Fostering A Taste For Disruption At NYU Stern

Let’s say a stranger came up to you and asked, “Is an MBA a worthwhile investment for an aspiring entrepreneur?” How would you answer that question (and why)?

Obviously, I’m going to be biased here. It relates back to the educational journey here at Stern. I think of it in three parts. We’ve talked about the motivation. It’s the motivation to actually challenge the status quo and come up with new recipes that can be tested. We talked about mindset, which is really challenging your existing identity, thinking habits, assumptions, and biases and in order to break out of those things and seeing new perspectives. And the third part of that is really about your methods. What thinking tools and methods are you using to create new value? So I think of it in those three areas.

The great thing about an educational journey is that you can experiment with each of those three areas. It gets you on the path to mastery of those things. What that means is it is a way of practicing those three things. Practice a different attitude as it relates to motivation. Practice a different awareness as it relates to mindset. Practice a different way of approaching world’s problems as it relates to the methods that you use. Now, you’ll get some of that if you’re not doing an MBA and just pursuing your own business. If you are just pursuing your own business, what I believe you’ll be practicing (more than anything else) is operational skills. An MBA gives you an opportunity to not just practice operational skill, but to develop mastery in thinking skills. And the two things are very different. It is very hard to practice thinking skills when you’re under the crush of the day-to-day pressures of running a business.

The other thing about an educational process is that the emphasis is directly on the thinking process and not on the material being handled. If you’re just going and doing a startup and that’s going to be your education, you’re going to be focused on the material  being handled, meaning the idea you have to develop, get funded, and make work. Whereas, if you’re going through an educational process in an MBA program, you can put the emphasis on observing your thinking process and mastering your thinking. So it’s a very important difference between those two things.

Are there any other points you’d like to make for our readers?

When organizations or people get praised for their entrepreneurship and innovation, it’s often assumed that it comes from their charisma or energy. Or if it’s an organization, it’s like a CEO like Jack Dorsey [Co-founder and CEO of Twitter], a charismatic CEO with a vision that’s interested in innovation and can motivate everyone else in the rank-and-file. That’s true in some cases. But it’s definitely not the rule.

We’ve really got to break this way of looking at entrepreneurship. The idea that you have to be a risk taker or think of an unusual idea or you have to be an extrovert to inspire people to step out of their comfort zone, I just think that’s flat out wrong. So I think the problem with this cult of personality approach to innovation is that despite their charisma, many entrepreneurial leaders out there make no practical attempt to teach this form of thinking as a leadership capability that business school students have. I think we’ve just got to get passed this cult of personality approach. This is holding us back. Simply describing the need for entrepreneurship doesn’t do much to achieve it. Every student needs to understand that entrepreneurial thinking is part of their career, and they need to do it regardless of any internal or external pressures. It needs to be a core competence that they develop regardless of their personal learning or leadership style.

TOP MBA STARTUPS: THE SERIES

Poets&Quants’ 2016 Top 100 MBA Startups

The Investors Behind The Top MBA Startups

The Top Business Schools For MBA Startups

Inside Harvard Business School’s Startup Machine

MBA-Founded Student Loan ReFi Firms Take Off

The Stanford MBA Who Is Reshaping Healthcare

Stitch Fix: Harvard MBA Hurdles Silicon Valley Gender Barrier

VertsKebap: The $36 Million VC-Backed Mediterranean Street Food Startup