Entrepreneurship and Business School
December 2004
Why should entrepreneurs get an MBA?
If you're an
entrepreneur who thinks pluck and luck is far more important
to success than learning business essentials by getting your
MBA degree, you might want to hear what people like Emily Cieri think about it.
"Most of our students
coming to our program have technical experience or life
sciences or educational backgrounds. But they usually lack
the hard-core business skills to develop a business,"
says Cieri, managing director, Wharton Enterprise Programs,
University of Pennsylvania.
In fact, she goes on:
"Students already in business sometimes already have the
technology to do it but they need to be rounded in areas of
marketing, financing their business, legal aspects and many
others. They often don't have that foundation."
As a representative of
one of the oldest and best-known MBA programs, Cieri may
have some bias. But as MBA programs everywhere have in
recent times stressed entrepreneurial skills, students
involved in the programs have also given testimonials to
their success.
"I had entrepreneurial
vision, but needed the business skills to make that vision
successful," says John M. Arnold, who earned an MBA at the Smeal College of Business, Penn State.
He owns several
businesses that have grown 2,200 percent and now generate
more than $750 million in income. "My Smeal College MBA
degree gave me what I have needed to meet and exceed my
personal goals," he says.
Another entrepreneur, David Henry, had no thoughts of school
while building a successful $1.5 million day-care business
with his wife. But then he hit a cash crunch.
The 28-year-old Pittsburgh native with an undergraduate
degree in French told The Wall Street Journal: "We
had no idea what we were doing."
So he enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University's MBA program,
which typically emphasizes entrepreneurship.
A year after graduation, he was on a second round of
venture-capital financing. His business was heading towards
$18 million in revenues.
His experience is a textbook example of how even the most
skilled entrepreneurs can learn necessary skills through MBA
programs.
Henry discovered in his classes, for example, how much
economies of scale meant to his business – it doesn't cost
much more to insure 500 kids than 100. That applied to food
preparation and administrative fees as well.
And the right niche? How important is that? Another
entrepreneurial class taught Henry to stop locating in
suburban centers, where all his competition could be found.
His niche would be the inner-city families that are ignored
by the big child-care chains.
Still another critical class was on entrepreneurial venture
capital. It shed light on what investors were looking for.
As the Journal wrote:
"Once the province of ambitious corporate climbers, MBA
programs now are being filled with the ranks of
entrepreneurs who want to hone their analytical and
financial skills for their own businesses."
Nearly every top-rated business school has a specific
program or a core of classes that emphasizes
entrepreneurship. In fact, entrepreneur classes are the
fastest-growing courses in today's business schools,
academics say.
Page 1
2
Are you interested in reproducing this article on your
own website free of charge? Contact us
to find out how. |
