Why MBA ?

And the answer is not “Why not ?”. There are a million reasons why one should not take up an MBA. But the question is different here. It’s the most dreaded question for every aspirant. It is the trillion-dollar question that makes or breaks an aspirant’s chances of getting an admit into the hallowed corridors of IIMs and other top 10 bschools in India.

An MBA curriculum has everything from Finance to Marketing to IT to what not. Ever thought why this is so ? Each of these topics are vast fields of study disciplines in their own domain. So does an MBA make a jack-of-all-trades out of a guy ? Maybe so. It is necessary for a successful manager to be aware of the various parts of business like Operations, IT, Finance, Marketing etc. BUT, the most underrated aspect of an MBA is the fact that it aims to teach how to manage people. Successful managers are not those who can do a comprehensive sensitivity analysis but manage those who do it for them. The ability to extract high-quality work out of their teams is the most important takeaway from an MBA.

Another important aspect of an MBA is that it is designed to create and develop in students an ability to take decisions based on incomplete information. The courage to act needs to develop here. Those who cannot take strong decisions will ultimately succumb to pressure of either the organization or even their own startup.

Bschool is not where you learn Finance or Economics or IT. There are specialized courses for that. And they are great sources of learning. Bschools do impart these relevant pieces of study so as to enable the students to form a complete of business as a whole. All of these culminate into the primal aim of creating an environment where students can try out decisions before they head out to the sublime brutality of the corporate world where the margin for error is negligible. This is what an interviewer would look for as an answer.