Can signing up for an MBA lead to success?  

I've noticed a few recent articles floating around the Internet about Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, e.g. here and here. Seth Godin summarizes the major points from the book as

• Where you're born and when you're born have an enormous amount to do with whether or not you're successful.
• Becoming a superstar takes about 10,000 hours of hard work.
• Both of the bullet points above are far more important than the magical talent myth.

I find this interesting from an MBA perspective. On the first point, I think doing an MBA puts you in a place from which your career and life can go in a completely different tangent to that in which it was traveling before your MBA. It gives a little bit of the "when you were born" and "where you were born" advantage. I also believe the advantage won't come automatically. You've got to make it happen. The guys who started Akamai just told their target customer companies that they were calling from MIT and wanted to try some experiments; these companies, normally avoiding anyone trying to sell them anything, shrugged their shoulders and said "sure, why not". Through an MBA program, you're actually learning some of the skills that can take your life in that different direction, e.g. how to build super-growth companies, or how to market effectively. Of course, to get into an MBA program, you might need a "when you were born" and "where you were born" advantage to begin with; a kid from a poor village in a faraway island is unlikely to end up at a top business school in the US.

On the second point, 10,000 hours is realistically about four or five years. If you are MBA'ing at a US school, you are already investing two years in something. Is it possible to make those two years count towards that 10,000 hour total? To make it count, you probably need to have a consistent goal that will guide your selection of electives, summer internship, club involvement and everything else you do at business school. Then there are the hours put in before starting the MBA - do those count? I think this is where career goals play a critical role: what is the golden thread that runs from the past, through your MBA to your long term career?

Which leads to the third point: can signing up for an MBA lead to success? Perhaps only if :

• you realise that you are catapulted into a different place, with access to new resources that you'll need to take advantage of, just as the Akamai guys did.
  
• you need a golden thread sowing your past, MBA and future life to notch up that 10,000 hour mileage.

What do you think?