Let us see the leaders of 5 top technology companies.

1. Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) - BE, MS,MBA

2. Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) - B.Tech, MS, MBA
3. Shantanu Narayan (CEO of Adobe) - BS, MS, MBA
4. Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) - BS, MBA
5. Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) - BA,MBA
See a common thread? This dream is the reason why many of us do our MBA
afterengineering. As my teacher used to say, MBA will not help you a lot in founding a
successful company, but it does help in taking over & scaling a company someone else
founded ;-).
There is a fundamental misunderstanding among many people on what MBAs and
business schools do. The dominant assumption among many Indians seems to be that
MBA and B.Tech are completely unrelated degrees.
On the contrary, engineering degrees and MBAs are much more related and form quite a
combo. Many great economists did this [including our present RBI governor Raghuram
Rajan]. It is like adding ketchup to the french fries.
First, understand the key career paths afterMBA from a top school:
1. Investment Banking: Use all your math, logic and Excel knowledge to
help companies buy other companies or buy other assets. Engineers have a
strong advantage here as they are trained in quantitative methods and great
at hard-nosed logic. Added bonus if they have a good knowledge of particular
industries [say a Mechnical engineer who had worked in auto sector].
2. Product Management: Be the bridge between the engineering and
marketing in technology companies. The engineeringbackground would help
you understand & work with the engineers, while the MBAbackground would
help you plan and sell.
3. Management Consulting: Help companies make changes in their
business to improve profit margins. You need to be really good at data and
have a very sharp, analytical brain. The engineering background would help
you do your work, while the MBAwould help you sell your work. Both are
equally important.
Other less sexy career paths like operations management also involve a heavy dose of
engineering. There are a few other paths sales roles in technical companies
whereMBA+Engineering combo would help. Think of the two-stage rockets we studied
in Physics.
MBA forms the stage two propulsion for many engineers.

Why MBA completes an engineer?

1. In Engineering degrees, we are not taught key things like strategy. But, if you
are scaling a business or managing a business, this is very important. Manye
ngineers eventually go on to become managers/entrepreneurs and are
handicapped without this knowledge.
2. Engineers often find it hard to respect and appreciate the business side of
things. They often underestimate things like sales and marketing. This leads
them to perpetually low-paid careers. MBA degree can often fix this.
3. Engineers are good at the details, but often lose the big picture. They often
miss the forest for the trees. MBAs are the complete opposite - they create
castles in the air.Engineering+MBA let you be at the right level of detail.
4. MBA frees up the engineer to work in a variety of industries. Management
roles in many industries are quite sexy. On the other hand, engineers are
often restricted to certain industries [like software] if they want to earn well.
5. Engineers often don't know the value of their work. Engineers with MBAs are
a little more smart selling themselves ;-)
Are there some more statistics & research on this?
Do MBAs Make Better CEOs?
...roughly 40 percent of the S&P 500 chief executives have MBAs in any given
year..Among the top 10, half had MBAs...
Page on hbr.org
CEOs who had an MBA on average ranked 40 places higher than CEOs who didnt
have an MBA(a statistically significant effect).
And if you look at Indian-origin CEOs in the US, the difference is even more stark practically everyone has an MBA, as our non-MBAnetworks are relatively shallow [given
that we are immigrants]. Indira Nooyi [Pepsi], Vinod Khosla [one of the star
investors in the valley], Ajay Banga [Mastercard], Ram Shriram [an initial investor
at Google] besides Nadella,Pichai and Narayan mentioned at the top.
Don't follow the herd mentality though. Leaders never follow the herd and also all the
people mentioned above went to the top MBA schools.
Summary: MBA is a degree that is designed to be at the sweet spot of engineers.
Engineers can both use their core skillsets and also learn things they really suck the most
- presenting and organizing themselves better. Also, 90% of the top Indian engineers
don't end up in the IIMs and help the nation build its engineering powe

Last month (August, 2016) we had the privilege of meeting and interacting with Dr.
Raghuram Rajan (yes, the rockstar, who also happened to be my boss till 7 days ago (4th
Sept)).
At the open interactive session someone asked him exactly this question. Why do most
Indians pursue MBA after BTech? (Rajan Sir had himself done that).
He first laughed and admitted that he too had to face that nagging question early on in his
career.
The rest of the answer in his words:
Somewhere in the third year I lost interest in engineering. It is then that I decided I would
go for MBA. And after graduating from IIM-A I joined Tata Administrative Services. I was
taken on a visit to a plant along with other recruits. There we had the plant in-charge
cribbing that these engineering MBA grads have wasted an engineering seat etc, etc. A while
later while we were moving up in an elevator, beside our elevator there was another shabby,
dingy one. I asked the plant in-charge what or who that other elevator was meant for? He
replied that it is for the engineers! (crowd bursts into laughter)
The point is, in India, the remuneration for an engineer is not at par with a manager and we
still need more companies which would treat their engineers at par or better than their
managerial counterparts. And that would happen if companies invest more in R&D and give
more challenging roles to engineers in India. People move in a direction that is incentivized.
However, no education is a waste.
Rightly said, Sir.