as to how his perceptions might have changed. When I reached out to him, he reminded me that it is not a good idea to generalize MBA programs as there is such a massive difference between schools. He talked about his unique experience at Stanford and what he found his MBA could give him (and not give him). A Stanford MBA gives you: An amazing platform. One word: accessibility. While at b-school, provided you want it badly enough and work hard enough for it, you can meet anyone, talk to any organization and take that further in a project/job/entrepreneurial opportunity in pretty much most civilized places around the world. That's pretty amazing. The courage to pursue your passion and ideals. It's not often that a school gets called by all its students as the "dream factory". Remember those crazy ones in undergrad who just think a bit different, and go out and carve out their own path? That's the ideal b-school person, everyone aspires to be like that, a good number of us are already like that, and being in that environment is infectious. Broad and worldly education. Needless to say, professors here are world class, caliber of thinking is unparalleled, and it's not just in any one area, it's in ALL areas. Some of us structure our course such that we take up to 30-40% of our courses from across engineering, design, medicine and other departments, combined with really stellar classes at the b-school, makes for a potent mixture. Conversations are so much more interesting when you are learning 27

about global management when an Israeli Air Force pilot and an aspiring Lebanese politician are talking about their own very reasonable, yet very different perspectives with Condoleezza Rice acting as moderator. Being part of a very, very special family: the most special thing about the bschool is that you are part of a very special family. Stanford b-school people were exceedingly NICE.

I've kind of run out of space to talk about things an MBA doesn't give you, but here's a quick list: - Guaranteed success: a Stanford MBA isn't guaranteed success. And by success, I don't mean earning a comfortable living, I mean really doing something that you are destined to do. The GSB is a platform, not a magic bullet. You need to work just as hard, if not harder than ever. - Make you a "better x": the program is what you make of it. I think to argue whether an MBA makes for a better entrepreneur or not is a moot point. It's like arguing that computer science programs don't necessarily make for better engineers (and you can point to many drop-outs that have been very successful). The concept of getting an MBA to find a better job is a very jarring concept to me. At least at Stanford, the focus is on realizing your full potential as a change agent in the world, irrespective of what society may value. In The Ten Biggest Lies of B-Schoolvi, Eric Jackson talks about the lies that MBA students should protect themselves against. They include the expectation that you will be rich; that you are smarter than people without an MBA; that there is always a right answer; and that you know how to fix the first few companies after you graduate. As I learned more about what Bowen espoused, I wondered if another common myth that top MBA graduates might be indoctrinated with included the belief that they were amazing, the best of the best. Then again, maybe this myth was justified maybe the process of getting into a place like Stanford did filter the cream of the crop. Then I remembered that this crop had its own limitations. I thought of my own heroes, the ones who hadnt chosen to go down the b-school route, and I realized that the best of the best at the worlds top schools would be the best of a crop that had chosen to apply to business school in the first place. Emily talked about her own experiences of her Harvard classmates quite frankly: The only thing is that we were all of a type: insecure overachievers. I think that the one failing that almost all of them had apart from people who have gone on to build big businesses, was like a risk aversion, or a fear about taking risks. Similarly, in Jacksons article about the lies of business school, he also says that you are not necessarily going to be more creative and entrepreneurial after business school than you were before. In my experience, B-School makes you less creative, the longer youre in it. They teach courses on entrepreneurship but its kind of an oxymoron the idea of the analysis paralysis B-School Students being entrepreneurial.

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You will learn a lot of tools and frameworks in B-School, but you wont learn how to start a company. You just need to start a company. He also talks about how in his experience, The majority of B-School students are lemmings. They dont know what they want to do afterwards, so they just do what their peers say they should do (maybe thats why they applied to B-School in the first place). Ten years ago, everyone at my school wanted to be a dot com entrepreneur. That didnt work out so well and most students later went back to being investment bankers or management consultants. Your peers dont know what you want to do with your career. You need to start listening to that voice inside your head. In another one of Eric Jacksons articles, The Ten Most Dangerous Things Business Schools Teach MBAsvii, he talks about the false beliefs that an MBA can indoctrinate students with, namely, that they matter. That theyre the best of the best and that theyre smarter than everyone else because theyre going to get the tools to figure out the world. Most of all, he emphasizes that business schools will insist that you made a good investment, by choosing to do the MBA program, but that there will be lots of folks out there who never leave their jobs and probably make much more money over their lifetimes. There are lots of MBAs who are still trying to find themselves over the two years. Not that theres anything wrong with that. Just dont kid yourself that youre making an investment in yourself, when youre just clueless about what you want to do with the rest of your life. Emily talked about the post-MBA funk that can come after two years of being told you are amazing and a change agent about to be unleashed on the world. She confessed that a few of her classmates had to readjust to being a recent graduate, a mere mortal, once exiting the gilded MBA gates. HBS surprisingly is quite moral and ethical about it. It doesn't just go, "You're amazing." It is much more about, "We have chosen you to come here because we think you're good, we think you have responsibilities to [do] something awesome with your life, and you can go do it and we are going to give you the tools to do it." They have this philosophical thing of what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life and I'm quite philosophical. So, you're mired in that for two years and you're thinking at a very high level, what is my passion, what is my purpose kind of thing. Then the reality is, most people, because they are quite risk-adverse, will go into finance or consulting or something like that. Because you also have big loans to pay, so you have to get a high-paying job. Then when you go into those environments you are suddenly not pursuing the passion or changing the world or running the world. You're a gopher, and you're an overeducated, probably over-worked gopher. Loads and loads of people have that comedown from being told that you can do anything to, "Oh God, I'm sitting in an office for 20 hours a day doing spreadsheets." They kind prepare you a little bit for that, but not so much.

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New networks, new opportunities

When I asked Robbie Allen to outline the value of the network that his MBA at Haas (Berkeley) Business School had given him, he told me the following. The alumni network won't get you hired, but it will get someone to take your call. The way that we build connections with others is commonality. We meet someone new and it's not long before we're trying to find mutual connections. The alumni network is mostly an easy way to build and demonstrate commonality. I don't actually have that much more in common with someone who went to Berkeley undergrad 20 years ago than someone who went to another top US school. But we both know the name of the football team and that allows us to form a bond. Business school takes this to the next level by both being an almost universally positive experience for people, and a strongly enforced norm to help others. I'm tremendously grateful to the alumni that helped me out, and the school was very clear both that alumni would do that for us and we'd be expected to do it for future classes as well. As a small school the Haas network is pretty tight, so I'd feel comfortable calling up someone I'd never met before at a company to get an insider perspective on what's going on. Friends at larger schools have said that while their network is more pervasive, the network is a little less passionate given the sheer quantity of alumni out there. The network with your class is quite different. You have a deep personal connection with a group of hundreds of people with whom you've studied, strived, laughed, cried, and drunk a significant amount of alcohol. Not only do you have easy and instant access to them but also they'll go out there and put their reputation on the line for you with their friends and professional contacts. Given the geographic and professional diversity of this group, it's an incredible source of information, and contacts for not just a warm introduction but also an enthusiastic recommendation. I've seen classmates start businesses together, invest in one another, make connections that lead to jobs, and of course, fall in love with one another and start families. I found my New York apartment through a friend of a friend at business school.

Similarly, when I asked Mathew Chow to outline the value that his MBA at Yale Business School had given him, he told me the following. In reflecting on my first year at the Yale School of Management, Ive realized that the things that Ive appreciated most were not necessarily things I was aware of when I signed up for business school. Typically people look at career advancement, access to powerful professional networks, salary increases, or lateral industry moves as reasons to pursue an MBA. Some people pursue MBAs for the chance to relax, travel, party, meet a future spouse, or to take a career break. And those are all great reasons to pursue an MBA.

