Focusing on the Fundamentals

MBA applicants must consider a key question: Do you want the MBA degree as a stamp of validation? Or, do you want your knowledge base to fundamentally change?

By Jonathon Scott Feit

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Jonathon Scott Feit
Carnegie Mellon
Class of 2010

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I'm not one who "drinks the Kool-Aid." I'm far too blunt for that. And my inability to be a cheerleader—as an entrepreneur, I prefer to get things done than to talk, talk, talk about them—might not bode well for future political ambitions. But I have to present that disclaimer to contextualize what I'm about to say about Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business:

Quantitative analysis. Group collaboration. Entrepreneurship. This stuff works.

I'm not pulling quotes from the admissions brochure; I'm not that guy. Make no bones about it, this place is not for everyone, and the workload will make your head spin. What's incredible, though, is that someone who is allergic to numbers—as a wee lad, I read Euclid to learn geometry because I could understand philosophy but not the equations in my math book—can actually feel his thought processes changing.

Real-life scenarios once fraught with sentiment—like buttressing my family's half-century-old sewing machine business against an onslaught of cheaper Chinese imports—become opportunities for application, broken down into challenging chunks, plugged into a matrix of equations, and made efficient. This started over Thanksgiving break of my first year.

Words like "arbitrage," "net present value," "sample size," and "perfect competition," burst spontaneously from my mouth like that Whack-a-Mole gopher we used to smash at carnivals. With due respect to my statistics professor, nothing makes you feel like more of a business geek than viewing customer relations choices as a function of sample size.

MBA as Credential or Training?

Which brings us to a quandary: Though economically and strategically sound, viewing certain problems analytically—Tepper's euphemism for "mathematically"—can miss the point entirely. I'll don my media and marketing hat to declare that customers cannot be compacted into a series of numbers, and companies that attempt to do so fall from grace. (See Countrywide Financial. See also Sprint Nextel (S), Pacific Gas & Electric (PCG).)

Such tension sits just below the surface here at Tepper: How can we analyze without dehumanizing?

MBA applicants to Tepper and other leading business schools—which all offer unique and worthwhile specializations—must consider a key question: Do you want the MBA degree as a stamp of validation that you already know what business is and does? Or, do you want your knowledge base to fundamentally change—to sharpen and grow—such that looking below the surface of a business quandary becomes not a habit, but an unconscious instinct?

Neither is a wrong answer. I'm constantly floored by my colleagues not only at Tepper but also at other schools I considered (and some that I didn't but probably should have). Everyone learns something from their MBA experience, but some of these fellow candidates have already done so much that I wonder what they could possibly gain out of two years focused on the fundamentals. I used to wonder—and as an entrepreneur, I am often asked—why get an MBA if one already has critical thinking and management skills?

B-School Tension

But from my vantage both inside and out of the working world, the toolkit of fundamentals is the point, especially during times of economic crisis. Fundamentals let you leap from the sinking financial ship and survive to flourish, because (as I often say) "Business is business is business." The underlying disciplines of finance, marketing, strategy, and operations are the same whether selling widgets or subprime mortgages.