My answer so far: Basically, no.

Been thinking about this question throughout my MBA so far, especially during my first year where I would often reflect at the end of a class on whether what I had learnt would have helped me make better decisions and more importantly avoid the stupid ones I made as an entrepreneur.

For the most part the answer was usually no. If I had to deal with VCs as an entrepreneur, my answer may have been different having taken the VC class at Haas (with legendary Terry Opdendyk and co: Sean Foote and Jerry Engel) but otherwise the accounting, strategy, marketing classes wouldn’t have had much of an impact. I learnt enough about the subjects on the job and was supported by very able people we hired. Much of what is taught is either too theoretical or too big-business focused in any case to be relevant to a start-up. Finance classes were useful to a degree in terms of getting inside the heads of (non-VC) investors and bankers and it’s the one subject that I found pretty difficult to learn on my own before b-school (and at b-school for that matter!).

Some of the domain-specific electives are helpful if you’re building a start-up in that space (particularly the case for the tech classes at Haas for instance or I imagine Finance electives at CBS).
The Gilt girls (Harvard MBAs ’04) seem to agree in their FT interview last week:

As an executive “you really can’t digest and memorise everything down to the nittiest-grittiest detail. [Business school] teaches you to take large amounts of information and helps you get to a decision quickly,”

Ms Maybank points out that even with the many resources available in business school the gut is still more important than the courses.

There’s a good Does getting an MBA make someone a better entrepreneur? Quora thread that’s still going with a few different opinions but generally speaking the consensus seems to range from nice but unnecessary to waste of time. The whole thread is worth reading, here are a few fave snippets:

Gummi Hafsteinsson:

You have to keep in mind the causal relationship here: a lot of (but not all) people who go do an MBA are not true entrepreneurs, it’s not that an MBA makes them more or less likely to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Jeremy Liew:

Also life isn’t just about becoming a better entrepreneur. I had a great time at b-school and met some of my very best friends there.

Which really resonated with me. There are plenty of great reasons to do an MBA, becoming a better entrepreneur just isn’t one of them.

NYTimes, Bloomberg, and the WSJ all report the private equity don’s generous gift that will help Columbia build its new campus at the controversial Manhattanville project (see this Chronicle of Higher Ed piece for a good rundown of the storied Columbia – Harlem relations).

Apparently the search for an architect is on, let’s hope we end up with an interesting choice that makes up for the ugly current home – Uris Hall memorably called a ‘monumental offense’ in 1997 by David Garrard Lowe in the City Journal:

Uris Hall, he wrote, “is a characterless Brobdingnagian structure whose facade, with all the allure of a crematorium, bespeaks a place where people come not to begin their life’s adventure, but to end it.”

Christopher Szabla adds to the Uris-Hate in a 2005 Columbia Spectator piece:

… what looks like a smashed air-conditioner unit in the midst of their historic grounds. In this light, it defies belief that such a monstrosity as Uris Hall has been permitted to desecrate Columbia’s otherwise elegant landscape for over four decades now. With its flanks and crude rooftop looming arrogantly overwhelming Low’s graceful dome, its ballooning rear end projecting twice the length of an Avery or Fayerweather, this behemoth, more than any other architectural excretion endured by this university, mocks the spirit of Charles McKim’s classroom buildings. Its bombastic hauteur would be seen as tasteless were its Orwellian overtones not so frightening.
Indeed, architectural trends come and go, but Uris has been consistently unloved from its conception. Incensed students picketed its groundbreaking, and an architecture professor’s radio interview concerning the structure was confiscated by campus security, unaired. To add insult to injury, Uris was, in the 1980s, retrofitted with the addition of a bizarrely incongruent facade which de-legitimated whatever tenuous connection it may have once had to the monumental axis of columned buildings stretching from Butler to Schapiro. The building became, after this fiasco, beyond any justification, theoretical or otherwise. It is time that its aesthetic reign of terror be put to a swift and decisive end- it should be demolished with all the violence it has committed upon its surroundings since its ill-advised creation.

Here’s what the orginal bilding looked like – far more elegant than the current bizarrely incongruent facade.

About to post some Columbia Vs Berkeley and realized this review of the spring semester at CBS was still in my drafts box:

It’s surprising just how different the first year spring semester experience at business school is from the fall.

Students have generally found their grooves, their cliques and, for many, their summer internships. So while still a highly intense few months it felt far more settled than the manic first term.