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But whats been most meaningful to me has been the opportunity to be in a supportive, risk-free environment where were given every opportunity to find and chase our dreams. Its been an environment where people are invested in you, and where you can invest yourself in people because you believe in what theyre pursuing. Its the opportunity to be learning-oriented, not merely production-focused. Its an opportunity to pursue your passion, not just try to land the next job. Its an opportunity to belong to a supportive, like-minded community, not just be part of a professional network. For me, thats meant that Ive had the chance to pursue a new interest in Design & Innovation a far cry from my most recent job in real estate finance. I dont know how it will end up, but Ive thrown myself into an internship, club activities, and classes to help me think more about how to help companies and people become more innovative. Ive received phenomenal support from classmates who have at once played the role of career advisors, advocates, sounding boards, and therapists. For me this was perfect. I needed to take risks. I didnt come to business school because I hated my last job; I came because I needed to try new things. I might very well end up back in real estate, and if I do I know itll be because I have full conviction for it. Many people who pursue MBAs expect to make less money than they did before business school. Even for those who will see salary increases, its hard to justify the tuition, expenses, and opportunity cost of spending one to two years in school. No matter how you do the math, long or short-term, its likely a financial sacrifice of some sort. An MBA certainly isnt for everyone, but I urge anyone whos considering it to factor in how much theyd benefit from this type of environment, in addition to financial payback. Grant, who attended the full-time program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business from August 2011 June 2013, echoed those sentiments, talking about the personal growth and global outlook he gained from his experience. I chose to get an MBA in part because the majority of senior people in my industry (private equity) have an MBA. While it isn't a requirement for advancement in my industry, it helps. Aside from what you actually learn, you broaden your network of friends and business contacts and the degree itself can help you establish credibility more quickly when first meeting someone. Additionally, I had a liberal arts undergraduate education so I wanted the chance to study business in an academic setting. I also wanted the opportunity to expand my horizons personally and re-evaluate my career goals to make sure I wasn't stuck on a path just because it was there. In terms of which program, I wanted to be in a big city, so I applied to a handful of the top ranked MBA programs in big cities (Booth, Kellogg, Wharton, Harvard, 31

Stanford, Columbia). I visited those I got into and chose Booth because it felt like the best fit, both reputation for finance/economics and the people I met. Generally the program did live up to and exceed expectations. There was a slight frustration that some classes were too theoretical and did not connect with the reality of the business world. However, sometimes the point was to understand theories in a perfect world then learn how to amend and apply them to an imperfect world. Academically, I was able to learn the theories behind many of the finance techniques I was simply using because someone told me to do it that way. I was also able to gain exposure to non-finance disciplines, such as operations, marketing, and entrepreneurship that I didn't typically come across in my job prior to school. As my career progresses, having exposure to these fields will be useful. Another thing to mention is the network. I met many people and made friends that I would not have otherwise made. Being thrown together with 550 people who are similar in some ways and different in some ways is a unique opportunity. Now that I am an alumnus, I have an instant connection to all other alumni of Booth. Perhaps the biggest benefit for me was growing personally, in multiple ways. The first is that I met people very different from those I previously interacted with. My class at booth was very diverse and I met and worked with people from many different countries. I learned about different cultures, business in different countries, the struggles that international students have with getting visas to work in the US after school, etc. My class was also diverse in previous work experience and career goals. I was able to learn about what it's like to work in other industries and open my eyes to how many promising career paths are out there (as opposed to having tunnel vision prior to school since most of the people I was around were in finance). Because of these diverse backgrounds and goals, I know people currently doing and who in the future will do many different things in business, non-profit, government, etc. There is a lot of group work and focus on developing your leadership skills so I pushed myself to become a better leader and group member. Working with different personalities and people motivated in different ways will help me as I work with others in my career. Its also easy to push yourself to take chances (e.g. speaking up in class, joining a club you know nothing about, and much more) in a low-risk, supportive environment. As a student, successful people are eager to provide advice and lend a helping hand. Its easy to ask someone to lunch on your own and there were many networking opportunities facilitated through Booth. This can range from meeting numerous private equity professionals at school sponsored events to having dinner with Steve Forbes and a group of about 12 students both of which I did. Basically, if you want to get outside of your comfort zone or expand your horizons in another way, a school like Booth provided that opportunity. For me, one thing I wanted to do was learn more about the world outside of the US. This was accomplished in part through relationships with international students, faculty, and guest speakers.

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Also, prior to school I had never been outside of North America/the Caribbean and I wanted to change that. Business school provided the opportunity in two ways directly through school sponsored trips and indirectly through long holiday and summer breaks that don't exist when you're working. Of course, I could have done something like Matt did and take a year or more off from work, but I don't have that high of a risk appetite, so the route of continuing to further my education and bolster my resume while still gaining the free time to travel was a better choice. Before school even started, I went on a Booth-organized trip with 15 classmates to Jordan and Israel. There were countless other opportunities to go on Booth-organized trips both in the US or abroad, but the remainder of my travel was self-directed. I went to Spain over winter break, traveled around Europe with Matt during summer break (Copenhagen, Berlin, 5 or so cities in Poland, Prague, and Munich), and Italy and China after graduation. This is quite significant considering two years ago I had never been outside of North America. And this isn't unique. Many of my classmates had similarly extensive travel some more and some less. One other thing (this is somewhat stream of conscious) is that I had a summer internship doing operations/business development work for a small company in the IT space. I also had an internship during the school year as part of a class at a private equity firm in Chicago. The opportunity to explore other companies and career paths with an internship is hard to find outside of school.

The end of business schools?

Even though I enjoyed hearing about the experiences of those who had completed the program, I wanted to search for other accounts of the value of an MBA. One of the best counter-arguments to a pro-MBA stance was written over a decade ago by acclaimed Stanford Business School professor Jeff Pfeffer who co-wrote The End of Business Schools with Christina T. Fong, claiming that the business school industry produces far less success than meets the eye. He argues that MBA graduates fail to earn or learn as much as advertised, nor do they produce as many breakthrough companies. The report talked about the overemphasis on analysis at the expense of both integration and developing wisdom as well as leadership and interpersonal skills, or teaching the wrong things in the wrong ways (and perhaps to the wrong people, or at least at the wrong time in their careers). Another business school academic, Harold Leavitt (1989) repeated this idea, arguing that "we have built a weird, almost unimaginable design for MBA-level education" that distorts those subjected to it into critters with lopsided brains, icy hearts, and shrunken souls. Mintzberg and Lampel (2001) reported that none of the four CEOs people most often named when asked who had accomplished great things had a business school degree (in fact, two of them Motorolas Bob Galvin and Microsofts Bill Gates, were college dropouts). They also reported that 40% of U.S. CEOs mentioned in the Fortune article "Why CEOs Fail" had MBAs (Charan & Colvin, 1999).

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Pfeffer and Fong talked about how the selection process for top business programs means that students are admitted on the basis of higher than average capabilities and credentials and that, therefore, graduate business programs may be as much networking and screening services for recruiters as they are educational institutions. Seth Godin has argued that the core curriculum at business schools is largely irrelevant, and a business school degree functions to provide a pedigree rather than learning (Godin, 2000: 322). Pfeffer and Fong also point out that what is most important in leaders often cannot be taught. They argue that the majority of what business schools teach theory and analytical techniques can readily be learned by smart people. However, other gifts such as wisdom, the ability to communicate and lead, and the art of building strong interpersonal relationships are less easily transferred. Since they are less easily taught, these gifts are increasingly valued in the competition for leadership positions at organisations. This recognition of the trade-off between what could actually be taught versus what it takes to succeed confirmed what I had already suspected. It reminded me that while Bowen and Emily and others I knew had tremendously enjoyed their time at business school and discovered new friends and opportunities as a result, there was also evidence to suggest that they would have succeeded regardless, albeit in a different form. Business school was a critical factor in their present success, but it was not necessarily any kind of magic bullet. However, top business schools like Harvard and Stanford gave its students unparalleled access to valuable networks and advisors. Entrepreneurs like Victoria Ransom had used the MBA program to catalyse the development of her business. So it seemed like if one went into an MBA program with a set agenda on how they were going to use their second year to develop a business idea, it might provide an incredibly effective platform for growing a startup.

Chapter summary
1. Unexpected and lesser known benefits of business school include the chance to build genuine friendships with super smart people and the opportunity to reflect on bigger issues and to refocus your own career if you do so deliberately you can also use the program as a platform to develop your own business idea 2. An MBA is not a silver bullet if you go into the program clueless about what you want to do with your life, you can also leave the program remaining clueless. There can be a post-MBA funk after being told that you are amazing for two years and then having to adjust to being an over-educated gopher, if you end up in a huge company. 3. Smart people can readily learn the majority of what business schools teach theory and analytical techniques. However, other gifts such as wisdom, the ability to communicate and lead, and the art of building strong interpersonal relationships are less easily transferred. Therefore, graduate business programs may be as much networking and screening services for recruiters as they are educational institutions. 34

Exercises
1. Do you know what you would use the MBA as a platform to achieve? 2. If you are using the MBA to explore a business idea, what does this idea involve and how might an MBA help you to develop and scale it faster? 3. In terms of what may serve your future career best, what would you be looking for from an MBA program the theory and analytical techniques, or stronger communication and leadership skills?

