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3. The gap between you and the CEO's office

Companies traditionally select as chief executive officers those who have transformed themselves successfully from middle managers to general managers. En route to the big corner office, they enhanced their knowledge, raised their visibility and built strong personal networks.

A former top executive with a global advertising agency explains that an MBA degree helped him get noticed early on, and tagged by his CEO for key trouble-shooting assignments. "No matter what I happened to be doing at the time, if the company was facing a challenge, the CEO would call me to say, 'Go find out what's wrong.' He'd tell the client that he was sending his MBA to fix things. As an MBA student, I had learned to penetrate the real issues and address the central problem."

Another top executive says, "Throughout my career, I've always been an aggressive problem-solver with a global perspective, skills that my MBA curriculum brought into focus. Combined with leadership skills, innovative thinking and common sense, an MBA degree can be a powerful catalyst. To achieve high-level success in business today, an MBA is almost a necessity."

Not everyone at the top chose an MBA along the way. The founder and CEO of a leading technology company, who opted for an engineering degree rather than an MBA, now reflects, "My company might have been bigger if I had an MBA degree, because then I would have been able to make business decisions with more sophistication."

There is broad agreement on the networking benefits of a top-notch MBA degree. By "joining the club", a euphemism for graduating from a leading business school, one gains entry to an invaluable web of classmates, alumni, future grads and educators who represent a world of expertise and influence. A former advertising agency leader says, "Students at the top business schools get to know people they're going to network with for the rest of their lives. I would run into people from my MBA class years later, and it took just five minutes for us to reconnect. There was no question about whether we trusted each other. All they asked was 'What do you need?'."
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