This is because the education of the MBA program, while useful in itself (particularly finance, etc.) is completely focused on driving program participants to want to be at the head of any organization. If people don’t enter an MBA program having that desire, most certainly leave with it.

An MBA is critical, if not a requirement, in particular industries. It’s a way to be recognized. The education itself is immensely valuable – everyone who is going to be in business or operating a business should know basic finance, accounting, economics, and human resource skills. But the real education is polish, drive, and networking.

An MBA is not just an education, it is an entire program designed to instill the utmost confidence and desire to succeed in its participants.

“All college and no knowledge” is not a recipe for success. The best MBA’s don’t confuse academic learning with real world experience; they value both.

MBA degree = CEO position

which is completely untrue. Don’t get me wrong: MBA schools are useful just as any other educational course. They give you tools and information so you can start dwelling in a new domain of knowledge without getting lost. But like in any other area, the degree by itself IS NOT ENOUGH. Gosh, what would I do if I only kept what I have learned in University? Nothing!

On the other hand, being a CEO of a software company is definitely a lot more than knowing about software. Many software related folks have no clue about management, about finances, about terms such as liquidity or profitability and obviously an enterprise needs a lot more than lines of good code to survive.

But it is a fact that is impossible to engage in a new software related venture with a CEO that never fully grasped the concepts of proper software requirements management, software documentation, versioning and such.

Let’s not even talk about the fact that managers who have never been in touch with software have no idea about what it takes to build it in terms of time, resources, complexity and all.

So they usually set up projects that end up being useless because they are oblivious of all these industry related factors.

We had a partner on a software venture, running the company as a CEO, who stated repeteadly that since they have been a manager for so long in a worldwide company, they could pull this one off as if being a successful manager in an industry qualifies you to repeat the experience everywhere.

To make a long story short: they knew a lot about specifics but nothing about software and that eventually damaged the company.

Not only they believed documenting was a waste of time in a team of 10 developers -with the nasty consequences that brought upon us- but also thought that changing the functionality of the core product of the company was a matter of simply picking up the phone and requesting so for the next day -because there was an important meeting coming up-. But hey, that person was the first one to yell to the programmers when a new bug showed up. When we tried to make that person understand that a buggy system was only the natural result of going back and forth with tons of requests without a proper change management approach, that person felt offended. Gee, how could an MBA be wrong?

Probably I encountered the wrong MBA folks in my life. The ones that pressure you as an employer to give them better insurance plans or better salaries than any one else just because of the degree they hold.

The ones that feel the need to bundle all these MBA terms like “competitive advantage”, “lock in the market”, “strategic management” in every phrase that comes out of their tongues.

The ones that love to arrange meetings all day instead of doing actual work.

The ones that look over their shoulder with disrespect to all the other ones who do not have those three precious letters before their names and get angry when you simply call them up by the names their parents gave them.

The ones that pull rank with their degrees but need a user manual to navigate a web page.

I used to want an MBA degree but I am so traumatized with my experience with these people that I have changed my mind about it. In fact, everytime I hear someone is an MBA, a negative association comes up in my mind and I start looking them funny.

Yes, I probably encountered the wrong folks…and wish with all my heart that I never ever have to deal with people like that again.

Never ever try to start a software company with people who happens to know nothing about it, especially if they are the ones who have the upper hand regarding the decision making process, because these type of companies can only go downwards.