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5.
Assess the Real Value of the Alternative Option
After speaking to various MBA graduates about their experiences at some of the worlds top programs, I decided to investigate the other end of the spectrum the idea that you could create your own curriculum. I had discovered since my undergraduate degree that the best jobs in the world were often the ones that you created for yourself. If you could create your own job, it made sense that you could create your own training program for getting there. The more that I learned about traditional MBA programs, the more I came to understand what Wharton graduate John Greathouse refers to in his argument for self-education, The MBA Education and Other Oxymorons.viii He describes b-schools as essentially vocational institutions for consultants and investment bankers. In general, the curriculum is geared to beat the entrepreneurial spirit out of the students. He talks about how he learned more from the guys running the hotdog stands outside of the Wharton Quad than he did from most of his teachers. He also said that even the most entrepreneurial programs at most decent b-schools are still overly theoretical. Reading cases in the hopes of becoming an entrepreneur is like trying to teach someone how to hit a baseball by reading a book. It might be entertaining to read about Ted Williams long, graceful swing and Babe Ruths powerful follow-through, but there is no substitute for grabbing a bat and stepping up to the plate. He also makes an excellent link between how similar base jumping is to starting a company. Base jumping is a sport which involves jumping off a high structure (bridge, building, mountain, etc,), free falling to an altitude in which the margin of a parachute malfunction approaches zero and then pulling the ripcord at the last possible moment. Starting a company is like base jumping without a parachute. In fact, to make matters more exciting, a startup requires you to build your parachute while you are freefalling. Once you make the jump, there is no turning back. If you are really good, you will not simply build a parachute, you will craft a hang glider that will allow you [to] fly around, check out the scenery and then pick the time and place for your gentle landing (i.e., an exit either via an IPO or M&A sale). If you are really good AND really lucky, you will convert your glider into a rocket that will put you into a self-sustaining orbit. If this happens, your venture will indefinitely prosper as a standalone company. The amount of money you raise equates to the height from which you can make your base jump. More money means you have more time to freefall. More money does not

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mean you will defy the laws of gravity. It simply allows you to buy expensive components for your parachute/glider/rocket and more experienced teammates to help you put the parts together in mid-flight. However, as discussed in Frugal is as Frugal Does, no matter how much money you raise, you will constantly struggle with the challenges of deploying your cash in the most effective manner. If you do not successfully build your parachute, you are destined to hit the ground hard. Thus, everything you do in the early stages of your startup must be focused on ending your freefall by putting wind under your wings. Survival is the most important objective of every organism, including your business. You must do everything and anything that is ethical and legal to ensure your company lives to fight another day. This may mean being a dream killer and completely changing your business model. This may mean laying off valued employees and straining personal relationships. No matter what you have to do, anything is better than crashing into the ground and taking a long dirt nap. Credentials may get you promoted but they do not make payroll and they do not motivate customers to part with their hard-earned dollars. Other than helping to establish your credibility with investors, your academic credentials will have little impact on your adventures ultimate success.

It is hard to know whether self-directed learning can ever replace the MBA program unless you know what you are ultimately aiming to get to after business school. It was difficult for me to know exactly what I wanted to do that would be different from what I was doing now. All of the pivotal opportunities that had come my way so far had happened fairly serendipitously. For that reason, I was not sure if self-directed learning could ever replace the program or whether anyone else could answer that for me, because only I could figure out what the program was ultimately for and what I wanted to do with the next few years. Perhaps irrationally, I believed that signing up to an MBA program outsourced this critical decision. Signing up to a traditional program meant letting business school academics decide the curriculum that was going to be relevant for you going forwards. Perhaps cookie-cutter jobs required cookie-cutter training being in a cookie-cutter role was not necessarily a bad thing as it often came with a secure salary and defined parameters. When I thought about my heroes and their careers, I thought about how there was not necessarily training that they could purchase. They had created their own careers and with those careers they had to create their own networks and their own unique curriculum, often on the job itself. This is why the idea of an alternative, self-designed MBA appealed to me. I knew that it lacked the prestige, credibility, and gate-opening abilities of a top-tier school name on the CV and I wondered how to design a program that was both creative yet effective.

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I was beginning to learn that an MBA could come in many different forms the Harvard and Stanford experiences of Emily and Bowen were very different from that of Ed from Exeter. Maybe knowing whether or not an MBA was for you came down to knowing what kind of future appealed to you. The idea of passive revenue was very appealing the ideas that author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss had put forward in The 4-Hour Work Week. I knew that building a business appealed to me, and I knew that to do that, you first had to have a tribe, as author Seth Godin talks about. I knew that lifelong learning appealed to me, a concept that Personal MBA author Josh Kaufman talks about.

An MBA wont guarantee a four-hour work week

At Escape the City, I often meet members who idolize Tim Ferriss, the creator of the 4-Hour Work Week blog and subsequent bestsellers. Ferriss is emblematic of the Gen-Y progressive entrepreneur movement the 24-hour, location independent, selfstyled career space as opposed to the 9-to-5, corporate-ladder climbing tribe. He is also a proponent of the Alternative MBA and outlines this in detail with his blog post, How to Create Your Own Real-World MBA.ix Originally attracted to Stanfords MBA program, he instead decided to create his own program. In 2007, he started having frequent lunches with successful entrepreneur Mike Maples, to discuss marketing and angel investing. (Angel investing refers to putting sums in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars into early-stage startups.) He decided to create his own personal fund that would replace his b-school tuition fund basically aiming to intelligently spend $120,000 over two years on angel investing in $10-20,000 chunks, so 6-12 companies in total. His goals would be to absorb as much as possible about start-up finance, deal structuring, rapid product design, initiating acquisition conversations, and so on. He does not suggest copying this approach but talks about how a home grown MBA might be gained from spending $2,500 per month on experimenting with various muses which may potentially morph into sources of automated income. He talks about learning to confront the issues and complexities of the real world instead of retreating to the protective womb of academia. One blogger had listened to Ferriss speaking at the Apple Store in New Yorkx and shared his insights about education in general. Ferriss feels that the value of a liberal arts education is its provision of a broad base of experiences and its tendency to invoke curiosity. Through learning to ask better questions, you learn more instead of going through business case studies every week. Those with curiosity and passion tend to be the ones who succeed in life, regardless of their chosen field, the blogger argued. The right mindset is not to focus on the short-term gains coming out of college or in your work, but to focus on what youre LEARNING on the job. Tim talked about alternative forms of learning that were better than an MBA. For instance, if you wanted to learn how to invest, you would work closely with a successful investor. If you didnt have access to one, you could read through Warren Buffetts Annual 38

Letters to his Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Tim actually went to one of Warrens shareholder meetings just so he could ask Warren and his business partner Charlie Munger a question. Paying for an MBA versus the Virtually-Free Real World MBA The point Tim was making was that you dont need to invest your time and money in a formal MBA program because you can design one for yourself. Its simple and deadly effective if youre committed to following through on your course work. Your course work can be anything from listening to interviews of successful people to going and seeing them live and in person talking about the subject that youre passionate about. I think the value of doing something like going to see an expert like Tim or Ramit Sethi, author or seasoned businessperson speak on a topic is that you get the quick, digestible version of their life story and experiences. You get to ask your own personal questions, the voids in their work according you that you want answered. Getting an MBA on the Job You can also create a quasi-alternative MBA on the job. By taking different roles in your company, exposing yourself to different parts of the industrial machine, you can feasibly expose yourself to all the subjects that are covered in an MBA program accounting, economics, business strategy, marketing, communication. In addition, you can get real world exposure to a topic that is critical to your success, but often is NOT covered during an MBA program: selling. You can learn how to sell and just about any other skill by working for passionate and intelligent people. You can learn more in a year if you create your course work and follow through each and every day. The best part is that youre getting paid to learn on the job and your additional coursework doesnt have to cost you a dime. Sure, your textbooks (books and programs from the experts in your area) arent free, but there is plenty of free advice and learning everywhere for you to learn from. Just be sure to put a filter on your information stream or else youre going to drown drinking from the fire hose of information. Other Free MBA Resources I love biographies, business success stories (posts, articles) and interviews conducted by great interviewers. Of course none of these sources compares to going straight to the source and hearing a pro talk live. Well, maybe the great interviews are a great proxy for hearing someone speak live or via an audio recording. The point is that you need to become a lifelong learner to really get to the head of the class in your chosen field. You can speed up the process by creating your own MBA or Learning Program. If youre passionate about your career and you love what you do, youll have no problem committing yourself to becoming a lifelong learner. Your career, if it is to be a successful one, will be a series of collaborations as a member of many different teams. And the secret to being a valued contributor to those teams will be your development as a lifelong learner. Ellen Kullman, CEO, DuPont

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So to sum up, Tim Ferriss had a unique approach to his own MBA which in a nutshell is about going to work for a smaller company (under 50 people) where you can directly report to someone who is the CEO, COO or VP. By working closely with and for these dealmakers, youll learn a ton of information that can quickly and easily outpace your counterparts in expensive MBA-land because youre not just learning, youre DOING while theyre learning. Big difference.

