Last year in November, Seth Godin had this vision of creating “a new way to learn about a new way of doing business.” Around this time, his project is approaching completion, with nine bright individuals getting close to graduating a six months, free MBA. Code named SAMBA, the MBA program had a very selective admission process, with more than 48,000 visitors viewing the program page, 350 applicants submitting their documents, 27 finalists interviewed in New York and only nine participants actually starting the program.

SAMBA Team (source: www.sixmonthmba.com)

If you want to learn more about the participants in the program, their entrepreneurial background and MBA projects, check out their blog, which was also their school journal. If you want to see what Seth Godin got out of his experiment, check out his blog.

The reason why I like this project is because it is an excellent proof of concept that you can do an unaccredited, short and free MBA and actually get more out of it than what most MBA students get out of a lot of ivy league MBA programs out there. As long as you have the driving desire to succeed and the will to act, no boundary should be able to stop you from achieving your goals.

At the time, Serbs and Croats were dying by the scores — for their leaders’ delusions — in the ruins of the city of Vukovar. Journalists, diplomats and many Yugoslavs (as they then were) could just feel that the war was going to move on, soon, to Bosnia, and that it would be terrible.

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New York Times: Letter From the Balkans – On a Campus in Bulgaria, Every Reason for Optimism

MBA - Master of Business Administration (source: www.getentrepreneurial.com)

…that is the question…

The best answer, especially if you ask a consultant, will be… it depends…

But before we get to the details of the depending answer, let’s see what the context looks like. I guess we all acknowledge the fact that basic education is one of the ingredients to success. Reading, writing and doing basic maths is definitely helping us achieve something hopefully relevant with our lives (at least enough for us to realize what’s going on).

What about a graduate degree or an MBA? Laura Ries considers that, for anyone who wants to work on the Wall Street or aims at sitting in the CEO chair sometime in the future, and MBA is a must have, because not having it will not open you the right doors to grant you entrance into these worlds.

Moreover, having the right MBA from the right school (i.e. Harvard, Wharton, Kellog, Stanford, to quote Laura’s picks), might even guarantee you a pretty good job in good corporations. However, is an MBA really necessary to be a successful CEO or antrepreneur? David Ogilvy, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison or even Larry Page proved it is not.

On the other hand, John Thain (Merrill Lynch), Richard Fuld (Lehman Brothers),  Vikram Pandit (Citigroup) and John Paulson, the hedge fund kingpin, all have an MBA. As New York Times puts it, they’ve all got fat bank accounts and have had their share of media coverage all over the world and, yet, these have not protected their businesses, at least not more than the US Federal Reserve had.

Uhm… the conclusions so far do not look really bright for the MBA. You don’t need one to be successful and having one is not necessarily protecting you from failures. Even worse, Laura thinks that MBA’s could even hurt you, especially if they are too analytical and too theoretical (left-brain oriented), thus leaving your creative side (right-brain) somewhat outside focus. The reason why Laura thinks this is because she believes that it takes the both brain sides to make the world go round, to properly manage a corporation and to be successful in the long run.

The usual critics of business education also complain about these things. “Some say the schools have become too scientific, too detached from real-world issues. Others say students are taught to come up with hasty solutions to complicated problems. Another group contends that schools give students a limited and distorted view of their role — that they graduate with a focus on maximizing shareholder value and only a limited understanding of ethical and social considerations essential to business leadership.” (New York Times)

On the other side, Business Schools claim that MBA’s teach you wonderful and useful things about doing business in an analytical way. In fact, they do recognize the problem that comes with too much analysis, and while using analysis upon themselves, they did started to change and cater for the right brain as well.

If you read between the lines above, the “negative” treats of the business schools are in fact quite positive. While I am extremely biased when I say this, I do realize (and I hope you realize it too) that the answer to the question in the title is a strong yes, especially if you want to run a company (yours or someone else’s), not because you cannot succeed without it, but rather because it will make it easier for you to be successful. You just need to be extremely careful how you choose your MBA program (and the reasons why you should choose one program over another are quite complex, including school brand and their care for your creative and leadership side).

(originally published at: blog.ceubusiness.ro)