116 | theceomagazine.com
EARNING AN MBA IS
MORE POPULAR
THAN EVER, BUT IS IT
TRULY THE PATH TO
SUCCESS? CEOS
ANSWER THE
QUESTION: IS AN
MBA WORTH IT?WORDS • LISA SMYTHA
pple CEO Tim Cook has one,
though Steve Jobs didn’t. Google
CEO Sundar Pichai has one too.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra got
hers from Stanford, and PepsiCo CEO
Indra Nooyi has one from Calcutta
(Kolkata). But neither Richard Branson
(Virgin Group) nor Jeff Bezos (Amazon)
nor Bill Gates (Microsoft) has one.
Which begs the question: do you
need an MBA to lead a globally successful
business? According to the Financial
Times, in 2016 only 31 per cent of the
world’s largest 500 public companies
(based on market capitalisation) had
a CEO who had a Master of Business
Administration (MBA) degree.
An MBA from Harvard or Cambridge
seems like an obvious step to the top job,
but it’s clear that most of today’s business
leaders still don’t see it as a necessity.
Nevertheless, the popularity of the MBA
has grown exponentially in recent years.
In 2014, the MBA became, for the first
time ever, the most popular postgraduate
degree in the US.
So will an MBA help your career and
your business, or is the ‘school of life’
enough to help you achieve success? We
speak to two CEOs to find out...