An MBA wont guarantee a tribe

Tim Ferriss is far from being the only high-profile proponent of designing and following your own curated MBA curriculum. Stanford MBA graduate and bestselling author Seth Godin also created an Alternative MBA. In his post If You Could Change Your Life, he said: Getting into Stanford Business School changed my life. In college, I trained to be a mediocre engineer (I didnt set out to be mediocre at it, but I sure was). I was on track to become Dilbert. Getting into Stanford meant jumping the track. Going from one path to another in one fell swoop. I didnt learn much of substance at business school, but thats fine, because the school allowed me to make a graceful transition. I had permission to reinvent and a platform to do it. Like Ferriss, Godin says that if you are clear on your intentions and know how you plan to maximize your instructors time, you can participate in an alternative MBA he ran one himself, and he condensed his key findings as follows: Learning: The educational lesson that I found the most striking is that the book knowledge was easy to transmit and not particularly essential. Once you get this far, its sort of a given that youre good at school. We read more than a hundred books, and the book learning happened quickly. Our culture has done an amazingly good job at teaching talented people how to learn concepts from books. I taught for five to twenty hours a week, and very little of it was about the books. So, if concepts from books are easy, whats hard? Doing it. Picking up the phone, making the plan, signing the deal. Pushing publish. Announcing. Shipping. We spent a lot of time on this area. Every morning, each person came in prepared to push someone in the group to overcome the next hurdle. This is what growth looks like, and it was energizing to be part of. We didnt do this at all at when I was at Stanford. We spent a lot of time reading irrelevant case studies and even more time building complex financial models. The thing is, you can now hire someone to build a complex financial model for you for $60 an hour. And a weeks worth of that is just about all the typical entrepreneur is going to need. The rest of the time, its about shipping, motivating, leading, connecting, envisioning and engaging. So thats what we worked on.

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It amazes me that MBA students around the world arent up in arms. How can schools justify taking $100,000 in cash and teaching exactly the wrong stuff?

The Personal MBA

Joshua Kaufman is a staunch advocate of self-education. He passionately states that MBA programs don't have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work.xi He designed and created the Personal MBA, which he claims allows you to get a world-class education simply by reading his 99 recommended books. He also acknowledges that the debate concerning the value of traditional MBA programs is long and involved, and the Personal MBA is just one addition to the issues, rather than a conclusion in itself. However, he points out that a traditional MBA program will introduce you to a lot of great people and get acquainted with a few professors and corporate HR recruiters who can help you land a new job. In exchange, you will sink deeply into debt. If you decide to enroll in a full-time MBA program, you must also consider the opportunity cost of lost wages and long-term investable savings. He points out that, There's nothing presented in a traditional MBA program that you can't learn by studying a few good books on the subject. Remember, the value of traditional MBA programs is not in the learning: the primary benefit is the connection to recruiters and other students. Kaufman says that if your goal is to work for a Fortune 500 company in an industry where you lack experience, you will probably find value in an MBA program, but if youre an entrepreneur or a middle manager in a company you like, Your limited time and energy is probably best spent working on your business and learning on your own. He also talks about the irony of how most promising MBA candidates are just as likely to succeed in business without an MBA as they are with the diploma. He harks back to what we explored in the last chapter the opinion of Stanford business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer (who co-wrote that report we explored with Christina T. Fong) who said, "If you are good enough to get in, you obviously have enough talent to do well, regardless."

Chapter summary
1. Tim Ferriss is of the opinion that you can design your own MBA program. Your course work can be anything from listening to interviews of successful people to going and seeing them live and in person talking about the subject that youre passionate about. You can learn how to sell and just about any other skill by working for passionate and intelligent people. You can learn more in a year if you create your course work and follow through each and every day. The best part is that youre getting paid to learn on the job and your additional coursework doesnt have to cost you a dime. 2. Seth Godin, a Stanford Business School graduate, argues that at b-school, they spent a lot of time reading case studies and building complex financial 41

models; nowadays, you can hire someone to do those things for you cheaply. The rest of the time, in an entrepreneurs life, the difficult things are actually doing things like picking up the phone, making the sale, shipping the product. Getting things done. That, he argues, is what aspiring entrepreneurs should be learning how to do. 3. Josh Kaufman designed and created the Personal MBA, which he claims allows you to get a world-class education simply by reading his 99 recommended books. He argues that the value of traditional MBA programs is not in the learning: the primary benefit is the connection to recruiters and other students. The learning itself can be gained by reading some of the best business books out there.

Exercises
1. What might your own Alternative MBA program look like? 2. What are the skills and outcomes you would need to take your career forward and what would you need to learn to ship? 3. Go onto the Personal MBA website and see which of the 99 recommended books you have already read, and which ones you are most keen to read from the list.

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6.
Start Where You Plan To End
While the idea of an Alternative MBA was beginning to appeal to me more and more, I knew that it would not have the same signalling effect as a traditional MBA. In other words, it would not look as good on my CV as a stamp from one of the worlds top schools. I wondered if I would even get into the worlds top schools and if not, whether I could achieve the same things without that stamp. Escape the City members consistently told me that reading the stories on our website helped them when deciding their own paths forward something about the variety of narratives helped them to contextualise their own. So I set out to record the stories from members who had completed MBAs, and the themes that started to emerge were consistent with what Id already found so far. Two of these stories reflected the general gist of what I found throughout the interview process. Emily studied at Harvard Business School before moving to Nairobi. She shared the importance of knowing what an MBA was to be used for and emphasised how crucial it was for prospective students to think really long and hard about their intentions. I think too many people just kind of go, Oh, I dont know what to do, Ill do an MBA, and that means that the value that they are getting from it is limited, she said. She did not think that an MBA was particularly well suited to teaching a person how to become an entrepreneur. It is very well suited to getting you a network, she added. If you come to do an MBA with a really clear business idea that you are able to execute, it's the best place in the world to get resources, support, advice, and to kind of spend your first year as a startup, to build it up. However, she added, If you are just coming in thinking, I might start something up then you will get discouraged and you will end up going into the job world and being offered $200,000 a year, and it's quite hard to say no that. She regretted not being more structured and thoughtful about her second year. A lot of friends who had done a 1-year MBA said that their experience was much too short, but unless you think really carefully about what you are using that second year for, two years felt too long. She had done journalism and marketing beforehand and wanted to start something up as she knew that she hated the corporate world. I don't know if it's a female thing, but I kind of thought, Gosh, I don't have what it takes yet to start something up. Looking back, that's nonsense, she laughed. I thought, I have been too liberal arts-y, I don't have enough quantitative experience, I'm not technical enough, I don't know anything about finance or accounting. An MBA is a really shortcut way of learning that.

