Wade Armstrong

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MBA: Worth it or Not?

Posted Friday June 2, 2006 in Business

Just about two weeks ago, the USC Marshall School of Business saw fit to confer upon me an MBA. Of course, everyone wants to know if I think dropping out of life for two years to get these three letters after my name was a good idea. The real answer to that question is that it takes years to truly assess if an MBA, or any other professional degree, has a payoff. But that’s unsatisfying, so we’ll take the short view and ask: right now, two weeks after I got the darned thing, do I think my MBA was worth it?

Of course, that’s an impossible question to answer. To anybody who’s gotten their MBA, the first measure of the value of the degree is its marginal net present value, or how much an MBA adds to my earning potential. I, like many other MBAs, would contend that access to more exciting and challenging jobs is also a key measure of the degree’s usefulness. How much money will I make? Will my jobs be better? It’s too early to know. (Although I can assure you that, in the last two weeks, I have neither done any work nor made any money. Thus, either my degree is a failure or my vacation is a success.)

But I guess I’d better hope that there’s some immediate payoff to getting an MBA, because here I sit, planning to start a business with my new degree. I do believe that I can immediately be more successful with an MBA than without; this belief is grounded in three specific takeaways I gained from my USC Marshall MBA program:

• The toolkit
• Networking
• Inspiring ideas

The Toolkit

Based on my past work experience, I had a good picture of my weaknesses as I went into my MBA program; it was my specific hope that Marshall would help me patch those weaknesses. With that goal I stubbornly stuck my way through first-term Managerial Accounting, signed up for the difficult and information-dense Financial Analysis and Valuations class, stepped up every time there was a chance for public speaking, learned Negotiations, and worked to stand out in three separate Strategy classes.

Now, no MBA program is going to be perfect, but I do feel that I walked away with the tools that I wanted — not least because I knew what I wanted before I started my program.

Networking

With a few years of entrepreneurship under my belt, I’ve come to really appreciate the value of networking. Business school is a great opportunity to be with 250 other people who feel the same way — even better, with 250 people who are all going to end up being much more powerful than they are now. Business school is also a put-up-or-shut-up environment in which the workplace effectiveness of an individual becomes visible very quickly. Thanks to Marshall, I’ve massively expanded my trusted network, both by adding people who believe in me and by adding people in whom I believe. That’s a great takeaway.

Inspiring ideas

I never anticipated that I’d want to leave business school with an idea for a company, but it happened. That idea came to my partner and me because I was in business school and I’d learned how to look deeper and operationalize ideas. That idea also came to us because I was always around people with clever ideas, being inspired by those ideas, learning about how people developed ideas, and getting to bounce ideas off of some truly clever and brilliant classmates. Never before had I spent so much time around so many ideas and so many people who could help develop ideas. This intellectual stimulation alone was of tremendous value.

These three factors are all immediate, useful take-aways from my two years out of the workforce. It’s fair to say that business school has already started to pay off; in another year we’ll look back again and see if I’ve been able to take specific actions that were informed by my MBA and which improved my business outcome. Frankly, I strongly expect there will be specific, measurable instances of benefit to talk about come May of 2007. Either that, or I’ll be in a good position to write the decisive treatise on which boxes to live in.