“Are b-schools really worth it? I idolize Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. None of them ever attended a b-school. Yet they stand out as few of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time. If you want to be an entrepreneur all you need is a good idea and enough funds to support your venture. What is the need to attend a b-school? Who has ever heard of a fortune making company being started in b-school? Rather b-schools turn you into a corporate slave, takes away all your creativity and you end up living your life to realize someone else’s vision.” Those were my thoughts back in 2012 when I finally ventured into the advertising & communication business after successfully completing my engineering course. I was in a hurry. Time was like sand slipping out of my hands and I had none of it to spend on business education or job experience. I was craving for fame and fortune. And that is where all went wrong.

Two years down the lane after having tried hard and harder to make ends meet I have reached a point of self-realization. I felt that business is not just about having a great idea and selling it; it is about working in a team, building relations, weaving a stronger network. A great deal of which is taught at b-schools. But as they say, better late than never, here I am trying to get into a good b-school to nurture my management skills, build a business acumen and in turn be a good entrepreneur. I now believe that my anti-MBA ideology carried along a handful of errors, which have been elaborated further for those sailing in the same boat, and I have been lucky enough to trace them in time and act wise.

First Error: We lump all b-schools together. There are more than 12,600 institutions in the world which award degrees in business management. Ninety percent of these are unaccredited and largely unknown. Of the remaining ten percent, only the highly accredited and selective schools tend to be better endowed, have stronger alumni networks, more prominent faculty, and attract stronger students. And then within this subset are schools that have strong resources for entrepreneurs. To paint all b-schools with the same brush is to deal in stereotypes. Don’t make that mistake.

Second Error: We tend to get biased by a small sample of special cases. We easily come up with names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Larry Page: but for each case, it is possible to offer a counterexample of entrepreneurs with MBA degrees. Frank Batten founded the Weather Channel; Phil Knight co-founded Nike; Scott McNealy co-founded Sun Microsystems; Meg Whitman grew eBay from a tiny startup to an online behemoth; Warren Buffett grew Berkshire Hathaway from a small failed textile manufacturer into a major conglomerate. They all have MBAs.

Third Error: Entrepreneurship, for us, is founding a startup that makes it to the premier corporate league. Plainly, one should not assume that entrepreneurship is only about founding a company. An equally entrepreneurial spirit is required to grow and expand an already established company. Why should we expect entrepreneurs to toil only in fledging small startups? Large companies, seeking to rejuvenate their cultures, want to hire people with such entrepreneurial skills and business acumen.

Fourth Error: We only see the Winners. Ignoring the bigger picture is a mistake we usually make. The failure rate of small business startups is quite high. Census data suggest that only half of all startups remain active after three years, and only 28% after 10 years. In that time, you can burn through a great deal of effort, relationships, and money (usually gained from family and friends). For every knockout success like Steve Jobs, there are hundreds of thousands of small business failures each year.

A great b-school education won’t guarantee success, but should improve the odds. It will help accelerate your growth, compressing years of toiling into a short time. It will build your business acumen and help you understand the pitfalls and risks on which other businesses have plunged. Perhaps most importantly, an MBA degree will disabuse you of the notion that entrepreneurial success is a matter of the great individual, the genius, the maverick like Jobs/Gates/Brin or whoever else you idolize. Instead, entrepreneurial success is substantially about teamwork, networks, and business relationships.