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An MBA is an amazing tool if used really well, but to use it really well you have to know yourself and you have to know exactly what you are trying to use it for, she reflected. I used it as a kind of general learning and meeting experience. I probably would have liked to gain a bit more work experience before I did it. I come from a really nontraditional background and so I learned a huge amount, she shared. My friends who came from finance and consulting, I think they learned much less; probably because they were repeating stuff they had already done and partly because they were so burnt out from investment banking. I think lots of people who do the MBA tend to be people who are slightly risk adverse, she pointed out. This isn't a criticism, and I include myself in that category of people who think getting another stamp on their CV is a risk hedge. If you go into it with your eyes wide open and very thoughtful about what you want to get out of it, you will get a huge amount out of it. If you do it just because you don't know what else to do, I think it is an expensive way to spend two years. Emily talked about the value of the network, which she said was not worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on its own, but was about a thousand times more powerful than she imagined. She told me that it wasnt so much about just getting jobs; it was about people returning your emails. For instance, when she travelled around Africa and looked up every person on the alumni database, she e-mailed him or her and almost all of them answered, even though they were at all kinds of levels. I was just a young person there was no reason for them to meet with me, but because of the HBS filter, they met with me, she said. The HBS filter means that I expect you to be of a certain caliber so I'll meet with you. This also means help with learning about industries, creating networks for sales, contacts in countries, everything. Emily also talked about how the MBA had expanding her horizons in the expectations she placed on herself. In a really banal way, my Facebook profile would have looked very different four years ago than it does now. My Facebook feed is now full of stories from friends around the world doing stuff that I would have never encountered before. I now have inspiration from friends doing incredible things, which means I raise my own expectations of myself because I am not comparing myself to Mr. Jones next door, she said. You're comparing yourself to all these amazing people around the world and it makes you simultaneously more insecure but also more ambitious yourself. You see your friends running some of the top companies in Silicon Valley. Then you go, Oh God, wow, I should be doing something of that order. She added that as a female, Harvard Business School was a place where she met and was inspired by women more than men: It was the first time I arrived and it was like, Oh, you're my people. I kind of went, Hey, I'm allowed to be a strongly ambitious kind of alpha-type work woman, but I'm also allowed to be a woman, and I'm allowed to stick with these other women who are strongly ambitious and we can talk about Sex

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In The City or something like that. I saw these women who were able to be very strong but without being unfeminine. What do I wish I had known is that my living arrangements totally defined my MBA experience, she added. No one told me that before. I had plans to live on campus housing and then they have a ballot for it, but I didn't get anything, so I ended up having to live in a shared house with these other girls. It was one of the best things about my experience there. We had this amazingly happy house and I made these amazing friends. When I asked Emily for her thoughts on the varying value of the MBA in different worlds, she said that if a person planned to work at a well-known brand in the corporate world, an MBA would be a great investment. When I go and talk to people and tell them that I have an MBA from Harvard, the tenor of the conversation changes she said. It opens doors; it helps in a huge number of ways. An MBA, she theorised, Almost goes against you in the startup world. There is a whole kind of conversation around how MBAs are terrible in startups because they are quite risk adverse. I think startups hire MBAs at a certain point of growth, but they dislike MBA founders for example, because they think they're slightly cocky and don't know what they are doing and don't have any tangible skills, which might be true. So if you know for certain that you are going to start a company, I'm not entirely convinced it's the best investment for you, particularly if it's a tech company, she concluded. I think it is marginally more useful for starting a food company or for starting a fund or for starting a manufacturing company. I think it varies. But tech is so much about quick and dirty, scrambling, rapid iteration, moving quickly, embracing risk. It's kind of the opposite of learning a method and then applying the method, which is what an MBA is about. Another MBA graduate I talked to was Kirstie, who had been at a small and mediumsized enterprise offering very niche marketing services for over seven years, before she started to wonder what else she could do. To be honest I really started to wonder what I had been doing for that many years as I felt a growing sense of dissatisfaction, she shared. It wasn't until speaking with a great friend that I realized I had loved the job because I enjoyed fixing things, making things work better, and making things grow. She considered that perhaps her time had come to move on, but she had no idea how to translate what she had done into what she wanted to do. A friend suggested an MBA, which was met with a good giggle from those who knew Kirstie well. I had never been a particularly strong academic, Kirstie admitted. A hard worker and practical, perhaps but academic? Not on your life. Suddenly, it all clicked into place: An MBA would not only draw a line under what I had done and to a certain extent 'explain' what I had been doing for the last seven

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years but it was also the new experience that I was dying for, a new challenge to push me where I had failed, having got too comfortable, an opportunity to change what I had become. She had never been to Belgium before and knew it was a slightly strange choice but had a gut feeling that it was the place for her. It's not a bad school but its not in the top five either but for me it fit the bill for what I wanted my MBA to do. The year flew past and while she had never enjoyed learning at school or university, this time around was different. Half of her year involved lectures and the other half involved practicing what had been learned, through two consultancy placements (one was a business and the other was a non-profit organisation of the students choice). For the non-profit organisation, Kirstie headed out with six friends to Myanmar and promptly fell in love with the place she knew that she wanted to come back to stay and work at some point. She wanted to experience its steady development into a safer and happier place for others to live. She headed back to London to start her next adventure (and to figure out how to get back to Myanmar) and found herself looking at change management, which, before her MBA, she had never been aware of as a career choice. After asking around for advice from her network, she was offered a years contract project manager role on a big change project with a large firm turning over more than 3 billion a year. It was a great opportunity to learn, understand and then reassess I changed industry, role and size of firm I believe I would have never been considered for the role without my MBA, but I also probably would have never gone for it, she said. Three months in, I was offered a permanent role and managing a third of their key change projects. This isn't the end plan in any sense of the word however this part has absolutely exceeded expectations. An MBA is not a golden gateway to another world that you can't get to without it, she confirmed. It doesn't even teach you things you can't learn anywhere else. The key is to be clear why you personally are doing it, and achieve it no matter what. This degree was the best thing I could have given myself at that stage in my career, she said. It got me out of a hole, restored my confidence, improved my knowledge so I could walk and talk comfortably with CEOs and CFOs of billion-pound companies, made me look at the world in a totally new way, and made employers look at me differently. Like Emily, she confessed that a newfound friendship circle was an unexpected but crucial highlight of her MBA experience.

Why Some Startups Have Never Hired an MBA

Having spoken to a variety of MBA alumni, I started to notice the culture differences between them and those I knew who worked in startups. It was hard to pinpoint what the differences were, so I turned to Google. On a Quora forum under this topicxii, I

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found some insightful answers from entrepreneur, investor and professor John Greathouse. He wrote an article on whether entrepreneurs should get an MBAxiii, and talks about the incongruence between what an MBA can offer and what a startup needs. o Tool Users Startups are initially in discovery mode they need people who can DEFINE problems, not just solve those which are already defined. MBAs come out of school with a nice, shiny toolkit from which they are ready to bang away at problems, but they often lack the practical experience needed to thoughtfully define the challenges that need solving, as well as those that can be ignored. o Golden Handcuffs Top MBA schools are very expensive and graduates make big bank. When I graduated from Wharton 20+ years ago, my compatriots were making $120k - $150k (double in today's dollars?). I was one of the few who shunned the investment banking / consulting path for the life as an initially unpaid entrepreneur. In short, most startup can't afford MBAs as they don't deliver value commensurate with their compensation. o Attitude I have a lot of MBA friends, but the reality is that many people who get into top Business Schools are Tools. They are not cool and are often solely focused on furthering their own careers, rather than building teams. This preference for a cutthroat, rather than a collaborative culture, is not healthy at a fragile startup in which everyone must row in the same direction and the drama quotient must be minimized. This was only emphasized by other Quora forums I wandered into, like one titled, Why are MBAs looked down upon in Silicon Valley.xiv The key points seemed to be that there is a perception among startup entrepreneurs that MBAs are driven by motivations such as money and profit, as opposed to the holistic value of a product, and that MBAs typical lack of technical acumen can make them unable to understand general industry trends beyond buzzword level. Via Quora, I found this perspective from Matthew Roche, CEO, BO.LTxv: I have noticed that the type of person who gets an MBA tends to be seeking leverage. For example, if I am smart, and then I attach Stanford to my name, then I have a force multiplier in terms of access to resources and authority. I am borrowing their brand to enhance mine. It is rational. If you are the type of person who values brand-borrowing, your instinct will be to continue to seek assets that create the same leverage. Goldman, Proctor and Gamble, and other huge brands do this. They provide access to huge resources, distribution, and, frankly, when you say you work for them, your calls get returned. A startup has none of this. You have to create all of your own leverage, and your 47

resume is of limited utility in hiring and selling. If you are looking for startup success, you would not seek people that want leverage or who are optimized for situations where leverage already exists. You want people who create leverage. You want engineers and salespeople.

