Penelope Trunk: Why B-School Attracts People “Who Are Lost”

The readership of Poets&Quants also includes graduate school deans and instructors. What advice would you give them to make their curriculum more effective and increase their programs’ value to the larger business community?

Market the career center! That’s the best way to differentiate yourself. Forget your curriculum. We can all get it online. What you can offer is the networking opportunity if you’re not Top 10. That’s why you want to market your school for an outstanding career center. That’s where you can compete. You can compete with Harvard if you can get students jobs. Why aren’t business schools doing that anyway? It’s a huge differentiator. I would love to market a business school that way, have the whole school riding on the career center. The students are there to get jobs anyway.

There’s this crazy snootiness at MBA programs where professors are more important than the career center. But professors, for the most part, are a commodity. The schools all have the same curriculum. Career centers are not commodified. It’s all about the network. The classes are commodities. But in the information age, getting a job is a differentiator. The career center is where non-Top 10 B-schools can differentiate themselves. Career centers must start to deliver more. I mean, students think the career center is a total joke. It is a crime. The center’s pay should be based on percentage of students using center, with bonuses paid out on the top 20 percent of students getting jobs. Over three years, they’ll be really popular.

One more thing: Centers have to start using social media. That is how candidates differentiate themselves and how to connect with employers. Have a two tier system to make uniquely competitive connections through students and career centers. The old school connections will not work in a new school workplace.

What advice would you give to someone who is determined to earn the MBA?

If you get in, I’d tell her to work on the side. No one cares about your grades. Start a company in your first year. If it goes under, move on and start another company. You’ll have an amazing experience and a MBA.

If you don’t get in, look at it this way: The process of getting into a Top 10 MBA program starts in college. You start a path that shows how directed you are and that you need a MBA. Then you start moving to that path. Show tenacity and talent in that path. Then, apply to Harvard and show commitment to that path. It’s a long process. You need to start studying for the GMAT years in advance to kill it. You can’t study for the GMAT in one year and disrupt your working and personal life. Hire a consultant 4-5 years before you go to help you with a plan and check in with this person to make sure you’re following the path. Most important, ask yourself: why are you doing this? Remember, lots of people you read about in Fortune and BusinessWeek do not have a MBA.

Another thing about not getting into a Top 10 school. Ask someone at Stanford if they hired someone who helped them get in there. A Stanford MBA is great for a career. But no one wants to sound like they prepared their lives to get in. They won’t tell you how hard they worked.

You went to graduate school for English. Did you ever consider an MBA yourself?

No, I didn’t consider a MBA. I went to graduate school for English, but there were no jobs teaching English. I wasn’t doing anything where I’d need it. After school, I did HTML and the Internet. I did software and start ups. I was rarely around people who have MBAs. The startup community makes fun of people with MBAs. It’s a waste of time. At startups, people are overflowing with ideas. They need to act on them. They will literally die if they don’t implement them. B-school is for people with no ideas. It’s an outrageous distraction from your great ideas if you feel you have them.

Do you think having the degree would give an advantage in providing career advice?

If I had a MBA, people would probably listen to me more carefully when I say not to get a MBA. When I tell people not to play pro sports, that it’s boring, they listen because I did it. Without an MBA, they’ll say she could never have gotten one, that she’s jealous. But I don’t think you can’t coach just because you didn’t play. It reminds me of couples’ therapists who have never been married. It’s easy to see others’ problems but not our own. Giving advice is easy.

What advice do you have to MBA students who date their classmates? Great! How else will you find someone, especially for women? Not many guys will follow a twenty-something woman around country. With women, you have biological clocks. And the rate of Down’s Syndrome is high after you turn 35. You may not be married in a MBA program, but you better find someone. It is imperative for single women in MBA programs to date someone who is marriage material. What else is she going to do?

Advice for spouses or partners of MBA students?

Get a workplace spouse. Get a credit for putting person through school. I don’t know. Go to couple’s therapy. Get divorced before you have kids.

Can it ever be a good idea to go to business school to not only get a better job—but also to get a better spouse, one who shares your upwardly mobile dream of MBA success?

One of best questions I ever got. You don’t want two people to get upwardly mobile at the same time. They’re always having to re-locate. Only one person can climb the ladder at a time. There’s great research that has been published in the Wall Street Journal on that. I’d advise women to go to B-school if you want to land a better spouse. Usually, those high earning, good looking men are in New York. In San Francisco, they don’t go to B-school. They’re engineers and they’re weird. Competition for women to land spouses in New York is crazy. It’s like seven women for every three men. B-school decreases the competition.

Have you ever dated an MBA? If so, how did it go?

 

I don’t think I have. I would only date someone in a Top 10 school, anyway. But even then, MBAs are rule followers and they’d have a hard time with me. I wouldn’t want them to keep track of me. Plus, I tend to be the center of attention and only one person can be that…and a Top 10 is probably used to getting all the attention. You can’t have both people being the center of attention. Here’s a truism: Startup founders don’t date Top 10 MBAs.

You’ve founded three companies and Brazen Careerist is thriving. Looking back, are there any hard business lessons you could’ve avoided by taking in an MBA program? On the other hand, would your success have been delayed by the two or three years you would’ve spent in a MBA program?

No. People are forgiving of what you don’t know in the world. As an entrepreneur, you just hire someone to tutor you or you hire a controller if you’re not good at finance. In a startup, the founder leverages his or her strengths and fills in the weaknesses. The world forgives weaknesses as long as we have strengths. You need to be great at something. MBAs don’t teach you how to be great. MBAs don’t teach you how to be an inspirational leader. You can’t go to school to be great at something. It’s just who you are.

What do you do if you can’t get into a top tier MBA?

Go to night school for your MBA, get terrible grades and get a job. Not getting into a Top 10 school is a blessing. It means you weren’t a perfect fit. Now, you have two or three more years to figure it out. You just have to bite the bullet and do that.

 

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