Mittwoch Mai 25, 2005
Becoming rich without an MBA
Based on the following comments to my last MBA related blog posting I did a little research:
"Go to the home page of a top VC, for instance Sutter Hill Ventures (www.shv.com), and see where they got their degrees. Can you see a pattern?"
"the best talent and the most money clusters around relatively few institutions"
Although I believe that institutions like Harvard and Stanford "produce" a lot of successful business men, I also strongly believe that there are other ways to be equally successful.
BTW, how is success actually measured? Is it the size of the salary, the title, the money-earned-per-hours-worked ratio, or simply the level of contentment and satisfaction? Many people want to be CEO's. However, although I'm pretty ambitious I don't see that as the highest level of success. I'm not sure if people are happier if they don't see their families anymore because they are constantly flying around the world to close deals.
Nevertheless, I took a look at the list of the richest people in the world. To my surprise (if I did not make a mistake), most people don't have an MBA from a top institution. Actually, they don't have an MBA at all.
Quite a few of these people also did not inherit a fortune, but created it themselves. A few examples that I identified are Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, Sam Walton, as well as Karl and Theo Albrecht.
Apparently, Sam Walton (Wal-Mart) and the Albrechts (ALDI, Trader Joe's) started the businesses from scratch with not a lot of money in their pocket. Bill Gates and Paul Allen decided to drop out of college to start their software business. And Larry Ellison seemed to have a rough start, too:
"He enrolled at the University of Chicago the following fall, but dropped out after the first semester. his father was now convinced he would never make anything of himself, but Ellison had learned the rudiments of computer programming in Chicago and took this skill with him to Berkeley, California, arriving with just enough money for fast food and a few tanks of gas.
For the next eight years he bounced from job to job, working as a technician for Fireman's Fund, Wells Fargo bank and began working as a programmer with large databases at Ampex. At Ampex he built a large database for the CIA, code name: Oracle."
Probably these are extraordinary people, and also most likely top business schools can help to accelerate the career. However, it looks to me that there are other ways to become successful. I doubt that all the European, Asian and African CEO's and VP's went to Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, and INSEAD!
Thus, if the people network is key, like some people indicated in their comments, there must be other ways to build up or access such a network. If it is the MBA knowledge, like others suggested, there must be other ways to access the knowledge.
As usual, I'm curious to see and read your comments!
( Mai 25 2005, 07:56:17 AM CEST )
Permalink
|
Gesendet von Michael Tibbetts am Mai 25, 2005 at 05:24 PM CEST #
Gesendet von Erwin Tenhumberg am Mai 25, 2005 at 07:08 PM CEST #