Get an MBA and acquire the healthy level of narcissism that is necessary to become a leader
What do you get from an MBA? One recent study found that MBAs acquire an enormous amount of self-confidence during their graduate education. They learn to believe that they are the best and the brightest.
This narcissism has a real career impact. Psychologists at Ohio State University studied the behavior of 153 MBA students, who were put in groups of four and asked to orchestrate a large financial transaction on behalf of an imaginary company. The psychologists observed that the students who had the strongest narcissistic traits were most likely to emerge as leaders.
According to Amy Brunell, the lead author, the results of the study had large implications for real-world settings, because “narcissistic leaders tend to have volatile and risky decision- making performance and can be ineffective and potentially destructive leaders.”
Brutal commentary coming out of Bloomberg, considering a good chunk of their readership has come out of an MBA program at some point.
The study does validate something I've seen-- that it DOES take a level of gumption/ego/reality distortion field to rise to lead/manage within an organization or have the guts to go out and do things that change the world. Whether that change is for good or for evil probably depends on the person's motivations and the levels of unhealthy narcissism, though.
I've heard that you can trace the downturn of industry sectors by the percentage of exiting MBA grads surveyed who say they want to go into that field post-graduation. Is it a wonder that finance is suffering now after being the career of choice for decades? By the time people find out what the next hot thing is, that thing has peaked.
Another big 'most-wanted' company by MBA grads these days? Google.
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Overestimating one's own abilities, however, could be where ego starts to go bad—that is, believing that what you want to accomplish can be done alone.
1. You learn a lot in an MBA program and it's super useful knowledge. We've had to pick up a lot of corporate legal and finance knowledge now for Posterous which we would have learned in business school (I'd rather learn it as we did, but that's a separate point)
2. Having confidence is incredibly important when it comes to running a company, making deals, managing people, or just generally doing any job. The more confidence you have, the better you can lead, the better work you do, more gets done. Our best deals came when we were most confident.
3. We (Posterous) have been in meetings where we've hoped to work with other companies on things. Anytime we talk to a developer or product guy, we get super excited and want to work with them. When/if we are passed on to the business guy, we get pissed off/annoyed and cut off the partnership. I feel these guys we've talked to (I'm not saying all MBAs) are the guys who have this narcissism that makes them hard to deal with and they probably lead their companies astray.
2. MBA's are becoming a commodity. MFA is the thing. Design, kids, design. It's not "plastic" any more. (The Graduate ref.)
1) its great when changing careers
2) its really good for networking
3) its a big benefit to guys with technical backgrounds looking to round out the business side
4) its a "finishing school" for CEOs (probably useful IF you want to stay on as a CEO once your company starts to really grow, rather than just jump ship for another startup)
Sachin is spot on, and I think its because the startup world is a different place, and the MBA stereotypes don't apply here as much.
You need to be an entrepreneur first, and then you can learn to be an MBA, it doesn't work the other way around.
It comes up a lot because so many of my friends go get them, but I've yet to see concrete evidence that it helps in this space. I'll start polling those guys to see if they've got some real world examples.
We'll definitely have to keep in touch on this topic to see how things go at Posterous, and where an MBA could have helped?
any comments on the 'room for error' part of the bloomberg opinion? that aspect was very intriguing to me.
Robert -- I'm pretty convinced that Enron-esque 'smartest guy in the room' hubris applied here too. Money talks, and when you make as much money as you do in finance, one takes on the air of invincibility. I love "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- it's a much better explanation than this article of what's happening now in the markets.
Yep, you probably wouldnt be in this biz if you were MBAs. Disclaimer: I know I'm making huge generalizations here.
MBAs seem to learn a certain framework at school which causes them to see the world in a specific way. Sometimes this makes them blind to the basic common sense of "build what people want".
Now this opens them to some opportunities that guys like you and I would probably miss, or wouldnt want to be a part of :-)
No offense to those guys, but I like the simple common sense approach.
Have you guys blogged about the lessons learned on the legal/finance side? Would love to hear what you thought was most important...
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