
Why Business Schools Struggle to Teach Entrepreneurship - BenSS
http://blogs.forbes.com/nathanfurr/2011/07/08/why-business-schools-struggle-to-teach-entrepreneurship/
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programminggeek
Ok, having gone to business school I'm somewhat qualified to speak on this.
First, I think most biz schools aren't staffed with highly successful
businesspeople. If you are a crazy successful person in business you probably
don't become a professor afterward.

Business schools are setup more like trade schools to teach marketing,
finance, management, and accounting. Those have little to nothing to do with
how to create a product, how to get your first customers and so on and so
forth. Most business schools presuppose and existing, successful business of
some sort. Take away the existing business and most of what they teach is not
terribly useful.

Also, the best teacher of entrepreneurship is not school at all. It is
experience. Starting a company, incorporating, getting customers, building a
product, hiring workers all seems impossibly hard and confusing at first until
you get some practice. Starting a business isn't hard, but it's a much
different experience than being an office manager or accountant at a fortune
500.

I learned more starting my first company about how a business should be run
than I ever did sitting in classes. There is no class that can teach you how
to start a business unless it actually forces you to start a business.

Running a business should be taught like an art school or a culinary school -
by doing. Try learning how to cook by just reading recipes or watching cooking
shows, but never actually cooking a dish by yourself. Sounds absurd right? Ok,
try learning how to start and operate a successful business without ever
actually starting or running a business.

That is what business schools do and that is why they fail.

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rdl
From what I've seen, Stanford (and maybe Harvard) are kind of in a different
league here -- people actually do go teach there after a successful business
career (and not even at retirement; some do it in their late 30s/40s/50s).

They also do a bit more than act as trade schools to teach skills. There's the
huge networking value (only worthwhile at GSB, HSB, (+maybe MIT Sloan or UPenn
Wharton for very specific disciplines too)), and they do teach some useful
information beyond technical skills.

They are still probably not the best opportunity cost weighted use of time for
most people (unless you want to work in the highest levels of large companies
or government), but they might have some net positive value; lesser MBA
programs have negative value. Getting an employer-funded MBA while living
through a 2y lockup period after M&A does seem like a great choice though :)

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soci
Agreed, top business schools should and do have successful business
professionals as professors. Of course there are entrepreneurship classes, but
are taught by real entrepreneurs.

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dkrich
I too am an MBA grad, and my experience tells me that entrepreneurship is not
a skill that can be taught, but rather can be aided with some practical
understanding of law, accounting, and marketing tactics, which, along with a
nice network of smart people, can absolutely be gained at a top MBA program.

An MBA is neither a necessity nor a setback en route to a successful career as
an entrepreneur. That's why you can quickly come up with stories of the Mark
Zuckerberg's, Andrew Carnegie's, and Steve Jobs' who never graduated college,
but just as quickly come up with stories of the Mark Pincus', Phil Knight's,
and Jeff Skoll's who got MBA's and became immensely successful entrepreneurs.
In fact, MBA's as a whole have a pretty good winning percentage. This could be
due to a number of factors, very few I would guess actually having much to do
with the education obtained in the MBA program courses themselves.

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kenjackson
Entrepreneur's struggle with entrepreneurship. There's data that basically
shows that successful entrepreneurs in one space are no more succssfull than
anyone else when the start a new venture in a new space. And I suspect the
main reason why you're likely to be more successful if you stay in the same
space has much to do with reputation and network than anything that could
actually be taught.

The big takeaway I have is that everything you learned running your first
startup is generally not applicable to your second startup, except those
things you learn in a b-school (tax law, forming corporations, equity,
etc...). And surprisingly this is also true of management in a F500 company
too, but just at GE it's a lot harder to rock the boat -- for better or worse.

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localhost3000
Did anyone else have trouble reading this article? It felt like it was written
for a group of third graders - extremely simple and repetitive writing...but
then I started thinking, "oh yea, it's been edited for the search engines..."
and this made me sad for the state of written media.

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danteembermage
If you were teaching an MBA course on entrepreneurship, what would you put in
it? I ask because I'm teaching one right now and I need to do some serious
lecture prep for Thursday. Over the semester I've assigned some the the essays
like "how to start a startup" and most of Fred Wilson's MBA Mondays with some
random other things of interest smattered in (e.g. business models that rocked
2010) but the whole thing is feeling a bit haphazard at the moment. Thursday
is going over the different types of financing available, a bit on how they
work, and some how a student would go about pitching their startup.

If Hacker News could crowdsource me a textbook for next time around that would
be amazing ;)

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samt
How about the art of "getting out of the building"? Sending students into the
real world on three or four customer development projects for hypothetical
products would be very valuable.

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j_baker
Am I the only one who sees the whole idea of an entrepreneurship program at
schools as being silly? It just seems to me that a classroom education is a
wholly inadequate way to teach people to strike out on their own and do
something new.

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Joakal
There are technical, business, marketing and idea entrepreneurs (probably
others). I don't believe each know what the other does: Programming, Stock
Options, Networking, etc.

Maybe a program would be too structured for your tastes, but implemented well;
it can reinforce potential entrepreneurs' knowledge. They could, of course,
offer them in instalments as some entrepreneurs know some stuff and don't know
other stuff but that's a different topic.

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xfax
One of the goals of any school is (or should be) to teach the student 'how to
think' rather than 'what to think'.

A startup is not some mythical entity that works in mysterious ways. There is
a lot of overlap with how larger businesses are run - namely, hiring
practices, advertising, market analysis, negotiations etc. These are common
themes that are covered in business schools, and startups can benefit from
them as well as larger corporations.

Sure, startups need to be a lot more inventive in how they deal with early
growth, but I don't think an MBA precludes any of the required skills.

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davros
They struggle to teach entrepreneurship for the same reason they struggle to
teach leadership, teamwork, business management (no an MBA doesn't mean you'll
be a good manager in a large business), etc.

Taught courses can help in all the above areas but only to a limited extent,
entrepreneurship is no different.

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dimmuborgir
The same way how music schools struggle to (or don't intend to) teach students
how to become great musicians.

Music schools only (or can only) teach students the compositions of other
great musicians.

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impendia
False. I had a good friend who was doing her DMA and she was a shockingly good
violinist. I also went to an orchestra concert that was all (doctoral) student
compositions. They were quite excellent; I never would have guessed that they
were anything short of top-notch professional.

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dimmuborgir
I know where you're coming from, but in the entrepreneurship context I don't
see any role of music education in your examples since the only objective
measure of the _greatness_ of a music is its commercial success or cultural
impact or both.

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known
<http://www.aim.edu/> mandates MBA graduates to do a startup as part of their
curriculum.

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fezzl
To put it crudely, because professors don't know shit.

