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June 21st, 2010 by Leadership Catalyst

The Great Certification Hoax

Open up any newspaper or magazine containing a business section, flip through it for a couple of pages and, sure enough, you will find the tertiary education ads.

Brash and alluring these ads will promise you an excellent education followed by a stellar career, provided you acquire their MBA!

Wake Up And Smell The Roses

Many moons ago an MBA was something rare, a way for non-business grads to acquire business know-how, allowing them to become more valuable to their employer. It was a way for an engineer to become more business savvy and thus have a shot at moving up the corporate ladder, past the dead end of just becoming the head of engineering.

As more and more profit oriented education institutions woke up to the fact that the 3 letters M-B-A sounded like a lot of coins to be made off unsuspecting individuals with a true wish for personal betterment, every shack with the name ‘university’ written on it’s entrance started offering their supa-dupa MBA.

The MBA Inflation

This greed by the education institutions led to the current MBA inflation. Far from being a mark of distinction, an MBA has possibly become the biggest money drain for many people with a true desire to enhance their career.

The truth is that the letters MBA on a resume mean little or nothing by now. Most all companies are smart enough to recognize that the education sector is populated by many mercenary education organizations offering nice sounding certificates for the right amount of money, period.

As with all good things in life: you pay for what you get. The discount MBA, that seems so tantalizingly within your budget is exactly that, a discount product with little or no value. The university offering it to you has bought this product (for that is what an MBA is) from another education institution. You will be buying a second hand product with outdated information, taught to you by second class lecturers with no hands on experience. The result: you have bought a product you believe will pave the way for your career only to find out that no one is really interested!

If You Really Want An MBA…

Then do it once and do it right. Globally there are only a handful of recognized MBA providers. These institutions are expensive! And they are so for 3 reasons:

1. They strive to bring in the best and brightest tutors and information, giving you a real cutting edge in the market
2. These institutions know their name is a brand that will give you an edge in the market. Hey, you want to use their name, you pay!
3. It is not what you know, it is who you know: these top end institutions are where you meet and greet today’s and tomorrow’s big players. This gives you the chance to become part of the inside family, to have the right phone numbers in your Blackberry, to kick-start your career.

No Money For A Big MBA? Good! Here Is How You Become A Success!

Of course you may feel despondent if you look at your bank account and figure out that your funds will not allow you to get that blue ribbon MBA. As a matter of fact this may be a blessing in disguise! It will ‘force’ you to use a totally different strategy to success.

Look around yourself at the next meeting in the company. You may be surprised to see how many people around you live in the ‘is-this-enough’? paradigm. Somehow many middle-aged players in the field never made the connection that times have shifted. Afraid of standing out, rocking the boat and making truly innovative decisions these players see their value in their unbending loyalty to the company. Whatever top management decides will be implemented, whether it makes sense to them personally or not.

Loyalty To The Company-> A Commodity That Lost It’s Value

Our father’s generation was brought up on the singular notion that the highest good a man could offer to a company was loyalty. A man who would have 2-3-4 or more jobs in a lifetime was considered a job-hopper, or worse: a guy who was a dissenter who could not fit in!

Hand-in-hand with loyalty to the company you were asked to check in your brain and opinions at the office door. Those times are gone. Technology and society have started moving at a disruptive speed, making continuity of anything impossible. This means that you will only be a hot commodity if you are able to bring in the hottest new ideas, trends and strategies. In fact, you have stopped being a loyal employee and have become an innovation consultant to the company.

Start Your One-Man Think-Tank And Branding Organization

The time of having brilliant ideas in silence is over. Those famous moments of quiet despair when you sat in meetings thinking ‘if only anyone would listen to me I would do it like this’ But I am just an employee, so I better shut up’ are a thing of the past.

In our brave new world of digital media you can now become your own one-man think-tank and an in-house consultant.

Look at it this way: it is possible that you have a brilliant idea to solve problem X. It is also possible that your immediate superiors are too dense, too afraid or too traditional to understand it. Does that mean you have to give up? That would be a grievous mistake.

It would mean that you have again checked your personal intelligence at the office door and remain a grey sheep indistinguishable from the flock.

Think Gen Y: start your own blog, your own in-house one-man consulting operation. Take that really good idea to solve problem X and turn it into a fact driven presentation or article. Send it to top management and see what happens.

Is your intention to create politics? No. Is your intention to offer a specific new solution that will allow the company to grow? Yes!

The result: top management will wonder who this person is who went the extra mile and produced a short, sharp, number-driven document with new ideas. Hmmm, he/she is an interesting individual with fresh ideas’ he/she does not have an MBA, but he/she sure has some sharp ideas’ all the MBAs in the world cannot compete with a person able and willing to deliver fresh ideas.

The future belongs to the individuals willing to think new thoughts, able to create simple, fact-driven, presentations to management and ‘risk’ going up the ladder 2 or 3 steps to present their case. You either create your own brand as a solutions-driven consultant to the company or you stay one of the loyal gray flock of sheep who unthinkingly wait for orders from above.