Not Soulless, It’s Life

I was having a conversation with a friend of friend the other day and he was asking me about my MBA. It was basically the question “so why an MBA?” As if the MBA is the height of disgust. (This was implied, not explicit.) My answer to him was simple. Because what you learn in business school are lessons that can be applied to the rest of your life. What is business but an institutionalized version of things that we do everyday? The give-and-take, the working together, the borrowing and saving. (i.e. economics, but in a more social context.)
Sure, b-school graduates get a bad rep because they go into finance and build a giant house of cards that collapses to destabilize the economy, then still take their big bonuses.  Yeah, I think we can all agree that those people aren’t heroes.
But understanding business helps you to gain perspective on the decisions you make and the decisions that get made for you. Although b-school trains you to think in dollars and cents about even human lives, more importantly, it teaches you to think about it.  It teaches you how to dissect and evaluate the problem and think about all the parts that go into it.
The analysis may be soulless, but its the person applying it to life that makes it interesting.