Codie SanchezFounder @ Contrarian Thinking

There is no paying $150,000 to go around it. You have to go through it.

8 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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Codie Sanchez says her MBA was useless. At $150,000, business school teaches theory instead of the real skills that matter. She hires MBAs anyway but has to teach them everything from scratch, the way actual leaders learn: by doing and failing.

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Do you know what the most useless thing I've done for my business was? Get an MBA. And I have a saying when we hire somebody with an MBA, it's that we're going to rub it off you real quick. Because the problem is that so many MBA programs teach theory, not practice, and then make these people feel like experts. Most of the builders I know, the billionaires, they say the path to leadership should not run through the business school. You parachute in the leader and you don't actually know how things work. You're just good at PowerPoints. The only way you really learn is by doing the thing. It's valuable to learn from the mistakes of others, but that doesn't have to cost you $150,000.