Focus.
MBA Students at Columbia have more options to break from the cluster-based core curriculum and to design a more personalized schedule based on individual interests and ambitions. Students that started school with vaguer career goals start eliminating choices (based on updated interests or just as often updated reality checks). Responsibilities also ramp up for the club Associate VP positions. For many these choices start crystalizing the directions that their lives will take for the next decade or so. The gravity of all this is probably lost on most of us as we scramble to get assignments in on time, submit cover letters to potential employers and experience a little of what the world’s greatest city has to offer.

Recruiting.
There are many many moments where business school just feels like an expensive two year recruiting camp. Time and time again I had to step back and remind myself that I was at grad school to learn subjects that fascinated me for how they make sense of, and shape, the world we live in.
The weighty worries of student loans and uncertain futures though often proved formidable. This is where the collegiate supportive environs of Columbia Business School came in handy (students, first and second years, professors, our office of school affairs and the career advisors all play their roles here). I know I wasn’t alone in those 3am moments with a paper due the next day, a cover letter and application to an incredible job due at 9am (and probably a potentially life-changing music show a half hour subway ride away!) when I looked around Butler library and contemplated the fact I was levering up to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of putting myself through all that stress!

As the whitest winter New York had seen in a long time gorgeously turned into spring though, light seeped through the end of the stress tunnel as more and more of my classmates secured summer jobs. The bankers first, followed swiftly by the consultants and then the rest of us over the remaining couple of months. As it each wave of recruitment took place a noticeable shift in campus energy (in and out of the classroom) took place. By summer, an unrecognizable relaxedness permeates Uris. Again this all points to the focus at business school of securing a job over learning. Many students tune out of the academics as soon as they sign their internship offer letters.

Others, myself included, didn’t have that choice. Recruiting can go right down to the wire. Perhaps 20% of the student body wrapped up our first year without having accepted or received an offer. This can be (and certainly was for me) a nerve wracking period (this is especially pronounced at Columbia as we wrap up our semester a couple of weeks before our peers and so recruiting doesn’t really officially end until three or four weeks after our last exam).
Most if not all my classmates now seem to have found something exciting to keep them busy over the summer. The coolest are working at McKinsey, Amazon, Google, MTV, Opening Ceremony, tech, media, retail companies to name but a few.

Travel.

One of my favorite parts of spring was traveling with classmates. Apart from the Silicon Valley Teck Trek (see photo of us at Facebook on the right) and the Dubai Chazen trip which took place just before school started, I managed to squeeze in a couple of snow boarding trips (Vermont and Cat Skills), Shanghai, Boston, Coachella (were it not for a misplaced passport, San Diego would have been on there too for a sports case competition). These were all incredible and I highly recommend taking part in as many trips (fun, recruiting and academic) as you can at b school.

They allow for more intimate environs to bond with class mates and are great ways of getting to know people with different class schedules. There’s 1,500 or so MBAs at Columbia so there’s always new people to meet and it’s otherwise a little too easy to stop getting to know people outside your year / cluster etc.

Some of the trips are official university trips which are cool in terms of access to businesses etc and also great ways to get to know professors better. The others are student run and organized and have a more social focus.

Academics – last and least?
Academics can often seem a bit of an after thought at business school. Not to take away from the many studious students who ace most if not all of their subjects- often the same students who seemingly live in the library or else were only really seen on campus when in class.
The structure of business school (at least at Columbia) was such that unless you were of the minority gunning for dean’s list the incentives and penalties to do well or not do poorly barely exist. It is far too easy to pass subjects without having really grasped it well enough to practise or even well enough to not potentially cause some damage – alittle bit of knowledge and all that – .
There is too much fluff squeezed into the business school curriculum (leadership, ethics etc – mostly in response to supposed developments in the real world) that detracts from the time and focus better spent on statistics, economics, mathematics and finance.

A summer gift in the form of playlist.

John Byrne, former editor at Business Week has launched what has quickly become my favorite business school publication: Poets & Quants. Worth bookmarking if you’re at business school or considering applying to one.

Here’s the Haas Dean Rich Lyons on the four guiding principles at Berkeley:

The Economist’s annual Which MBA? is out:

Haas stays at #3, Columbia moves up to #12.

