Donnerstag Mai 26, 2005

Entering the house through the window
I started this MBA blog thread in order to better understand what people believe the benefits of an MBA from a top business school are. At the same time I'd like to (try to) prove that the same can be achieved through other means. Just be patient and open to new ideas!

I can't remember who told me this or where I read this, but the following quote is definitely true for my professional career until now:

"The shortest way into the house is probably the door, but the fastest or easiest one can actually be the window."

So far my personal experience has been that real life experience is much more valuable than academic training. Theoretical knowledge is helpful, but only where it "supports" the reality. In many situations, good/common sense is more useful than things learned in school or read in books.

I'm currently not enrolled into an MBA program at a top-business school for multiple reasons. Although you might assume, based on my earlier blog entries, that I don't appreciate top-business-school MBA's, I have to tell you that I would love to get an MBA from Harvard or Stanford. However, I more and more realize that I have to "enter the house through the Window", again.

During the last years I realized that MBA knowledge is useful and that I should get it. However, at the same time I also realized something else. I'm probably not smarter than most of the people with a top MBA, but I'm also not "dumber" than most of them.

Due to the fact that my father was "just" a tailor and my mother "just" a house wife, my family did not have a lot of money. Therefore, I decided to do a three year professional training instead of going to university since I knew that my family could not financially support me in any way.

The three year training program worked in that way that I worked 50% of the time at a company (a large high-end furniture manufacturer in my case) and the other 50% we had to spend on learning maths and programming at a private school. The companies we worked for paid for the school, which by the way was located in a beautiful refurbished little castle. At the furniture manufacturer I worked in the IT department where developed and supported software applications including a business intelligence application used by the marketing folks.

The theoretical training was based on the maths and computer science curriculum at universities, but tried to be a bit more "hands on". Very quickly I realized that still a lot of the stuff taught there was very abstract, theoretic and not of much value in real life. Therefore, I started reading Java books during some of my lessons. I sensed that Java will quickly become more important than Fortran and COBOL. In parallel I carefully studied and collected job ads to understand what skills the job market really requires. Based on the job ads I created my own curriculum. Since unfortunately one of our teachers really sucked, I also used the course material from "distant learning university" (FernUni Hagen) to compensate for the incompetent teacher.

During the three years of my training I also approached a company organizing developer conferences. The company offered me to attend the OOP conference in Munich for free, if I checked the attendee badges and distributed the handouts. I accepted the offer and got to listen to (and to personally know) C++, Java and pattern gurus from all over the world. Based on my experience in Munich I also decided to go to the companies Java conference in London, where I got "promoted" to "Chief Student Helper". In the following years the conference company actually even asked me to organize and manage the student helper work for them, simply because I had more experience with it than some of the employees of the conference company.

With all that extra stuff that I did, I still was among the top 30% of my training class with respect to my test results. However, I had the advantage of knowing quite a bit about Java, object oriented programming, extreme programming and patterns.

This Java knowledge eventually got me into Sun where I started working as a systems engineer doing presales for Sun's software products. As part of that role I focussed on application servers. Through a colleague I quickly found out about the possibility of technical rotations, and just five months later I did my first technical rotation at the headquarter in the US doing competitive analysis "playing" with all kinds of software and hardware.

As you can see already, my professional career has not been a "straight line" so far, but looking back I realize that I have to take a similar approach for my "MBA career". Due to the fact that I do not have a university degree, most business schools do not accept me for an MBA program. I also tried to do the GMAT once without too much preparation upfront, simply because my work did not leave me the time to do so. I realized that the GMAT makes it much harder for people who do not have English as their native-language. Thus, (although I'm in no way suggesting that I'm a genious!!!) non-native speakers have to be quite a bit smarter than their counter parts from the US and the UK to achieve the same results. The GMAT is not just a (business) intetelligence and general language test, it is also an English test. It would be interesting to see, how US/UK students would do on the GMAT if they had to do it in French, German or Spanish!

Going forward I will tell you more about my live and my approach to become a marketing expert including learning the tools, building up a network as well as learning more languages, which from my point of view is critical in today's world!
( Mai 26 2005, 10:35:54 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [3]