This week’s quote goes out to Mike Kaplan:
If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. You don’t even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike.
–Paul Graham, How to Start a Startup
I’m not surprised by this statistic. An MBA is just a tool that teaches you how to take action. The challenge (and satisfaction) of entrepreneurialism lies in finding ways to make a concept actionable, monetizable, and appropriately bite-sized. MBAs study how to do this, but I think there are a lot of excellent alternatives to the MBA route.
I seriously considered going the MBA route. But, I started to focus on the inevitable overlap between business and law and I had trouble defining what I could get from an MBA that I couldn’t get from a JD. I wanted to learn how to play the game smart and plan for contingencies before they were overwhelming my company.
Jerry Seinfeld may have said it best…”To me, a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We’re all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there is a problem the lawyer is the only person who has read the inside of the top of the box.”
Thanks for the shout and keep posting. Rock on Chicago, rock on London!