Why MBA?

This is the question which plagues majority of students who are getting ready for a B-school interview. The gist of the problem is very simple, most of us decide to go for MBA due to a single reason – the fat pay package. There is no other degree in this world which will help an unskilled 24 year old earn more lakhs per year than his age. But of course, you can’t say that in an interview. So you need to build up a story, a story good enough to elude the smart professors who will be interviewing you. So start thinking about it now itself.

Let us now see who the people who really need an MBA are. Basically an MBA is required for a manager or a business leader who manages a group of individuals. The idea of the course is to inculcate some leadership qualities into a person to effectively manage his team. But the million dollar question is that if management education or any other education in this world can impart leadership qualities to a person in mere 2 years. It is possible if the person possesses some level of these qualities already. The idea of selection processes is to identify such people - who are good at analyzing a problem from various angles; who are good at effectively communicating the same to their peers and who are good at leading a group in the right direction. Thanks to the modern day competitive exams, such inherent talents are no longer a pre-requisite.

Presently the people who make to management institutes are people who are good at number crunching, well versed in reading comprehension and well trained (by their coaching institutes) in group discussion and interviews. The whole process has become conventional and predictable. CAT is the closest aberration to this theory – it is still able to keep its unpredictability under wraps, but only just. A validation to this theory is the fact that IIMs have 90% of engineers. This is not only because engineers are closer to mathematics; it is only because of the fact that these engineers are people who have been always good at their studies. Because they were good at competitive exams, they got into good T-schools and subsequently into great B-schools. Prominently there are 2 reasons why an engineer decides to go for an MBA – Either he finds out later in his life (could be in engineering college or his work place) that he is not good at engineering or he finds out he cannot make enough money as an engineer. Anyway the B-schools don’t care and select them if they feel that he/she can “contribute to the B-school batch”.

Business is very different from other occupations because you don’t need a certificate to practice business unlike a doctor or a lawyer. Why does one need a BBA/MBA to practice business? Simple, it is no longer a simple world; you can’t expect yourself to be a successful businessman without the knowledge of the world. It is this knowledge or exposure that a good business school imparts to its students. They take examples from past to teach you business. In most renowned colleges, the tool used to teach businesses are case studies. Case studies can be considered as short stories which talks about how a company achieved a particular target. For eg., the turn-around of Indian railways is a case study. The best part of the case study is the analysis which follows that, the students are supposed to make groups and analyze the case study from all angles. Most of the business concepts get clarified through this story and post-analysis. For eg., let us say that the case study is about the Satyam scam. While doing an analysis of the same, the students are supposed to go and study the company laws which were violated by Ramalinga Raju as without that knowledge their analysis won’t be complete. This methodology of analysis has students as a vital component. The better brains you discuss the problem with, the better understanding you gain about the problem. Or let me re-phrase it, the more diversity you have, the more angles you cover. This is one of the reasons why, B-schools are constantly in a look out for people from diverse backgrounds.