LIES B SCHOOLS TELL YOU 1. You will be rich.

My experience (and from talking to others) is that it will take you 2 or 3 times as long as you think it will take to succeed after Busines s School. So take it easy running up your student loans and credit card debts e xpecting you re going to be a rock star later. 2. You are smarter than people without an MBA. You were smart enough to get in t o Business School. That doesn t mean you are smarter than other people without an MBA. Stay humble. 3. There s always a right answer. B-School students are usually very analytical an d achievement-oriented. They like to think there s always a best answer. There s not. The perfect answer is always the enemy of the good enough one. You make decisi ons you can with the best information available. Life and business today doesn t let you count how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. 4. If you ve made it this far (to B-School), you re destined to succeed. In my B-Sch ool, there were always amazingly talented executives coming in to give talks on business and life. They d always compliment us on what a great school we attended and why we had our future by the tail. It made us all feel invincible destined to succeed once we set out on our various career paths. It doesn t work that way. I know B-School classmates who ve failed miserably, under-achieved, gotten divorc ed, gotten severely depressed, etc. B-School is a great educational opportunity in life, but you still have to go out there and succeed. Nothing is given to yo u as a birthright. 5. You know how to fix the first few companies you join after school. You ve probabl y worked at companies were people who ve been there for 2 decades roll their eyes telling you about the new hotshot MBA who just started and is now telling everyo ne how to do their jobs. It s so clear to him, yet others find it deeply offensiv e that he would think he knows how the company works when they ve spent countless years there and are still trying to figure it out. All hotshot MBAs should wear tape over their mouths for the first 3 months on the job and not be allowed to f ix anything. 6. Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) will always tell you what a company is worth. MBAs love DCF. They think the true answer to what a company is worth is always a DCF away. Just crank it out on a spreadsheet or whiteboard, show the boss, and mov e on to the next problem. Unless you re going to be a sell-side analyst, you ll nev er do a DCF after B-School. And even the sell-side analysts get their underling s to do them. And no one reading your reports will read them anyway. 7. The soft courses (leadership and people management) are least important. I reme mber talking to the professors from the Management Department at my school who h ad to teach the courses on leadership and people management. They used to lamen t that the MBAs never paid attention to them in class. Yet, the Executive MBAs (usually in their 40s or 50s) always told them that these courses were the most important of all the B-School classes they took. You learn after B-School that the perfect answer or strategy means nothing if you can t get people around you to buy in to it and help you achieve it. To do that, you need to motivate them, l isten to them, connect with them, and support them when they need it. 8. You are going to be more creative and entrepreneurial after Business School t han before. In my experience, B-School makes you less creative, the longer you re in it. They teach courses on entrepreneurship but it s kind of an oxymoron the id ea of the analysis paralysis B-School Students being entrepreneurial. You will learn a lot of tools and frameworks in B-School, but you won t learn how to start a company. You just need to start a company.

9. Your peers will give you lots of tips and insights that will help you succeed in your career. In my experience, the majority of B-School students are lemming s. They don t know what they want to do afterwards, so they just do what their pe ers say they should do (maybe that s why they applied to B-School in the first pla ce). Ten years ago, everyone at my school wanted to be a dot com entrepreneur. That didn t work out so well and most students later went back to being investmen t bankers or management consultants. Your peers don t know what you want to do wi th your career. You need to start listening to that voice inside your head. 10. The Ivy League MBAs will be even more successful. An Ivy League credential w ill be a big plus for you on your resume no question. However, you have to real ize that if you re getting an Ivy League MBA, you re probably 10x more susceptible t o the previous 9 lies than other MBAs. Don t let yourself be the next Jeff Skilli ng, the smart Harvard MBA, who worked at McKinsey and then went to Enron and dro ve the company off a cliff. He had a golden resume and where did it get him? If you treat B-School like an amazing educational experience, chances are you ll g et a lot out of it. Just keep your attitude and sense of entitlement in check.A s Casey Kasam used to say, Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for th e stars.