10 personality types who should not study for an MBA (Part 2)
The résumé box-ticker whose heart isn’t in it. Maybe your hands come out in a rash when you pick up a textbook, or just hearing the word “study” induces a wave of nausea. In other words, you’re not really excited at the prospect of expanding your knowledge and skills but everybody at work has told you this qualification is the passport to a lifetime of well-paid, feet-on-the-desk leisure. Well, brace yourself – everybody at work was lying. An MBA can be a fantastic launch pad for the next stage of your career but it will be your career, shaped and driven by you.
Maybe your hands come out in a rash when you pick up a textbook, or just hearing the word “study” induces a wave of nausea. In other words, you’re not really excited at the prospect of expanding your knowledge and skills but everybody at work has told you this qualification is the passport to a lifetime of well-paid, feet-on-the-desk leisure. Well, brace yourself – everybody at work was lying. An MBA can be a fantastic launch pad for the next stage of your career but it will be your career, shaped and driven by you.
While taking a good, long look at yourself can be a useful way to assess your strengths and weaknesses, this looking at yourself business can sometimes go on way too long. Image is important but when this image becomes one of a vain, hair gel-obsessed airhead its time to wonder if the upper echelons of the business world that an MBA can lead to are the right place for you.
There’s a healthy competitive instinct that pushes one to improve and there’s the borderline psychopathic need to triumph that manifests itself in a willingness – an eagerness even – to trample everything and anyone in your path. MBA programmes recognise the vital importance of teamwork, as well as personal ambition, to a successful enterprise.
Being a bit of a night owl per se shouldn’t preclude you from every MBA programme, but the desire to suck the blood from anyone you come across could well be an issue. We’re living in age in which corporate social responsibility programmes are becoming more and more important to businesses, and this importance is increasingly reflected in the syllabus of MBA courses.
If you are incapable of independent action and need a precise set of instructions to carry out the simplest of tasks then you probably need to be told an MBA programme isn’t for you. These courses, like the careers they can lead to, are only suitable for self-motivated individuals ... who are not prone to rust.
PART 2 >