HBS Blog Causes IBS
This “The MFA is the new MBA” post on harvardbusiness.org is the exact type of chicken-soup for your brain-dead readers that they’ve been serving up for months now. A word of advice to the worlds most famous university: more videos of Michael Porter’s nip and tucked face and less posts cobbled together by the interns.
Here are four things an MBA might actually learn from an MFA:
1. Chill Out, Man: An MFA degree costs roughly the same as an MBA with a vastly smaller chance of ever paying it back. Yet, what keeps MFA students up at night is “good drugs,” not “will I ever get a job!?” panic.
2. It Feels Good: Artists, and particularly fiction writers are always waiting to see how the work is developing. They sometimes say “I want to see where this piece is taking me.” This sixth-sense, usually referred to as “being artistic,” is completely different than the typical MBA practice of bullet-point-analyzing everything to death. Great ideas are rarely born from Excel.
3. Everything Here is Pointless: There is an heavy pressure in MBA courses to focus on the most relevant issues. Whatever is happening “now” or is most “real” is all that exists. This type of short sightedness would never be a problem for a this-blank-canvas-is-my-final-project MFA. The future of new possibilities requires thinking about what might be considered irrelevant at the moment.
4. Create: The simple art of creating something wonderful, and selling it, is the heart of business. No MFA has ever been guilty of uttering the words: maximization, leveraging, exploit, or structured investment vehicle.
