It's not possible to teach someone the true entrepreneur spirit. Most MBAs go on to become cookie cutter consultants... This quote by YC's very own PG comes to mind:
“If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don’t hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.” - Paul Graham
The Forbes statistics are misleading, firstly they only represent a tiny percentage of businesses and secondly most people in that list made their money before MBAs were widespread. The Forbes 400 in 40 years time is likely to be considerably different.
Thirdly Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Dell also all dropped out of school, it doesn't mean dropping out of school makes you more likely to succeed at business. It's a classic case of selection bias. You need to look at the whole population otherwise there might be a million technology founder businesses that fail for everyone that might succeed.
What you need to do in order to have a fair test is take the graduating classes at an MBA course versus say a CS course, look at the number of graduates who start businesses and then analyse how many of them succeed from each each group.
I personally think there are more CS graduates that start businesses than MBAs. From what I have seen, most MBAs become consultants or executives of existing companies. I could be completely wrong here though as I am speaking based on people I have met and not actual statistics.
I think the point that's trying to be made here is that you don't need an MBA to make it in business, which I think is a very valid point. You just need the entrepreneurial spirit and drive, along with the technical expertise (if you're in software), not the MBA.
About 10% of Oxford's Said Business School graduates start businesses, I'm guessing that's quite a bit higher than most CS degrees.
LBS run an entrepreneurship summer school which concentrates on the entrepreneurship parts of their MBA program. Over the last 9 years they've had 350 graduates, and produced 90 businesses. Of those 90, 80 are still operational, which is a fairly good success rate.
Although I completely agree with you that you don't need an MBA to be successful in business, much like you don't need a CS degree to be a good developer. But if you're weak in those areas that the degree covers then obviously there will be value in studying those areas.
The Fortune 400 are generally people who found an early niche and exploited it in a way that created barriers to entry. That could be in software, but it could be in dominating natural resources in a country, government-sanctioned monopolies, or excellence in squeezing efficiencies out of economies of scale.
It's more proscriptive, I feel, to try to find people around you who you think are successful, and ask them, not the outliers in a magazine.
Whether it's software, or natural resources... the path to riches begins with an idea. It begins with creating something that people want. And I don't think that's something that an MBA program teaches you.
“If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don’t hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.” - Paul Graham