Beware of MBAs: The business school curriculum teaches how to suck at startups

You can learn a lot on the job, but how many jobs let you do accounting and marketing? If you're working for a domestic company do you get any experience in international business? If you work in HR are you doing anything involving economics.

It's easy to say you can learn anything on the job, but that's hardly the case when your job has specific responsibilities. A student who truly STUDIES and EARNS their MBA has the ability to apply a broad set of knowledge to any job. What's the basis for questioning someone's ability as an effective manager because of their degree type? Not all MBAs are managers, that's something different entirely.

Then in your "real world evidence" you're questioning the efficacy of MBA graduates based on how foreign companies train from within? Huh?

By itself, any degree means nothing - it's up to the employee to apply the knowledge they gained while earning that degree to bring value to their company.

Questioning if there's value in an MBA in any company is questioning the value of knowledge. If there's no value in knowledge, then why bother having any sort of degree - just hire kids of a working age and teach them to put the widget together. They'll learn the rest on the job right? Hardly.

For starters, I don't know that American companies are as good as German and Japanese companies. US is measurably wealthier than both of these countries, at least in terms of GDP per capita. Maybe US large companies are more efficient.

But even if assume large companies in those countries are similarly efficient, there are way too many differences between US and Japan besides "MBA density". It could be the case that Japanese companies hold their own despite the lack of MBAs. In fact, I do believe they do well despite the custom of treating fresh undergrads as useless, insisting on an archaic seniority system, etc.

A: An MBA is a credential, not necessarily a skill or set of skills. Earning an MBA is applying yourself to learn a set of skills, and then convincing the instructing organization you have learned the skills. Why get an MBA if you can circumvent it and just learn the skills? Why even bother with the superfluous skills and instead only learn the necessary skills on the job (and get paid for it)? With your MBA you can convince someone that you have some set of business skills, and that you are capable of applying yourself.

B: There is a different culture of employment relationships between America and say, Japan. In Japan, you are typically employed by the same company for life. Job hopping is rare, and there is a lot of loyalty in the employee-employer relationship. Why would you get an MBA in such a culture? You can surely learn the necessary skills on the job, and you most likely will not be leaving the company to find a better opportunity. Branching off from point A that an MBA is a credential, it follows that such a credential is not needed as much if you aren't planning on using it to unlock external opportunities. The flip side to this is that in America, an individual might find themselves working 2 or even 3 'careers' in their lifetime, and job hopping isn't considered disloyal, it's being aggressive. A credential is much more important to someone in this culture, as they will need it to convince new employers to hire them.

A counterpoint I want to bring up in support of an MBA is that an MBA readies you for the job you may have 5 years from now. You indicated that the necessary skills could be learned on the job. But training a new manager is expensive and risky. First, the manager must take the time to learn the tools, making him or her less effective. Second, there is the risk that this person is simply not management material, and that the investment will be wasted. Having an MBA shows (in theory) that the candidate is management material, and in fact has already learned many of the necessary skills. A company looking for a manager gets to know that this candidate is more likely to work out for them.

Finally, you said "If a person cannot learn that on those skills on the job, I seriously would question his/her ability to be an effective manager." The actual purpose of the MBA degree is to show that the candidate does have the capacity to be an effective manager. Again, it's a credential that is designed to remove the risk of a poor hiring decision.

It's about selling a vision, not presenting analysis.

From my experience that's a sure way to receive a polite "no thank you" from VC's or angels. Good venture capitalists demand meaningful analysis in your pitch. Every single pitch I've been a part of has inevitably zeroed in on market, financial, and performance analysis within 5 minutes of starting. Those slides about vision and big ideas just don't play well in those rooms (again, from my experience).

More than anything, money-folks seem to want entrepreneurs who have an eagle eye on the performance metrics of their business.