Just the other day, I was headed out the door for a few days of R&R in Florida. Being (somewhat) fastidious by nature, I decided to have one last look at my e-mail before leaving. Big mistake. For the in-bound e-mail that I found myself staring at was one of those "conundrum-class" messages.

The e-mail was from someone who dreamed of building their own company.  Already possessing an undergraduate degree, the question was if I thought it would be worthwhile and beneficial for this person to get an MBA.  They felt that it could give them more opportunities and would be good to have to fall back on as a ‘safety net.’

To which I responded:
 
It's late as hell, and I'm headed to Florida for vacation in a matter of hours and so I was just shutting down my computer when I saw your e-mail!
 
Damn! Why did I have to read it? But you have touched on one of my pettest of peeves.
 
So ... first off, please understand that I earn at least part of my living and ALL of my health benefits by teaching at Duquesne. And since I have cancer, these health bennies are really important to me!
 
And, I firmly believe in formal education.
 
But when it comes to MBA's, well ...
 
Think about it ... why would an Entrepreneur, a person who is hell-bent to get out and change the world ... want to spend even one more minute in school than he or she has to?
 
I mean, when I was in college, all I could DO was count the days until I was free of having to study day and night and could therefore instead spend all of my waking hours building something. (You see, I wasn't that great of a student ... I tended to daydream a lot about starting my own business ... and so school required a lot of effort!)
 
By the way, I did in fact start three businesses while in college, and I was able to graduate with about $28,000 in my checking account – and a brand-new Triumph TR-6.
 
You see, a true entrepreneur realizes shortly after starting their four-year undergraduate journey (well, it now seems to be closer to five years) that he or she is:

1. Going to spend a heck of a lot of time doing things that generate very little payback.
2. That this time, once burned, is gone forever.
3. That he or she is going to have to also "work within the system" (AGAIN) ... playing by stupid administrative rules that often don't make sense and performing amazing feats that demonstrate knowledge retention to people who most likely have never even once in their lives made a payroll.

I offer this last item because I tend to divide the world into two groups:

1. Those who have made a payroll, and,
2. Those who have not.

Why is this important? Because, "making a payroll" is/was the hardest thing I have ever had to consistently do in my life. (Let me add the fact that I have never once, in over thirty years and nine start-ups borrowed even one dime. Every business I started was either with my own funds or by those of a customer.)
 
Furthermore, there really isn't all that much to the business of business beyond "make something, and then sell it for more money than it cost you to make it." There really ain't all that much to teach once you get past the fundamentals of entrepreneurism (which can easily be covered in a half-dozen or so classes). So, the Business schools tend to load up their curricula with massive amounts of mathematics, especially calculus, and then employ those quantitative tools to more or less predict things (such as consumer behavior, market behavior, and overall economic analysis).
 
Why? Well, I have my theory ...
 
I think that the "heavy math" enables the B-schools to sort of "swagger in their quant-ness". I mean, the more quantitative their courses are, the more formulae they can toss out and thus (what I call) "eat innings." Remember ... these schools charge a LOT of dough. So, it is first imperative that a LOT of time be spent, and next that this time be spent on some really heavy topics.
 
So this math then enables its professors to prove stuff. And while most of the stuff they prove is really stuff that most entrepreneurs tend to figure out just by living and observing human nature ... the "quant-wanna-be's" can use their expensive educations to generate various formulae to explain how everything happened.
 
As Bill O'Reilly would now say (and I really dislike Bill O'Reilly): Look, if you want to get out there and get in the game and start changing the world with your passion and your ideas, then entrepreneurism is for you. But if you wish to defer this challenge and instead suffer through a bunch of redundant and/or superfluous classes that will possibly eat up the best years of your life, then by all means head off to Business School.
 
Because that, my friend, is what we're talking about.
 
Oh, and by the way --- I have an MBA!
 
Best of luck to you.
 
Ron
 
P.S. Check out a few guys who figured this out earlier than I did and then had the courage to follow their convictions - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ray Kroc, Micheal Dell, and Larry Ellison. (You get the idea.)