OH DUDE COME ON!!!!!!
Its not the license to live people. Of all things, dont they teach you at MBA college that MBA stands for Masters in Business Adminsitration!! If administration is what i wanted to do, i would not have spent 8 years of my life in a creative field. Agreed MBA is a ladder up in MOST workplaces, though i dont know why. But in the creative field, ingenuity & experience are all that matter. Rest all is silly stuff.
Lets delve a little deeper into this MBA phenomenon. Every engineer worth his / her penny is dying to do an MBA. Guys, if you were intersted in business mangament, why didnt you just do BBA? (like my dear Rooney, salutes to him). Oh no!! BBA!! thats so uncool! Engineering is cool stuff!
& then? Are then what, an MBA. So you first learn some techspertise & then go into MBA & shoot off 4 years of your hard work! I think its HOT!! RAGING HOT!!!
Neways, please dont even start telling me that in this multi faceted world, engineers need tools to manage people & vice versa managers need to know technical stuff. That was yesterday. We are going into super-specialty fields!
Awareness & learning are two different things. I completely agree that an engineer turned MBA would do great stuff in a managerial position at a factory, but hey, even a person with 5 years of engineering knows what to manage. The charm & the art lies in being shrewd enough!
Coming back to my field, we are in the business of creativity, and the greatest problem is to sell it to (Un)willing buyers. Well if we didnt know that was to happen, we would be sitting ducks!
So all the stuff you MBAs talk about is embedded in us the day our first client kicks our butts & the day we have to haggle for our consultancy charges. So dont come about here asking me if im going to apply for an MBA. If you need one of those, I can darn well give you a crash course in managing people, clients, life and what not! You dont need a stupid piece of paper telling you that you can ACTUALLY do all that monkey business!
I dont mean to disrespect my fellow friends & acquantances. But dont look at the world through the glasses of MBA crap. Theres waves of people out there, naturally adept at what you have set out to learn. Please respect that. & more importantly, NEVER EVER question experience based learning to you 2 years in hell.
If you are not clear as to what purpose your MBA will serve you, get yourself TWO options only: Ask those who know what to do, OR leave the damn thing alone. But of all things, dont go on propaganda mode asking everyone around you to do MBA. Its not the 12th standard degree which is a must to get elsewhere!!
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3 comments:
Lovely post (& that comes from an MBA:-))I realized a curious statistic once I enrolled in my B-school. Most of the people who do their MBA aren't even aware why they want to do it. Fittingly, the course itself is generic and the technical skills imparted can only take you so far. The crux of it, that's man (and infinitely more arduous - woman) management comes from experience, observation and at times sheer natural ability. My father is perhaps an illustrious example. An engineer by qualification (& talent) he grew up to be one of the best managers around. Of course, MBA is not all fancy presentations & quirky jargons (unless of course you are in an IT company). Some of it involves serious research and a confounding application of mathematical principles as does any discipline worth its salt. Its precisely this part of MBA that's worth respecting, for it opens your eyes to the world, helps you understand the underlying dynamics behind every major occurence, the very impact of the stock market preceding this post is best explained by some of the tenets of finance taught in the MBA course amongst others. However, the blind craze for boardroom suzerainty that, apparently is the final destination of an MBA grad is a myth and the faster people realize it, the better it is for them as well as the course itself, for then we would perhaps rid the colleges of students who came to do their MBA because they didn't have anything else to do.
Rooney wrote:
Yo!
I think I agree with you bhaiyya on this issue to some extent. I rummaged through my essays and I found this one that I wrote for my college (HLBBA) wall magazine this August. They wanted to know how learning management at college helped me at workplace (in 200 words). This is what I replied,
" At the cost of raising a few eye-brows within the college general management staff, I feel some of what is taught in general management is what we already know. Did we not know all about motivation, planning, delegation of authority and feedbacks? Perhaps, we were ignorant about the fact that a feedback from everyone we deal with at work place is called a '360 degree feedback'. Or that total customer focus was called 'Total Quality Management'. But we knew the crux. Perhaps the point of having these things in books is to condition our mindset. But does this necessarily translate into actually applying them at our respective work places? If that was the guaranteed fruit of reading management then everyone would have been a happy subordinate/boss. I have always been a firm believer of the fact that when it comes to having the right set of management skills you either have it or you don't. Books cannot teach management. Experiences can.
With whatever little work experience that I have, I felt that adaptability over everything else is the most important thing (when you join as the junior-most). In the field of business I find myself in, our planning majorly relies on how our client plans. A client who buys service isn't always the most cooperative. To be able to generate results from an environment of uncertainty and lack of planning is what I would call management. And believe me, this is one thing which cannot be learnt from books. You have to be on the field to be in such a situation and then seek within yourself the right arsenal to confront it. In short, if we have the will to excel wherever we go, we will always rise up to the occasion and discover the good manager within us."
Though bhaiyya, at the same time a professional course helps you learn certain technical tools (that can be employed at workplace) that can only be taught in a classroom. Time value of money, capital budgeting, valuation of companies/assets/liabilities, accounting of mergers and acquisitions are some of the examples.
You surely have an edge if you are profecient with these aspects of management studies. But yes, general management theories didn't inspire me as much in college. Only because Maslow or F.W. Taylor put their opinions in writing , their theories became famous. But, you'd agree that Maslow's Need Hierarchy Theory is one that attracts widespread criticism nowadays and has been termed redundant by other modern theorists. The renowned BCG Growth-Market Share Matrix looks good on paper, but did we actually need BCG to tell us that an enterprise working in a low growth potential market with a low market share Referred to as 'Dog' in the theory) should retire, and the funds ear marked for it should be diverted in the so-called 'Stars' of the market? That's common sense, right?
In short, Shomu bhaiyya, you wasted your time...hehe:-)...well so did I
Dear Rooney,
My point was not so much for the MBA course, as it was for those who join it unknowingly, and think the world of it. While every course does undoubtedly augment our skillset, i do not think everyone needs an MBA to be a professional. MBA is targeted at a certain kind of job & i believe it should limit itself to that. To say that MBA can increase efficiency in any field is very naive.
So my article was against those who join MBA & then look down on others, as if they are lesser mortals!
Sandy
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