Is time spent out of the office studying for an MBA worth the paper it's written on if you're falling behind your competitors at the same time?

For most of us, the skills that provide our edge at work are the products of a mix of formal training and on-the-job osmosis. Personally, as a Harvard reject who set up in business on the rebound, I've often wondered whether an MBA offers the entrepreneur an advantage, or if the missing formative years at the coalface are too high a price to pay for another sheet of paper.

After all, I can safely say that while my time as an undergraduate student of economics at St Andrews University expanded my mind and loins, I have yet to deploy a single word of the post-classical neo-endogenous growth theory I learnt there.

I wouldn't have missed the experience for the world, but a few practical skills would have stood me in better stead for any early entrepreneurial endeavours.

Compare this four-year investment with my first 30-minute sales call as a green salesman. After delivering an over-polished sales pitch to a guy who turned out to be a visiting Swedish supplier, I was indelibly stamped with the lesson that you ask questions early.

And how about the first time you answer the phone to your bank manager querying the size of your overdraft? That's another experience destined to trump any textbook exhortations about cash being king. It's the brief moment when your heart stops beating that cements the memory in place.

As small children, we absorb learning like sponges, illustrating our in-built propensity to develop our minds, skills and talents. Then we go to school. The state wrests from us the legal control for our own development and enforces more than a decade of education. After that, our hard drives are reformatted at universities and business schools.

One secret of enterprise is to keep the enthusiasm of those early years. People who retain a certain awe around new things inhabit a superior zone to those who are afraid to show any gaps in their knowledge in public. Be honest, aren't you impressed by the brave person who asks the crucial question about the emperor's new clothes?

Great entrepreneurs absorb and deploy learning on the run. This talent seems to me to offer them a massive advantage over battery-fed MBAs, who are bred on a diet of business cases that are past their sell-by date. The pace of change is so rapid today that locking yourself away to study business history could even suggest that you lack the confidence, drive and hunger to succeed in a start-up. 

I guess it's different for aspiring corporate cogs, but entrepreneurial talent feels a hunger to trade bankrupt stock, not study bankrupt business models.

The dated learning model of some MBA courses seems to me to be pre-Google. It also carries the disadvantage of taking the student away from the world of work. You need to learn from today to plan for tomorrow, but while you're studying, you're missing out on what's happening on the ground.

Don't get me wrong, I think it is essential to take plenty of time to work on yourself, rather than staying buried inside the business, as so often happens. I guess this is why the IoD and others offer tailored short courses for the directors of small and medium-sized enterprises. It's also true that there are many successful entrepreneurs who have taken the MBA route.
But when faced with a choice between two candidates, one of whom has an MBA, I'd still expect the coalface learner to be able to demonstrate more growth where it counts and to hit the ground running faster.

The seminal moments in our business lives all come at times when our preparation fails us and we have to push past fear and disaster and on to success.

Like Ernest Shackleton, who against impossible odds got every man home from his Antarctic expedition, or even the X Factor contestants singing live in front of millions on a Saturday night, there is nothing quite as awe-inspiring as talent stepping out into the cold light of someone else's judgement. After all, you've got to be in it, to win it.

Alex Pratt OBE is founder of seriousreaders.com and an adviser to the government on innovation and skills.