Oportunidad

As I hurtle towards an exciting, uncharted future full of opportunities, I find myself becoming more and more preoccupied with The Past. There’s a part of me, and I daresay a part of everyone, that yearns for the Good Ol’ Days, whatever those may be. It’s like the city folk who are saving all their nickels and centimes for the day when they say “F-it all, I’m moving to the country,” the country folk who watch the city slickers move in and wonder why they’d ever leave the city, where the shiny lights of opportunity beckon, and the historically apt amongst us who look pityingly at both and shake their heads at the Sisyphean idiots, pushing clods of manure to the other side of the fence, hoping that greener grass will grow.

I’d like to pretend that I see the latter perspective more so than I live the former two, but it’s hard to escape the following anecdotal example. One of my first real jobs out of college was for a cool company that bucked conventional wisdom and reinvented the wheel, bringing a new sense of cachet and buzz to a flagging industry. On my first day on the job, I was given an office next to the president, and told to relax and settle in. As I was expecting nothing more than a cardboard box, or a cubicle at best, I was immediately thrown off balance. Given my vague directive and penchant for being an anti-social introvert (Oooh, yeah, I’ll fit right in at a MBA program), I sat in my office fiddling with the shiny color laser printer that was next to my desk. As sitcom script writers would have it, the boss walked in as I marveled at my first color toner cartridge.

“Don’t worry, DTLF, you’ll be up to your ass in alligators, soon” he said, as I fumbled furiously to put the ink where it should have been, and look like I was doing something productive.

And I was. Working with and working for that man was one of the best learning experiences I’ve had in this lifetime. As time passed, and his story slowly emerged, I was amazed. He grew up in a rough part of town in the ’60s, finishing high school and headed straight for work. Hired as manual labor at a manufacturing concern, he grew with the company and rose through the ranks, eventually becoming SVP of Operations (with MBAs working for him) of what was now a multinational corporation, within 15 years. Unsatisfied with the way the company was headed, he rustled up some private funding and bought out a small competitor. Within a handful of years, the new company became one of the most widely-recognized brands in the industry segment, and very profitable.  With nothing but a high school degree.

If a Bachelor’s is the new high school diploma, then what’s a high school diploma worth these days? Does that make a MBA the new Bachelor’s? Can a high school graduate, albeit a very hungry, driven, intelligent graduate, compete and excel in today’s world? Hell, can a MBA, when we’re a dime-a-dozen? Can I tease out a better return investing $150K USD instead of blowing it on a 10-month meat-and-greet with a dash of academics thrown in?