Is MBA necessary? Post MBA thoughts.

Feedback on MBA program, Is MBA valueable, Dew Drops, Ravichander Rao

Management is about making decisions so that a right course could be set to accomplish something. The decisions making and directions setting are fairly straight forward, if one is familiar with the situation. For instance, if you are planning to take a daily route to the office on a regular day, your decisions regarding the mode of transport and timings are straight forward decisions. If the day happens to be one  when your regular routes are blocked for some unforeseen reason, how will you manage to get to the office in time? For someone who is new to a locality, making decision at this time requires some learning about - newer routes, other modes of available transportation, times taken to reach the destination, etc. But, for a taxi driver, this information may be already known and the decision becomes commonsensical. Likewise for some people decision making is commonsensical and MBA is not necessary.

Within an organization there are different functions - Marketing & Sales, Finance, HR, Logistics, and so on. Each of these functional organizations manage one specific aspect of the company. What these organizations manage and how they manage is non-commonsensical to most of us. If one wants to bridge this gap, an MBA will help. This can also knowledge gap can also be acquired through work rotation and reading relevant books. But the time period of learning between these two approaches differ. For most of us, the non-MBA approach takes longer because of the commitment level.

For those who have decided to pursue an MBA program, there is a dilemma whether to invest the money or not in a full-time program. In my opinion, any investment in your education is never a waste, but the pay-off periods may differ. If you can manage your educational funds without being a burden to you and your family, go for a full-time program. A part-time may not be as intensive in training as a full-time course, but the interactions among candidates (from Sr. VP to front liners) exposes you to practical aspects of decision making better. 

Before I started on this journey, a question to myself was - does that lead to CEO, if not what is the use?  Perhaps I have found the answer to this - having MBA is not enough. The preparation for this role is a self-learning journey the way of Jonathan Livingston in Richard Bach's book. An MBA provides a starting point for the take-off, the rest of the journey is on the individual...