Booth jumps to the top spot where it often is on other lists and seems anecdotally accurate based on how impressive the Chicago grads I have met are.
Different schools have different strengths of course. Columbia is a superb finance school (also v good if you want to become a consultant), Haas very strong on tech / green tech and better on entrepreneurship too (planning an expanded CBS v Haas post soon).

I am pretty sure there’s a way to define your own personal rankings by changing the weights of the metrics used to assess the schools but I can’t seem to find it on the website. Might be on the iPhone app though it seems the new version hasn’t made it to the app store yet.

Here’s the ranking broken down by category:

And finally there’s a look at the ROI’s at various schools:

The Financial Times’ Lex asks:

Where are tomorrow’s masters of the universe? Red in tooth-and-claw investment banks are pulling out all the stops to woo graduates. Nomura of Japan, arguably the world’s most socialist nation, is resorting to fat paycheques. Graduates are reportedly being offered $75,000, triple the average starting pay in Japan. US and European banks grumble about a dearth of applicants. In the UK, state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland and the about-to-be-defunct Financial Services Authority are among graduates’ top picks. Nearly twice as many graduates plan to apply to charities as to investment banks, according to High Fliers Research. Pinning graduates’ disenchantment with banking to the recent crisis seems a tad disingenuous: today’s bright young things simply have less fire in their bellies. Half of those surveyed by Orange, the mobile network, put happiness as their number one work requirement; 43 per cent wanted “nice colleagues”. Bring back Gordon Gekko.

Not many signs of happiness being students’ number one work requirement at Columbia Business School where I sense Gordon Gekko remains a revered role model for many.

“I hate panels” blogged Fred Wilson recently, riffing on a Mark Suster post about getting the most out of panels.

There are many conferences at Columbia Business School, mostly organized by student associations. I have been to the Retail & Luxury Conference, the Media & Entertainment Conference as well as Cyberposium at Harvard Business School, but there’s almost a conference for every industry club (PE/VC, Marketing, Brite, Social Enterprise etc).

The conferences’ stated aims usually include networking / recruiting opportunities for students, raising Columbia’s profile and in theory allowing for thought leaders in academia and the field to exchange ideas.
I can’t help but feel that none of these objectives are met very well. Perhaps it is time to rethink these formats.

Fred again:

All that said, I really hate panels. I hate watching them and I hate being on them even more. I think it’s a lazy way to participate in a conference. You show up, answer a few questions, sit up on the stage with a bunch of other people, and then go home.

I much prefer the 15-20 minute talk with Q&A afterward. I think I’d prefer even more a 10 minute talk with longer Q&A afterward.

I like the idea of programming a series of interviews rather than panels that allow for deeper explorations of a given topic. Perhaps a faculty member and an industry thought-leader, or two industry folk, or two competitors interviewing each other. The Q&A sessions can sometimes be the best part of these things, but here too there’s perhaps room for improvement. I like the idea of sourcing questions from students, faculty and attendees in the period leading up to the conferences and during the sessions, this can be done via twitter, facebook, sms, email etc and then the moderator or the conference team can select some of the more interesting questions to get conversations flowing.

I also like the Pecha Kucha / Ignite formats of constraining actual presentations to short and impactful and then allowing for in-depth Q&As to follow.

In terms of networking, small break-out sesssions, breakfasts and lunches etc with the speakers can be organized and students can apply to attend or a lottery system can be implemented (I think a combination of the two would result in the most passionate and interested students attending whilst maintaining fairness in the process).

The conference format as it is at Columbia is broken. I’d like to see us fix and improve it for next year’s round.

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Fact I am posting this a week before Spring midterms gives you a sense of how over-scheduled CBS MBAs are.

First term at Columbia Business School was intense. That’s what everyone says when speaking of their MBA experience. Still nothing quite prepares you for it. Academics plays only a bit-part in the experience. The rest encompasses recruiting (probably the biggest time-drain), extra-curricular (clubs etc) and socializing (cluster etc).
It is possible to abstain from much of the non-academic side but few MBA students do, it’s an integral part of the experience and the learning.

