This blog entry is done purely as a means of avoiding the painful finishing touches of my MBA dissertation. It's this or wash the dishes.
Was the MBA worth it? I don't know.
On the cost side it cost me, over a 4 year period, the equivalent of about 6 months net income and I used roughly 1 in every 5 weekends to complete assignments. The reading time wasn't nearly as much as everyone thinks and I usually managed to do it during my cummute. Besides, I would've been reading stuff like that anyway.
The benefits. When I started the MBA I was already a Theory of Constraints / Lean zealot and I figured that to truly understand TOC/Lean I needed to understand the old paradigm(s). That was my original, noble, justification. Now I’m nearly finished I reckon that 90% of the knowledge was from the old paradigm(s) and on it’s own not particularily new to me or useful, but about 10% was useful, new, knowledge. The MBA covereded a very broad range of knowledge at – generally – a fairly high level. We’ve covered the basics - HR, finance, structure, culture, strategy etc - and (since I specialised in technology management) subjects such as operations, product development, lean thinking, quality, knowledge management, complexity, creativity, etc but really only at a level that allows the “ignorant and confident” to talk convincingly without really understanding.
They never mentioned Theory of Constraints once.
I’ve done it part time, by distance-learning so I have spent a lot of time reading – and memorising – by myself. The occasional “group work” usually turned into p*ss*ng competitions between the MBAers already working as management consultants: more entertaining to watch than participate in.
The most useful part has been doing my dissertation. The process has been painful, long-winded and unnecessarily acadmic at times - even though it is supposed to provide useful "informed consultantcy" to my employer. In fact it could have been fairly pointless and dire but I used TOC to work on a topic of great importance to me. You've seen some of the trees and thinking in this web and - once I've printed and posted the dissertation - I'm going to polish the work I've done so far and take it through to completion.
My writing is better than it used to be, although far from perfect. My ability to talk in buzzwords is better, although my colleagues are very helpful in limiting this new skill (competency?) . My spelling hasn’t improved at all.
Ultimately the most important question should be: would the MBA make me a better manager/leader? By itself, I doubt it. But adding the credability of an MBA to my TOC, Lean and now Agile knowledge and I think it will. (BTW: I know a lot of MBAed managers who are complete pillocks).
Finally, I honestly believe I learned more about managing people and software projects during my two day Scrum Master training than in the first two MBA years. Beat that.
