This is a rather serious article about pursuing an MBA. If this is your objective, first of all, you need to understand that an MBA is a degree, not a qualification. It is necessary to think about how an MBA will impact your career, or whether it is necessary as a degree. In business school, students are graded relative to their level of contributions to the lecture; it is not an easy environment like college, where you can get away with just being present in class and memorizing everything before exams. In many business schools in Europe and North America, the students with grades in the bottom 30 percent are not allowed to advance to the second year or are expelled. The pressure to quit work and go to the United States to acquire an MBA is immense.

However, MBA graduates often say to each other that the two-year experience with colleagues who shared the same objective was a priceless gift in their lives. Why is that? Transferring knowledge directly linked to acquiring a qualification to become a lawyer, a certified public accountant, or a tax accountant is not the objective of an MBA education. Instead of knowledge or qualifications (skills), it offers an objective of a different order. What you can earn with an MBA degree is the “attitude”; that is, the “way of thinking, posture, and behavior toward people and things.”

I honestly don’t know how many business schools in Japan think about this as deeply as we do, but the top schools in the world certainly understand and incorporate this philosophy into their educational system. “An economy without morality is a crime; morality without an economy is nonsense.” I was deeply moved when I heard a graduate quoting Sontoku Ninomiya’s words in his acknowledgment speech.