Even if you dont want to start your own company, I wondered if getting an MBA would hinder your ability to be even be hired by startups. GoCardless is a leading London-based startup with 15 employees, who manage online payments. Their founder explains why they have never hired an MBA in the below company blog post.xvi I was driven to write this post by a jobs fair we recently attended, and the number of deluded MBAs / ex-consultants (NB. I and my co-founders are all ex-consultants) who came to talk to us all under the same terrible misconception. I WANT TO BE A PRODUCT MANAGER AT GOCARDLESS Nine out of ten of those guys (not all guys by the way) came over, and, after a wellrehearsed handshake and polite introduction, began to tell me how much they would love a role as a Product Manager at GoCardless. Now the fact that you want to work at my company is a huge compliment, thank you, but hang on, I didnt see a job ad on our site for a product manager. Come to think of it, what the hell would a product manager do at an early stage startup like GoCardless? We have got 15 employees. As one of our Biz Dev guys, Nabeel, said at the weekend: Do they seriously think that they are going to rock up on day 1, be given a team of developers and let loose on the product? SO I ASKED THEM I was initially a little taken aback and would outline how GoCardless worked and the kind of roles we had and they seemed a little shocked, like it wasnt quite what they were expecting. So I started asking them: What do you think a product management role at GoCardless would entail?. Most responses took a similar theme: I can devise a product strategy to help you grow your company over the coming years. Wtf? Would you like a corner office with that? Frankly, this is crazy talk. How can you possibly think that anyone in their right mind is going to hire you, Joe Schmo, from semi-respectable business school A, with all of six case studies under your belt to define the product strategy for their startup? That is simply not how early stage startups work. SO HOW DO EARLY STAGE STARTUPS WORK? More so than later on, early stage startups need to be driven by a collection of people who get shit done. If they are not, then nothing will happen and the company will die. The kind of people who work in startups early on, in whatever role, are there because they want to take ownership of and see impact from their work. When you are that

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small, everyone has to have the product manager mentality. But they also have to be able to get shit done. This fits with my personal belief that early stage companies work best when they have a flat structure. But even in a situation where that is not the case (or that I am wrong), you would expect management of any type, product or otherwise, to come from the founders/management team at this stage in the companys life. If you have a need for a distinct product management function at this time, I would be extremely worried about either the kind of management team that is in place, or the kind of people the company is hiring; in fact, probably both.

ASKING A STARTUP TO HIRE YOU AS A PRODUCT MANAGER IS BASICALLY ASKING FOR A CALL-UP TO THE MANAGEMENT TEAM Expecting to become a product manager at a large corporate, or even a later stage startup like Twitter or Google, is a great option for an MBA, particularly one with a semi-technical background. It also makes a lot of sense for the company. However, asking a startup to hire you as a product manager is basically asking for a call-up to the management team. Unless you have exceptional experience, skills or connections, this is delusional. Now I am not trying to argue that there is no place for MBAs, or that no MBA has a clue about startups both of those are demonstrably untrue. Also having an MBA itself is clearly not the problem. So what is? The problem is that a large proportion of MBAs ambitions seem to have moved away from entering a large corporate to becoming part of the burgeoning startup scene, and this shift has not been reflected in the course content. Most MBAs will offer whole modules on entrepreneurship and startups, yet they somehow fail to communicate the most basic understanding of what it takes to start a company to their students. (I acknowledge isolated exceptions such as Peter Thiels Stanford lecture series.)

BIZ DEV IS A CLEVER NAME FOR DIRTY WORK As a result there is a large number of people qualifying from business schools in London (and probably in most other places outside SF) that do not understand the fundamental rule of startups: ideas & strategies are worthless, execution is everything. If your whole role is to come up with ideas & strategies for the product but you cant make them happen yourself, and have a very limited understanding of how you could, you are pointless. Trust me, as a non-technical co-founder, I know. This is particularly true of non-technical students who seem to think that working in a startup is all about coming up with high-level strategies, negotiating big sales deal and raising multi-million dollar investment rounds. Its not. As this post from Christopher Steiner says: Biz Dev is a clever name for dirty work.

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WHENEVER I SEE A CV WITH AN MBA ON IT, I VIEW IT AS A BLACKMARK So many MBAs come out of b-school with this mindset that I have now reached the point where I see having an MBA on your CV as a blackmark. And its not just me. If you have one and youre serious about applying to a startup, I would explain in your intro email why youre not like most other MBAs and you actually understand what it takes to be successful at a startup. Dont fancy getting your hands dirty? Then dont join an early stage startup. And whatever you do, dont start one: I spend at least 50% of my time doing crap that I wouldnt ask anyone else in the company to do. Like I said earlier, you can probably snag a product management role at a corporate or even a later stage startup and do a great job there.

IF YOU HAVE READ ALL THAT AND YOU STILL WANT TO JOIN AN EARLY STAGE STARTUP, THEN READ ON So what can you do to make yourself better equipped for working at, and more attractive to, a startup? Theres no single answer, but the kind of things that distinguish applicants (and eventual employees) at GoCardless are: (1) Embracing new technologies and learning to code even if you will never be a hacker, a basic understanding will deliver a step-change in your effectiveness; (2) A proven ability to get shit done start and keep up a club, blog (hypocritical I know given my recent hiatus!) or other small enterprise; or (3) Knowledge and experience of working at a startup the only way to really learn about doing a startup is by working at or starting one yourself. (The next best thing is to be well read on the space and with the number of great resources out there you really have no excuse.)

Chapter summary
1. Know what you want to use the MBA for it is not a magic bullet. An MBA serves you well if you want to work with companies who are at a later stage of business. 2. If you want to deal with early-stage businesses and startups, an MBA might actually just be an expensive, debt-ridden procrastination tool unless you already have a very clear idea of what you might use an MBA network for,

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and want to start developing your business in your second year of the program. 3. An Alternative MBA cannot replace the pre-screened network and the peers of the traditional MBA. However, a traditional MBA does not give you the same time and freedom to pursue work experience projects with startups, which is probably a more useful field to work in if you ultimately see yourself working with early-stage startups.

Exercises
1. Are you more attracted to working with later-stage companies or early-stage companies? 2. If you have not yet experienced both, what are some ways that you could gain this experience? 3. If you were to tell your own story in later editions of a book like this, to others considering doing an MBA, what might yours look like? If you were your future self looking back on your life, did your present self choose a traditional program or design your own alternative, and what did that look like?

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7.
Accept Your Prediction Limitations
By now, I was feeling convinced that I knew which option I should be exploring, and it only became confirmed at an event we held at Adam Street Club on breaking into the tech startup scene. Chris Mooney, a long-time member now working at his own startup (having worked at a tech startup before) took the stage to talk about his own experiences. I began working Corporate Finance before Strategy Consulting. I escaped the corporate world and roles at Citigroup and IBM and joined a technology start-up Qubit as one of the first hires. Having left Qubit in September 2012 I traveled to New York to begin an MBA at Columbia Business School. Whilst in New York I met with a number of technology start-ups as I began to build my network with a view to applying for roles at these companies post MBA. However, all these meetings and conversations made me realise that starting my own technology venture was what I really wanted to do and embarking upon an MBA was simply putting off the inevitable. I was already in New York and all set to begin my life there, I left after the welcome drinks that were a few weeks before the start of classI had pretty much moved to NYC and was living with a close friend before getting settled. I declined the offer from Columbia and returned to London to launch Cloudcart and I haven't looked back. I basically came back and worked on the start-up full time. Whilst the 'unknown' offers a high degree of excitement and intrigue it also provides a great deal of uncertainty that is definitely the worst aspect of starting your own company. The best thing is undoubtedly the feeling that you get when you see people using and enjoying your product. The best advice was something that I read in a book many years ago. I don't remember the exact source or the exact wording but it went along the lines of: "nothing happens unless you make it happen". I only realised how true this was when I embarked upon this journey. The internet has a wealth of information about starting businesses, especially within the technology sector. I followed entrepreneurs and investors for years on Twitter and through their blogs and read every word of their advice for budding entrepreneurs. I also attended many networking events and met with people who had achieved what I wanted to achieve and so felt prepared.

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Even when you think you might have come to the end of your own personalized costbenefit analysis, you can sometimes only know how youre going to feel in a given situation after youve already experienced it.

Learning now to earn later

Mark Suster is a 2x entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of VC. He joined Upfront Ventures in 2007 as a General Partner after selling his company to Salesforce.com. He focuses on early-stage technology companies. I read his blog often and what struck me about my own hesitation to do an MBA was that it wasnt just the two years opportunity cost that came with doing the program. It was the fact that, had I chosen to do an MBA, after graduating I would be saddled into debt obligations that would make it a lot harder to take experimental, artistic, entrepreneurial endeavours afterwards. It would be harder to take on jobs that would allow me to learn and instead Id be forced harder to consider jobs that allowed me to earn as Suster says on one of his blog postsxvii : I often have career discussions with entrepreneurs both young and more mature whether they should join company X or not. I usually pull the old trick of answering a question with a question. My reply is usually, is it time for you to earn or to learn? I only emphasize the question because I find it much more helpful to join a company with realistic expectations of what you want to get out of it. My advice is often, make sure that what you get out of working at this company is one or several of the following: a great network of talented executives and VCs, more responsibility than your last job, specific industry or technical skills that will help you in what you do next, a chance to partner with companies that will increase your industry relationships, etc. Learn now to earn later.

