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All MBA have said are correct, but they can't execute it.
Oct 1, 2025
MBAs know everything but understand nothing.
An MBA doesn’t impress me. A GSD does. GSD = Gets Stuff Done.
I really had to decide why I was writing. I had no interest in going back to law; I very briefly - for about six hours - considered going to get my MBA, but in the end, I realized that the only work I really wanted to do was write.
I was a beast in college. I worked hard and I played hard. I was relentless learning about business. I actually snuck into MBA classes my freshman and sophomore years. I wanted to challenge myself to see how I compared to the smartest kids at Indiana University so I was 18 and pretended I was an MBA student.
Financial hydrogen bombs built on personal computers by 26-year-olds with MBAs.
When valuing a startup, add $500k for every engineer, and subtract $250k for every MBA.
I loved history in my school days, and I have always been a voracious reader. But in India, you end up doing MBA, engineering or medicine.
Hire extremely independent, intelligent, and passionate people, not necessarily "experts." Maybe three or four of my employees have MBAs, and those guys aren't necessarily at the top of the food chain.
MBA programs are underwritten by large companies and they succeed at producing future employees of large companies. In that regard, they are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing.
Successful entrepreneurs may hate hierarchies and structures and try to destroy them. They may garner the disapproval of MBAs for their creativity and wildness. But they have antennae in their heads. When they walk down the street anywhere in the world, they have their antennae out, evaluating how what they see can relate back to what they are doing. It might be packaging, a word, a poem, or even something in a completely different business.
The people who run the major banks have MBAs and wear suits. And when those people in suits come to the homes of people who don't have a high school diploma, don't even speak English, and offer them a home at zero percent down, that doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.
It is time to recognize conventional MBA programs for what they are - or else to close them down. They are specialized training in the functions of business, not general educating in the practice of management.
If the question is, how do we best produce business people who can succeed in the post-Great Recession era, then I think the MBA programs and their connection to large companies remains intact but it's not the path to a "Business Brilliant" life. It's a path to a middle-class existence marked by large stretches of security and comfort with occasional eruptions that you're probably ill-prepared to handle. Do I sound too cynical?
If given a choice between investing in someone who has read REWORK or has an MBA, I’m investing in REWORK every time. A must read for every entrepreneur.
You don't see a lot of MBAs as CEOs. The MBAs tend to get hired by the CEOs.
When it comes to success in business, an MBA degree is optional. But a GSD, which is only earned by Getting Stuff Done, is required.
I've been among their critics [MBA programs]. Much of what I've seen in business schools is quite non-rigorous. Anecdotal histories are stretched to illustrate favored slogans. Evidence of their effectiveness is similarly anecdotal.
We don't have much in the way of a business strategy. Like no business plan. Which I say to torment all my friends who are VCs or MBAs. That's always entertaining. The deal is, it's a mixture of luck and persistence.
Most small business owners are not particularly sophisticated business people. That's not a criticism; they're passionate about cutting hair or cooking food, and that's why they got in the business, not because they have an MBA.
More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject.
Tommy moved on. "Lash, your people have been oppressed for hundreds of years. It's time to strike back. Look, you don't have your MBA yet - they haven't completely juiced you of your usefulness yet. Would Martin Luther King back down from this challenge? Malcolm X? James Brown? Don't you have a dream? Don't you feel good, like you knew that you would, now?
The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind-computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands.The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind-creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers.These people-artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers-will now reap society's richest rewards and share its greatest joys.
I'm not sure I was a typical head of a company. Most people that run big companies come out of sales and they come out of marketing and they're quite serious and they have MBA's from very good schools and things like that. I'm an accidental CEO, thank the Disney Company.
Songwriting is a craft. Writing good songs on a a consistent basis doesn not happen spontaneously. In fact, most of our best songwriters learned to write good songs by writing a lot of not so good ones. Education matters in songwriting, just as it matters for physicists, chemists, doctors, lawyers and MBAs. Education lays the foundataion on which to build experience.
An MBA is a great degree for career paths like investment banking, finance, consulting, and large companies. An MBA is not necessarily the right path for starting a tech company. You should be building a prototype, not getting an MBA in that case.
You don't need a Harvard MBA to know that the bedroom and the boardroom are just two sides of the same ballgame.
A 2001 survey of business owners with MBAs conducted by the Rochester Institute of Technology found that money was the primary motivator for only 29% of women, versus 76% of men. Women prioritized flexibility, fulfillment, autonomy and safety.
MBA students come out with: 'My staff is my most important asset.' Bullshit. Staff is usually your biggest cost. We all employ some lazy bastards who needs a kick up the backside, but no one can bring themselves to admit it.
I get rejections from the New Yorker. When I had to give a little talk to the people graduating from the MBA program at Columbia who were going into writing and filmmaking and everything, I said, "When I tried to think of what to say, the only subject I thought was appropriate for people doing what you're going to do is rejection." That's what it's all about.
I got my MBA at Burberry, but I will get my PhD at Apple.
As MBA professors endlessly tell their students, companies do best when they stick to what they do well. There's a reason Apple doesn't make blenders. There's a reason Haagen-Dazs doesn't sell meat. And there's a reason drug companies should focus on saving and improving lives - not jeopardizing them.
Oh Lord, there it is again. The question;" What kind of business should I start?" Incidentially, it has a twin that also sets me off: "What should I specialize in during the second year of my MBA studies?" Sorry, but those are two of the most profoundly upsetting questions anyone can ask - upsetting because the answer should be obvious: Do what turns you on, not what the statistics say is best.
My daughter has fulfilled all of my dreams, because she has a BA and MBA in business. She's both a financial analyst and a plus-size model. She has the best of both worlds because, in modeling, you have to have something to fall back on.
This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.
Sometimes during the two-year curriculum, every MBA student ought to hear it clearly stated that numbers, techniques, and analysis are all side matters. What is central to business is the joy of creating.
We [in the MBA] get to create a situation where we're really choosing the students to join our environment based upon what we think they can teach the rest of us. We're always trying to attract people who are going to bring excitement and intellectual curiosity into our classrooms in our environment.
From the comfort of distance, [Non resident Indians and Kashmiris] financially and emotionally support ideologies whose consequence they don’t have to face. They are not just a nuisance. As a collective they are dangerous. When men capable of murder receive the affection of engineers and MBAs, it makes them potentially far more lethal.
Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously. We, their customers, demand it.
My characteristics [of Ideal Black Man.] aren't as specific. I'm more general. I'm more like, I have to be able to talk to him. You know, we have to have good communications. He has to be interested in the world. You know what I mean. Like interested in learning and adventurous and curious, 'cause that's what I am. He has to be passionate about something. And it would be nice if he had a job. It's not like he has to have an MBA.
Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management.
You don't need a business plan. You don't need to have an MBA. All you need is a great idea. Anything is possible and you can accomplish it.
If you think you can't, you're right.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
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