Nhlanhla Dlamini
Is an MBA worth the money?
How we made it in Africa recently posed this question to South African pet food entrepreneur Nhlanhla Dlamini, who did his MBA at Harvard Business School. He responded as follows:
“I personally really enjoyed my MBA. I found it very valuable. The people that I met there have been some of the most influential on my career, the most helpful to me as a growing man, and some of my closest friends. Many of them were at my wedding – or some of them actually my groomsmen. And it’s an experience that I would have struggled to replicate in such a short time anywhere else … You’ve got some really smart, energised people from all around the world, who are fully committed to making the most of that experience,” Dlamini explained.
“That’s my personal experience and I wouldn’t change anything about enrolling for an MBA.
“Stepping back from my personal experience, I absolutely can see that MBAs are very, very expensive and the cost-benefit needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. For a lot of people, I feel like the incremental income that they make after an MBA doesn’t quite justify the cost, but for many other people it does,” he continued.
“I had a great experience, but [for] many others I have to say they need to really interrogate the cost-benefit of doing an MBA.”
Watch our full interview with Nhlanhla Dlamini: South African entrepreneur competing in multi-billion dollar pet food industry
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