The Best MBA Requires No Tuition or GMAT

The Melting Pot MBA

Taiwan-born co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang at Computex. Photo courtesy NVIDIA Taiwan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The AI chip-maker’s market cap has risen 226% in just the past 8 months, to $1.157 trillion, making it the 5th most valuable U.S. company.

My BBA and MBA degrees required 45 courses in economics, statistics, accounting, finance, marketing, operations, and other b-school staples.  Many of the professors were exceptional, some of the concepts and case studies very helpful.  However, my best teachers haven’t been members of, say, the Nobel Prize-packed University of Chicago faculty—but rather the “adjunct faculty” I’ve met over the years, who’ve achieved great things.  Like Nabil Barakat. 

So while MBAs (and BBAs) are instructive and at times catalyzing—in terms of ROI, my advice is (also) to study the life stories of as many foreign-born U.S. business leaders as possible.  Their journeys are full of formative leadership principles. Their lessons include the vision they had of a better life that motivated them to emigrate; the courage to explore strange new lands; the grit needed to overcome a phalanx of obstacles U.S.-born entrepreneurs never had to face; the innate respect for diversity by virtue of their being an “Other;” and a commitment to continuous education.

Safra Catz photo courtesy Oracle PR/Hartmann Studios, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Born in Israel, she now runs America’s 20th most valuable company.

The world’s 8+ billion souls inhabit 234 countries, only 29 of which have populations of 50 million or more.  The U.S. is home to more foreign-born residents than there are citizens of South Korea: 52 million. On my USA Balance Sheet, our immigrant leaders represent one of our prize assets; and best hopes for a bright future. 

In addition to the many leaders who are no longer with us (like steelmaker Andrew Carnegie of Scotland and silicon chip-maker Andrew Grove of Hungary, just to name two Andrews), the following is but a small sample of the many current leaders who were not born in the States:

• Sergey Brin (Google co-founder, Russia)

• Safra Catz (Oracle CEO, Israel)

• Ali Ghodsi (Databricks CEO, Iran)

• Arianna Huffington (e-publishing visionary, Greece)

• Jensen Huang (co-founder and CEO of AI chip-maker Nvidia, Taiwan)

• Arvind Krishna (IBM CEO, India)

• Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, South Africa)

• Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO, India)

• Peter Thiel (VC genius, Germany)

• Fidji Simo (Instacart CEO, France)

• Lisa Su (AMD CEO, Taiwan)

• Raj Subramaniam (FedEx CEO, India)

If you can afford to invest $250,000 and a couple of years…an MBA might be worth it.  But if you can only afford a smartphone, some e-books, and a few subscriptions (RealClearMarkets is excellent, as is Leader to Leader and The Wall Street Journal, while Under the Hood often features instructive and inspiring immigrant profiles), and all you can manage is a few hours here and there in between your job, raising a family, or whatever—I encourage you to read, watch, and/or listen to everything you can that’s by or about successful foreign-born entrepreneurs.  Doing so just might provide the lift-off your aspirations have been waiting for.

Almost every “expert” said a reusable rocket was the stuff of science fiction. But a South African who studied economics in Pennsylvania proved them wrong. SpaceX is the smaller of Elon Musk’s two companies: its market cap is “only” $150 billion, making it America’s 44th most valuable company. His Telsa is the 7th most valuable. SpaceX liftoff March, 2023. Photo courtesy NASA Kennedy Space Center / SpaceX, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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