
Rahul Bajaj has it, Lakshmi Mittal doesn’t; do we really need an MBA?
More than 1,400 management schools in India churn out about 140,000 MBA graduates every year. But gauging by the way young people are climbing the corporate ladder, there seem to be plenty without an MBA degree.
Consider even the best-known of names. Bill Gates, founder of technology giant Microsoft Corp., who left Harvard University. Steel giant Lakshmi Mittal holds only a bachelor’s degree in commerce. N.R. Narayana Murthy, founder of India’s second largest information technology (IT) services company, Infosys Technologies Ltd, is an engineer by qualification.
But then, there are Louis V. Gerstner, credited with turning around IT giant International Business Machines Corp., and Rahul Bajaj, chairman of Bajaj Auto Ltd—both from Harvard Business School (HBS). Jerry Rao, founder of Mphasis Ltd, an IT firm acquired by Texas-based Electronic Data Systems Corp., graduated from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A).
So, do we really need an MBA to start or eventually run a company?
No, is the short answer. But probe a little deeper, and those in business seem to agree that it definitely helps.
None of the seven founders of Infosys Technologies has an MBA—yet even current chief executive and managing director S. Gopalakrishnan says it helps. “It is not necessary to have an MBA degree to start a company or run a large organization. But an MBA definitely helps a person understand ‘how a business works’ faster, through theoretical and practical learning across different business aspects.”
According to Subroto Bagchi, co-founder of IT services firm MindTree Ltd, it is not an MBA that matters, but what one learns from it. Not that he speaks from academic experience.