Consistently over the years, I have found that many students when asked what their career objective is would reply that they want to ‘be their own boss’ and want to start their own business. Some, realistically qualify this by saying that they first want to work a few years for someone else while they ‘learn the ropes,’ or saved some money to launch their own ventures.

MBA students have traditionally looked for corporate jobs. Can’t blame them. They pay a hefty tuition fee for good programmes and are looking to recover the amount as fast as possible.

They even begin using the terminology they pick up in the classes and talk of a salary package that is a good ‘return on investment’ in their programme.

Moreover, they are fed a steady diet of business cases mostly about large corporations in their two years of class work. And in each case, they are often asked, ‘what would you do if you were the product manager’, or what should the CEO do, and so on. This puts them in a mood raring to go and occupy that corner office as soon as they graduate.

They want to be decision makers, and move out of jobs where they are only assisting others. Placement officers of business schools are often frustrated when these eager-beaver managers even shun good entry ‘learning’ jobs in good companies, wanting ‘managerial’ positions immediately where they will ‘decide.’Field jobs in production and sales are shunned for office jobs; the unspoken text is that jobs where they possibly wear a tie and sit in the air conditioned corner office in the twenty third floor of a corporate tower is higher status than one where they have to talk to the foreman shaking an oily rag, or to the kirana shopkeeper.

And so it must come as quite a surprise to many like me to learn that the number of entrepreneurs straight out of an MBA programme is showing a healthy trend.

The need to save some money or gather some experience first is not so strong as new opportunities beckon. This is a major change from previous trends when only the last few in the graduating class and who were not making it to the prime jobs on campus would pretend to be entrepreneurs while waiting for the next posting on the placement board.

I don’t think we instructors are making the difference. But the environment sure is. All the stories of new startups hitting astronomical heights of valuations are sure inspiring. (And of course, there are some places like California where they seem to put something into the water supply to generate entrepreneurs.)

This is now called an ‘ecosystem.’ Good coffee shops with high speed internet help. Entrepreneur networks willing to share and assist are available. Angels and venture capitalists with lots of cash burning a hole in their pockets are sniffing out the innovative youth.

The MBA can come in handy for entrepreneurs too. Sure, we know about famously successful people like Dhirubhai Ambani, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who did not finish school and went on to be eminently successful as entrepreneurs.

But a survey conducted by the Financial Times found the survival rate of businesses started by MBAs after graduation to be better than that of new businesses in general (where only about 6 out of 10 survive three years).

Moreover, earnings of entrepreneurs who had finished business school were found to be slightly higher than that of the entire sample of MBA graduates.

The writer is a professor of Suffolk University, Boston, and Jindal Global Business School, Delhi NCR

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