I’m currently taking an EMBA at Ivey, and also involved in two start-ups.

I don’t appreciate this silly idea that someone is programmed to be some way. The human mind is a wonderful tool. If we decide to train it to think in many ways and then choose the way that is appropriate for a situation then we get Great Business Leaders, not just entrepreneurs or MBAs.

About risk: the environment you work in decides the level of risk that can be tolerated by your actions. MBAs work in a lot of risk in many areas. And some Entrepreneurs court risk by not analyzing key and easily accessible information.

(Check your use of Casual and Effectual. You seemed to have interchanged them in your bullets from the main body of your writing.)

I think you will find the research by Sarasvathy suggests that MBA’s use causal logic more while entrepreneurs use effectual logic. Your second paragraph has this backwards.

Entrepreneurs are the true wealth creators and multipliers of society.

Society has an interest in not killing the plant that feeds it.

We must ensure that we do not step on entrepreneurs, hampering the small-scale efficiency, innovation and profit incentives that create long-term wealth.

Currently for any person with a good idea, the administrative / non-technological roadblocks – for individuals particularly – seem daunting. Paperwork, barriers etc. which tend to suffocate experimentation.

Mars is a step in the right direction. Wohoo!

And the debate rages on. I don’t believe that an MBA can make or break your entrepreneurial ideas, but rather gives you the logical tools to execute them. There have been plenty of entrepreneurial ventures that have failed due to a lack of sufficient knowledge about business management issues, but these rarely make it to the news because everyone would much rather champion a successful underdog story. Therefore, relying solely on either one’s education or entrepreneurial skills would be unwise.

The problem lies in the comoditization of the MBA and the reason that the majority of individuals decide to pursue it for the sake of looking good on paper. It is this issue that needs to be visited before comparisons can be made as to who would make a better business leader. And here, I am reminded of George Bernard Shaw:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Keri, that is an excellent articulation and reflects our experience in our organization (which is made up of a network of entrepreneurs — we call them entreprenerds).

There is no question in my mind that the entrepreneurial thinking is the best route to making this fast-changing world a GOOD one that affects businesses and families in positive ways. Entrepreneurs tend to tolerate non-sense much less. Entrepreneurs are less vulnerable to paralysis of analysis.

Just my $0.02

David Redekop
Co-founder, Nerds On Site

[...] came across a MaRS Blog (out of the University of Toronto) post that delves further into this argument. Keri Damen offers [...]

Keri

This is a great issue, thanks for taking it on. It becomes especvially important as a rapid growth area within business schools is social entrepreneurship. At the Said Business School (Oxford) where I teach, it is the fastest growing area of interest for MBAs. The thinking is that we can arm entrepreneurs with MBA techniques and then make them more effective–perhaps instead we are killing their entrepreneurial instincts? This might be what yur post suggests. At ClearlySo (www.clearlyso.com) we are considering additions to “jobs” section which will further engage MBAs–perhaps this is a mistake?

Good post!
Rodney Schwartz

Great comments everyone. Definitely a topic that attracts arguments for and against.

The dichotomy between MBA’s and entrepreneurs is perhaps false in the sense that there are always exceptions – there are increasingly more Entrepreneurship programs/courses and students choosing these in MBA schools and I definitely did go to school with students interested in becoming entrepreneurs. There is also, as Rodney Schwartz mentioned, the exciting new interest in social entrepreneurship in MBA students and schools.

However, I still think the value of an MBA seems to be greater for an entrepreneur attending an MBA school rather than the b-schools encouraging their students to become (or even consider) entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs can learn MBA tools but MBAs aren’t necessarily taught or encouraged to be entrepreneurs. (The daunting cost of education these days may also be a disincentive as students with heavy loans choose high-paying jobs to pay their loans off before they can even consider starting their own business.)

In the core curricula I took, the only mention of entrepreneurship were big winners such as Starbucks, Google, Dell, etc. That kind of success can be daunting and ignores the other smaller wins out there that exist. There is so little mentioned about starting and building an SME (very important contributors to business in any country) or any mention of Canadian entrepreneurs and their stories. Having Canadian entrepreneurs in to MBA schools to tell their stories more often would be inspiring and encourage MBAs to think of entrepreneurship in a more well-rounded way.

There is also little mention of how major business ‘rules’ fail – like focusing on your cash cows (thus making sure revenues and profits are good), a big company might miss the next trend or innovation (i.e. think of the Big 3 missing out of the success of hybrids or gas-efficient cars as they focused on SUVs). The rules must be taught but so must critical thinking around how these rules can fail.

MBA schools have taken a lot of criticism in recent years and this is important as, with the business world changing, they must evolve and change as well in order to stay relevant and produce top business graduates. It wouldn’t hurt to inject more entrepreneurship into the core curricula or expand into talking about all sizes and types of companies rather than focusing primarily on MNCs.

The mix-up between ‘causal’ and ‘effectual’ in the second paragraph has been fixed – sorry about that and thanks for pointing it out.

Entreprenuers actually take the risk while MBA will usually play on the safe side. This is just a piece of my point of view. Thanks. During times like this, it is better to put a small business than do nothing.