Advisory note: The excuses enumerated below work best when used sparingly. Excessive use may result in raised eyebrows or demotions.

The age-old “my dog ate my homework” excuse may not fly in this paperless startup age, but there are plenty of other excuses you can use when didn’t finish all your work. Especially if you’ve earned your MBA.

There’s an endless number of to-dos at a startup, but I am a big proponent of that elusive work-life balance, AKA sometimes skipping out of the office before 8PM to go get an acupuncture or meet friends for a Grouper.

The key to getting away with not getting everything done is to talk like a businessperson. MBA degrees are optional, but helpful. Pull out those banal MBA one-liners and you can circumnavigate your way through any missed deadline or incomplete spreadsheet. Whether you’re too busy or just a little lazy, here are ten surefire lines that will cover your butt and earn you some corporate cred to boot:

1. I didn’t have the bandwidth this week
2. We were trying to boil the ocean
3. I had to prioritize other deliverables
4. It wasn’t the right high-level strategy
5. It fell below the line this week
6. It’s really a time and distance problem
7. There were other low-hanging fruit to attend to
8. It’s just not quite in my wheelhouse
9. It didn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel
10. The problem was that we were working in silos
11. It’s an issue of scalability

OK, that’s eleven. Bonus!

As my startup has grown from a team of five to one of 30, we’ve introduced a bit of a corporate structure and the corresponding vocabulary.

And while I’m still learning how to function in this bizarre managerial environment, I’ve already nailed the lingo. It seems talking the talk is most of the battle. A B-school grad even told me that a lot of what you learn in business school is how to speak with people across sectors. Sometimes a little hot air goes a long way.

Julia Plevin is a writer and blogger who recently returned to the United States after managing a magazine in Hanoi, Vietnam. She now works at a startup in San Francisco.

photo credit: robives via photopin cc

Considering applying for an MBA? As the Wall Street Journal originally reported, business school applicants expect to make an optimistic $133,000 upon graduation, a drastic increase from their pre-MBA salary of $45,000.

Data released today by NerdWallet, a tool that crunches financial data, reveals that applicants are overly optimistic. While grads of the top five schools, including Harvard and Stanford, typically earn over $130,000, average salaries frequently dip as low as $70,000.

The research company analyzed self-reported data from over 40 MBA programs to produce a list of top salary-earning programs and a useful side-by-side comparison between the leading schools.

Broad disparities crop up between the programs: Some help you land a dream job with a six-figure salary and a company car, while others may leave you in a position where you’re struggling to make your monthly loan repayments. Stanford’s Business School encourages its graduates to accept a job in the technology sector or start their own company, but in the majority of cases (52 percent), business school is a fast-track to a career in finance or management consulting.

Their findings indicate that:

•  The highest and lowest average starting salaries across all schools ranges from $121,455 to $73,748.
• A majority of MBA graduates enter finance or management consulting, which also receive the highest compensation.
• Top finance graduates can expect to earn at least 30 percent more then the average MBA student, with some students earning over $200,000.

Here is the full list of top 20 business schools by total compensation.

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Mike Gozzo.

A few years ago I was working in a job I loved with a company that was doing highly sophisticated technical work. I loved my technical role and the challenges and freedom it afforded me but I felt that there was a whole other side of the world that I didn’t understand.

I enrolled in a part-time MBA program in a business school and got to working on case-studies, networking and all that good stuff on nights and weekends. My relationships became tired and strained and I literally sweated through managing both a technical career and a demanding academic curriculum. It took me some time (almost 5 years!) and I graduated with an MBA.

If you were to listen to some startup types (or worse yet, your early-stage VC investors) you’d skip grad school, stick to ramen in your garage while trying to nail a huge viral coefficient and plastering whiteboards with agile index cards and a huge ass lean canvas. After all, the only things that matter to your business are your user acquisition techniques and the number of people on your LinkedIn that are wearing hoodies in their profile pictures.

This is why if you’re serious about being an entrepreneur, an MBA will give you an extra edge.

You’ll know enough about business to be dangerous

MBA programs vary from school to school, but you can be sure that by the time you’re out you’ll be conversant in a range of topics. Need to read a financial statement? Set up a pricing plan? Motivate your employees? Understand a VCs game-plan when he offers you a term sheet? Understand why you’re bleeding your seed money like a hunted seal? An MBA will teach you the fundamental theory that lets you answer each of these questions.

