Then CBS executive Barbara Corday said, regarding educa-
tion, “If I were talking to young executives, I’d advise them to
forget their MBAs. A lot of young leaders are very taken with
their own credentials, and they forget that most American
leaders of the past 150 years didn’t have MBAs, didn’t have
Ph.D.s. I barely graduated from high school and have never
had another day of formal education. I’m not saying that be-
cause I’m particularly proud of it, but I’m also not embarrassed
about it. In my business, very few people have an academic
background that matches in any way what they’re doing now. A
liberal arts education is probably the best thing for my busi-
ness, and I feel I have that, even though I don’t have a degree to
show.... A lot of the young people I’ve dealt with in the last
five years have all sorts of degrees, but they lack some of the
personality traits, the showmanship and enthusiasm and child-
like qualities, that the entertainment business requires, and it
makes me sad to see that.... People who go to plays, read
books, know the classics, who have an open mind and enjoy ex-
periences, are more apt to be successful in my business than
someone with an MBA in finance.”
Charles Handy, one of Great Britain’s thought leaders,
would agree with her. He told me that the primary lesson he
learned at the Sloan School of Management was that he didn’t
need to go to school.
James E. Burke, former CEO of Johnson & Johnson,
learned a lot while getting an MBA, however: “I went to that
school [Harvard Business School] with a set of values that I had
gotten, as people suggest you should, from family and church
and so forth. I was young, and I wasn’t sure that I could succeed
in business with my value system. I was really torn.... I had
somehow picked up, as many people do in this country—I
On Becoming a Leader