What struck me about Susters observation is that sometimes, to reach the top of whichever mountain youre climbing, you have to be willing to work for a lower salary in order to learn from the best. That option seems like less of a realistic one if youre juggling the debts that come with business school. I felt like the successful entrepreneurs Id met over the years were just as intelligent, driven, and structured as the successful MBA graduates Id met. The differentiating factor was that the entrepreneurs tended to be, as one Quora user put it, more scrappy, creative, resourceful. As Tanya Loh, a Chicago Booth MBA '09 graduate, described in one Quora forum:xviii The words creative, resourceful, scrappy, ballsy, and do-it-yourself aren't the first that come to mind when I think of my years in business school. I met a lot of super smart, well-connected people with clear milestones and career plans that amazed me with their specificity and measurability along that mystical totem pole of success. These

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were people who had gone places and were going places. That said, outside the forum of studying businesses and analyzing strategies, of looking at industries at arms length and guesstimating the viability of a new venture based on much more established analogs, there is a lot to be learned on the front lines. In execution. In getting your hands dirty, in translating your awesome idea into reality. This I have gathered from observing a few startups and their founders, whose passion, conviction, vision, and focus manages to draw the talent pool needed -- those creative, resourceful, scrappy, and ballsy do-it-yourself individuals willing to go long and sometimes do what might seem "beneath them" to execute. From my experience, neither these types nor the founders they follow, are typically MBA's.

These points made me reflect on the methods I use whenever Im making a big decision, which includes the MBA it comes down to staying upwind and placing myself around supermodels and wizards (metaphorically bear with me).

Staying upwind
When Paul Graham (the founder of the Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator which birthed Airbnb and Dropbox) talks about what he wishes he had known in high school, he talks about staying upwind.xix He rallies against the "don't give up on your dreams" advice that is so often touted at commencement speeches: In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward. Instead of trying to predict what you're going to want in twenty years, he talks about giving yourself the best skill-set possible by always selecting the more difficult problems to work on. Those tougher projects sharpen your skills and therefore inherently equip you best for whatever you work on next (which you can't necessarily predict from here in the present). Most importantly, choosing to tackle tough problems brings you in contact with others aching for challenge: "Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on."

Will this introduce me to supermodels and wizards?

Rob Fitzpatrick spent time learning from Paul Graham at Y Combinator. He came up with a twist on Woody Allen's oft-repeated quote: "90% of success is showing up (to 54

the right place and possibly creating that place if it doesn't yet exist and also talking to people while you're there)." In a blog post called How to date a supermodel (or get dealflow or find cofounders)xx, Fitzpatrick is talking about meeting co-founders and getting deal flow, but it applies to any situation where you are trying to engineer a desired outcome. He uses the analogy of meeting a supermodel and how the likelihood of the episode happening rests less on your having a six-pack and more on hanging out where the supermodels actually are. Any outcome has a pipeline and often we can place too much weight on an imagined entry price instead of just showing up. When it comes to making pivotal decisions, it's tempting to try and predict beyond what we can actually know. Fitzpatrick suggests that sometimes the most productive first step is making yourself both familiar and valuable within relevant environments. My friend Stu pointed out what I had suspected all along: "At this stage in life, in your twenties, you're still an apprentice in anything you do." He said, "The important thing is to find your wizards, the masters in your field. Sometimes they're in industry, sometimes they're in academia." These are the people whose wisdom and knowledge you want to absorb, he said; whose paths you somehow want to partly emulate. To be able to recognise your wizards, you need to first figure out what your deepest values are, what you're trying to learn more about what excites and interests you, what you could read about all day long, what you could spend your whole life exploring and contributing towards. While those answers are not for sale, they seem to be the ones we end up spending the most on trying to find.

Final summary
It is easy to think that the answer to Should I do an MBA? is automatically no if youre an aspiring entrepreneur, yet that seems too glib and simplistic. Instead, through my research, I realized that different lifecycles of a company require different skill-sets. Great entrepreneurs are like great artists. Managing a business is a science whereas starting a business seems to be an art. What I found through working with early-stage startups trying to find their business models was that there was a chaos and camaraderie and creativity that felt very different to working through established companies where there are processes in place to execute and optimize the proven business model. I knew that I wanted to work in startups as opposed to mid-size or large companies and that I wanted to follow a path that built on the values that I had already established in my career so far. Id always suspected that an MBA taught a person how to manage a business rather than start a business; that an MBA refines the skills you need to grow in a role where youre working within mature companies, whereas street credibility takes you further if youre looking for roles in early-stage companies, where the business isnt even a business when its a zygote; when its two guys in a garage searching for a business model.

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While MBA graduates may not typically become more entrepreneurial after doing the program, I suspected that the program might provide the skills and mindsets needed to grow and scale a business. When I researched which schools provided MBA programs best suited to entrepreneursxxi, the schools that seemed to consistently outperform their peers in the number of student entrepreneurs produced were Stanford, MIT Sloan, Wharton, and Harvard. As for making my own MBA decision, I gave myself the advice that Id gleaned through the process of writing this book. 1. Meet Your Own Internal Negotiators Get to the real source of the debate - the others in the room. Realise that the small questions are informing The Big Question. Recognise that the MBA can be a catalyst or an expensive detour, depending on what's ultimately more important to you in the end. 2. Define Your Decision Criteria Define your decision criteria. If you're looking to pivot your career into business, it can be an invaluable tool. Go elite or don't bother, but accept that the price tag is hefty for those schools. 3. Find Your Heroes Find your heroes because their narratives will help you to define what you ideally want yours to look like. Recognise that there are many ways to build a fulfilling, meaningful life. There are plenty of successful people doing incredible things who have consciously decided not to do MBAs because their influence and fulfilment has not been solely tied to one degree. 4. Assess the Real Value of the MBA Option Remember that the best platforms (the elite schools) can be powerful feeder programs but that you don't choose them, they choose you. It's very hard to get in and if you're going to apply, the application process in itself can be very time consuming. Even if you get in, they're platforms, not magic bullets. Beware of turning into a lemming. 5. Assess the Real Value of the Alternative Option Seriously consider alternative programs. Tim Ferriss has designed an alternative program and so too has Joshua Kaufman; both are successful entrepreneurs in their own right and are more broadly known in the progressive web world. If you want success in a traditional setting, a traditional degree like an MBA might be more powerful than anything you could create yourself but if you want success in progressive, creative settings; you will probably gain more from designing a progressive, creative learning experience. 6. Start Where You Plan to End Remember the hidden benefits to MBAs: the chance to room with people like Victoria Ransom and meeting other female entrepreneurs. If you're using it as a career pivot tool from small business to big business, it can absolutely provide that switch, even if you don't go to one of the Top 10 schools. 56

7. Accept Your Prediction Limitations When you finally make a decision, make one that keeps you upwind. Make one that introduces you to supermodels and wizards. Make one that feels right to you (not the others in the room with you).

My verdict
I found that Ingrid and Matt came to similar conclusions as I did. Ingrid I applied to school, did my GMATs, won a fully paid scholarship and 2 months before I was going to start a job opportunity landed in my lap. This was not the job or career path I originally pursued but somehow through the process of preparing myself for an MBA and pounding the pavement looking for a new job something in my gut [t]old me that this felt right. I put the MBA on hold and decided to purs[u]e the new job with total focus and commitment. Four weeks into the role, it suddenly hit me. This job was even better than going to school because I was being paid and challenged to learn new things every day, build a network and gain experience that would give me credibility if I excelled. The exact reasons that I wanted to get an MBA in the first place. I hold the value of a degree in very high regard. There is no doubt in my mind that I give people with an MBA a certain level of credibility because I know they have been through a certain rigor. You cannot discount the value of education or real work experience but what matters is what you do with those opportunities. What I think really matters in your career it is pushing yourself to ask those difficult questions and be honest about what makes you happy, what drives you and what sacrifices you are willing to make to find that balance.