Core & Cluster.
Columbia divides the incoming class into clusters of about 60 to 70 students each. It also mandates a core set of subjects that everyone must take (or test out of by taking exemption exams). Both of these are controversial parts of the CBS experience. My cluster (G’11) seems to have an awesome collegiate comradeship going and an impressive social calendar of events (although I am not particularly active in cluster life). Friends have spoken to me of other clusters with much more friction and a more competitive culture.
Core classes include Corporate Finance, Accounting, Leadership, Operations, Statistics, Strategy, Economics and Marketing. Most of the professors have been incredible, a few have been shockingly disappointing (in my cluster, this came down to professors either being new to teaching or bored of teaching).
The unpredictability of the experiences and the lack of choice are what make these controversial topics at Columbia. I still think a core curriculum makes sense as part of the business education but wish more diligence was involved in selecting the core professors. Students rightly feel they are paying a lot of money and are not happy when forced to take classes with uninterested or unready teachers. As for the cluster, it’s the only way of organizing 700 students and allows for a more intimate setting to get to know your peers. The flip-side is it tends to produce silos making it difficult to connect with peers outside the cluster.

Having said that business school can be incredibly social with lots of (non-recruiting) events to choose from most nights. Most of these seem to revolve around alcohol although there are also cultural / sporting happenings too. Alcohol is a big part of school. We received an email a few months ago from a non-drinking prospective student asking whether it would impact his experience. A qualified yes was most people’s response. I have a couple of friends at CBS who don’t drink or drink very lightly and they have had great times but at times have felt a little left out. The mercurial will leave CBS having met the 700 classmates (the super mercurial will have also met most of the 2nd years and in their 2nd year, the 1st years too). Almost everyone will have learnt about new cultures on others sides of the world via the overstated but still relatively international student body.

Community.
I recall reading the BusinessWeek forums when applying to business school and seeing the oft-repeated reputation of CBS as a commuter school – one where people come to class and leave, lacking the community of more secluded non-NY schools. Nothing can be further from the truth. Community is taken very seriously at CBS and the students are for the most part very involved in the school. This is obvious from day one when you are greeted by crazy energetic 2nd year peer advisors (who take time out from their holidays to introduce 1st years to the CBS experience and who are all legends in their own rights).
Combined with the school’s infamous happy hours every Thursday (free beer for all!) and all the extra-curricular activities at school, there is an amazing spirit of community that I love.

Finance.
CBS has a reputation for being a finance school. Proximity to Wall St, impressive faculty and of course being the philosophical home of value investing ensure this. It is more true than you might imagine (CBS also brands itself to varying degrees as a great school for Media / Retail / Luxury / Social Enterprise / Entrepreneurship). It is an overwhelmingly finance oriented school. The supposed vilification of Wall St the press harps on about definitely bypassed Uris Hall. The enthusiasm for careers on Wall St is everywhere and Goldman Sachs is still the Golden Catch. Some of the really smart ambitious kids seem more interested in Private Equity, Venture Capital and Hedge Fund opportunities which nevertheless are not easy to come by.
The finance focus paradoxically creates a strong outsider community for those students interested in non-finance careers.

Media / Tech.
CBS is rightly proud of its media ties. Again the NY location is key and the school makes the most of it. The Media Management Association is one of the larger and more active groups on campus. The focus though is on old media (again a reflection of NY businesses). There are some great media faculty and electives (Jonathan Knee, Sharad Devarajan etc) on offer and lots of amazing lunch talks.
It’s probably not so strong on the techier side of things or even on the new media. Boston or the West Coast probably have an advantage here.

Entrepreneurship.
I am not sure how this compares to other schools but CBS seems to be a place people come to to land a corporate job rather than start a company. The Lang Center are very active but the CBS culture doesn’t feel especially entrepreneurial. Having said that the weak job market does seem to be encouraging CBS MBAs to explore entrepreneurship. Applications to the Greenhouse program were at a record high this year.

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There are a few tickets left to this year’s MBA Media & Entertainment Conference.

Speakers include Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures; Ron Stern, Marvel Entertainment; Bob Guccione, Jr., SPIN Magazine; Derek Sivers, CD Baby; Gavin McInnes, Street Carnage, Vice; David Cho, The Awl; John Sloss, Cinetic Media; Dennis Crowley, Foursquare; Jay Rosen, PressThink; Richard Tofel, ProPublica; Steven Brill, Journalism Online.

Gavin McInnes’s panel should be fun!

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Christian Dicarlo, VP of the CBS SIlicon Valley trip asks Is It Better to Go to a Start-Up or an Established Firm? on CBS’ Public Offering blog and recaps the trip on his own blog Philtered.com.