Matt Although I still waver back and forth, Ive pretty much settled on the fact that I wont be getting a traditional MBA. Most importantly, I've realized it's a very personal decision. It depends on what kind of person you are and who you want to become. Am I more interested in becoming a Manager, or a Leader? Am I more interested in landing a great job, or building my own job? Do I feel like I need to rub elbows with other MBAs who are brought together by an institution, or reach out to people and meet people I look up to, who are like-minded, and who I actually choose (and want) to be around? For me, I've always been a self-starter and a creative thinker. I'm agreeable and can make friends, but I kind of hate the crowd and feel most at home when I'm doing things outside the norm and leading myself. But I've led teams. I've started several

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small businesses. I've been able to easily connect and network. I'm self-directed enough to learn and read on my own. I prefer action to theory. I'm easily enthused and can get shit done. I have a high tolerance for risk and the unknown. And I value freedom over most things. I've finally begun to appreciate how unique all of these qualities are. And they don't necessarily jive well with an MBA program. I believe I can accomplish the validation, networking, and knowledge that an MBA provides. It may take more time and more grit on my part. But that's where I'm at home. That's what makes me feel alive. I know I can gain the knowledge of an MBA. I know I can network with and meet the right people. The one thing I'm unsure about is validation. But I have faith that my actions -- the things I BUILD and DO -- will work as validation enough.

I decided to create my own Alternative MBA. I took myself through the process of evaluating my most important values and discerning the other voices in the room with me as I made my decision. Instead of working for a big company, I wanted to start and grow my own private practice, at the intersection of psychology, education, and technology. This would require me to retrain as a psychologist. I wanted to specialize in transitions, and I wanted to use my existing experience in digital startups to add a content production arm to my psychology practice. Once this vision was clear, it became easier to set deliverables instead of planning life by semesters, I set myself goals per quarter. I made a list of people I wanted to meet and the articles I wanted to write. I made a list of the skills I wanted to acquire in the coming year and the countries I wanted to visit and learn from. I signed up for courses in the relevant areas through Creative Live, Udemy, and General Assembly, as well as applying to more traditional schools, but for a psychology degree as opposed to a business degree. I also resolved to read Josh Kaufmans 99 books list and to start a book club with like-minded aspiring entrepreneurs. We made a list of articles and posts we wanted to read over the coming year and when we would read them by. The combination of doing these things reminded me of that Douglas Adams quote: I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

Final exercises
1. Go back to your answers from the earlier chapters and refine them further, having now completed this book. 2. Ask your friends and family for feedback on what they can see you doing in the future. Gather 10 email addresses and send out a variation of this sample template: 58

Dear (friends and family), I recognize that this is an unusual request but I am planning the next stages of my career and would very much appreciate your input as you are the ones who know me best. This was an exercise suggested to me by a book I recently read I just wondered if you might have a few minutes to provide some quick answers to the following: What can you see me doing, in terms of my career, in five years time? Ten years time? What do you think my greatest strengths are? What do you think my blind spots are?

I really appreciate your time and thoughts. Thanks! 3. If you want to create your own Alternative MBA, here are three steps you can take, right now: o Clear time in your schedule to dedicate to your career strategy process. Rearrange what you need to rearrange in order to have four hours of uninterrupted, peaceful time this weekend, and start with going through the exercises in this book. Then schedule a couple of hours to compare results with a partner, a friend, or someone else who is going through the same MBA deliberation process. o Make a list of deliverables, knowing that they will evolve. In a year, or two years, what are the deliverables you would like to get, that you could achieve with or without an MBA program? Some examples: I want to work on projects with these companies. I want to meet these people I want to attend these conferences I want to speak publicly about these topics I want to blog about these topics Be prepared; this is likely to shift as you get further through your own process. o Create a filing system for this process. Read the resources in the next section and start recording your favourite ideas in Evernote, Google Drive, Dropbox, or another system that works for you. Start an ongoing Microsoft Word document that records your thoughts around this process as well as the highlights from the feedback from your friends and family.

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8.
Educate Yourself
One of the other members I met through this process was Seb, a London Business School graduate who taught himself the digital skills he needed outside of the core business curriculum. His story reminded me that whether or not you end up doing a traditional program, no one program can give you everything, and it remains important to learn from a variety of sources. Here are some of the most popular startup resources we often find ourselves recommending, as well as some that have been produced by Escape the City.

Other resources by Escape the City

The Escape Manifesto Startup MBA suggested reading

Books

SPIN Selling Neil Rackham Business Model Generation - Alexander Osterwalder The Four Steps to the Epiphany Steve Blank Do the Work - Steven Pressfield The War of Art - Steven Pressfield The Personal MBA - Josh Kaufman The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick The Art of the Start Guy Kawasaki Anything You Want Derek Sivers Start With Why Simon Sinek Rework 37 Signals Delivering Happiness Tony Hsieh A Book About Innocent: Our story Evil Plans Hugh MacLeod Tribes Seth Godin Ignore Everybody Hugh MacLeod Crush It Gary Vaynerchuk Purple Cow Seth Godin From Good To Great Jim Collins The $100 Startup Chris Guillebeau The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell

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Escape From Cubicle Nation Pam Slim 4-Hour Work Week Timothy Ferriss How They Started David Lester Start Something That Matters Blake Mycoskie Screw Business as Usual Richard Branson Losing My Virginity Richard Branson The Lean Startup Eric Ries The E-Myth Michael E Gerber The Long Tail Chris Anderson Founders At Work Jessica Livingstone Creating A World Without Poverty Muhammad Yunus

Blogs and online essays

A VC The Startup Toolkit Seth Godin Paul Graham Andrew Chen The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Starting And Running Your Business

Classes

General Assembly CreativeLive Mixergy Udemy

Some final words from Escape the City

If you are considering quitting your corporate job for something more exciting, unconventional, or adventurous, many people will tell you that it isnt a good idea. Sometimes these people will be your nearest friends and family. Theyll be naturally risk-averse because they dont want to see you in trouble (financially or otherwise). Other people will project their hopes and fears onto you if you do something different. You implicitly represent a challenge to their life choices. Expect criticism. Use this as fuel for your motivation! Beware advice. There is an awful lot of unsolicited and bad advice out there. Advice is usually based on the experiences and world-view of the person giving the advice not based on a real understanding of your goals. You are the only person who really knows what you are trying to achieve. When you ask people for advice they will

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generally tell you to do what theyve done. Unless it went badly, in which case theyll tell you to do the opposite. People give you advice based on what worked for them. Not necessarily what will work for you. The world is full of all different types of people. Its one of the reasons why life is so exciting. Optimists and pessimists, cynics and enthusiasts. When youre making any big life change you really need to surround yourself with glass-half-full people. You need all the buoyancy you can get. The tricky thing is that often those closest to you will be the ones telling you that your plans are a bad idea. Theres very little you can do other than tell them that youre really excited about your plans and that youd appreciate their support. Illegitimi non carborundum. - From The Escape Manifesto

@JoelCPeterson's recent posts:

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130514070419-11846967the-200-000-question-to-get-an-mba-or-not
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http://rankings.ft.com/businessschoolrankings/global-mba-ranking-2013

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http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/finaid/cost/ https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/3dd2aba3612c v Eric Jackson - http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/11/13/the-10-mostunder-rated-reasons-why-you-should-get-an-mba/

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http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/08/10/the-ten-biggest-lies-of-bschool/ The Ten Most Dangerous Things Business Schools Teach MBAs http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/08/26/the-ten-most-dangerous-thingsbusiness-schools-teach-mbas/ http://johngreathouse.com/mba/

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http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/06/28/mba/

http://cubiclemillionaire.com/should-i-get-an-mba-whats-the-value-of-an-mbadegree/ http://personalmba.com/manifesto/

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http://www.quora.com/Entrepreneurship/Why-do-digital-entrepreneurs-hate-MBAs

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http://infochachkie.com/mba/ http://www.quora.com/Master-of-Business-Administration/Why-are-MBAslooked-down-upon-in-Silicon-Valley

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http://findmyjobnow.com/why-are-mbas-looked-down-upon-in-silicon-valley-5/ http://mattjackrob.com/2012/11/13/why-we-dont-hire-anyonewith-an-mba/ xvii http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-for-you-to-earn-orto-learn/

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http://www.quora.com/Entrepreneurship/Does-getting-an-MBA-make-someone-abetter-entrepreneur

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http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html http://thestartuptoolkit.com/blog/2011/10/how-to-date-a-supermodel-or-getdealflow-or-find-cofounders/ xxi http://www.quora.com/What-MBA-programs-are-best-suited-to-entrepreneursgenerally

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