You will study almost every industry on the planet. During my MBA, we covered companies from Google to Avon from a variety of perspectives. Think that Avon has nothing to teach you about statup marketing? Think about how they built the ultimate affiliate program and drove millions in revenue through user-acquisition before Zuck was even born. There are lessons in these companies and industries that are begging to be applied to the web and “disruption.”

Sure you could teach yourself this by reading book after book (in fact you will read a great many during your MBA) but you likely won’t be talking about them over beers with your colleagues who share a range of experiences from industries unlike your own. I’m blessed to have people from Montreal to Mumbai in my MBA network that have built web startups, ran construction firms, brought pharamceuticals to market and kept steel mills running. The kind of perspective on strategy you get when combining these disparate points of view is as humbling as it is eye opening.

Chances are you’ll get a return on your investment

Tuition costs can be prohibitive for an MBA. I was lucky that in Quebec we pay the lowest costs for tuition in North America. My entire MBA cost under $10,000 (including books) through massive government subsidization (tuition for international students would be many times greater).

To make an educated decision about whether or not the tuition is worth it MBA style, you need to figure out the ROI. Thing is, it’s hard to put a precise dollar amount on the return you’ll get from your degree in the context of your first tech startup.

This will vary from person to person, but try to think long term and how the extra edge in terms of your career flexibility (what if this bubble bursts?) and your ability to communicate with stakeholders outside of Silicon Valley.

It’s a time commitment — but you’ll learn work/life balance!

MBA programs suck up your time. There’s no escaping it. If you want to do well, you need to work hard, attend a ton of group meetings, and write a heck of a lot of powerpoint decks. However, in a startup, you won’t have it any easier. An MBA is a great way to teach you how to find balance between your work and your personal life.

While studying I made some awful decisions that really put a damper on my interpersonal relationships. I was performing well at the office, was above average at school and failing with loved ones. I quickly learned how to balance it all and launched a startup. By the time I graduated, I had a product in market, revenue and was interviewing my first employee. I actually didn’t attend convocation because I was prepping for an investor pitch. I also did this while caring about my family and building strong ties.

If I can do this. So can you.

You’ll earn a solid network

I love Y Combinator’s model and their alumni network. I’d love even more to be plugged into it. That said, how much disruption can you really create when everyone in your circle has the same worldview?

MBA schools will lead to your network being choc-full of mid-level executives across a range of strange and traditional industries, but these people will challenge you to think about fundamentals of your business and ask you the tough questions that only an outsider could see.

Some of the best advice I received on raising capital and managing competition has come from a guy who works in Saskatchewan modeling the financials around wheat production. He also made an introduction that led to a term sheet.

Many MBA’s won’t start companies (and that’s okay!)

Think about it, relatively few people start businesses. You start a business because you’re passionate about a problem and want to resolve it your way.

MBA’s learn how to do it the traditional way: market studies and business plans (think lean startup but with a 30-page report stuck to it). Many simply don’t find the opportunity or don’t want to shoulder the risk. Web startups aren’t for everyone even if software is eating the world.

My advice…

Follow your heart. If you want to be an entrepreneur, go out and be an entrepreneur. If you want an MBA, get an MBA. These two paths are complementary, not disparate and you can do both.

Most importantly remember that education is not about top ten lists, how to guides or viral blog posts. Real education opens your mind to the world around you and helps you really understand the *why*. Remember that blindly executing is the fastest way to run off a cliff.

Mike Gozzo is a Canadian engineer and strategist who has worked for some of Montreal’s most innovative technology firms. His experience inspired Appifier, a platform that brings web publishers to life on mobile phones and tablets.

He has been named one of the top 25 emerging entrepreneurs in the province of Quebec and holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Concordia University as well as an MBA from the John Molson School of Business.

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Create an Internet business in four days; that’s the goal of the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania’s workshop that finished yesterday. Students spent four days turning ideas into business prototypes and competing against each other in the course’s Innovation Tournament.

In four days, Jan 2 – 5, MBA students learned how to pitch, create and launch a new web-based business. Each student entered the class with an idea and through a process of elimination, seven business ideas and teams emerged. Students learned the basics of creating an online business; from identifying target audiences and pitching an idea, to search engine optimization and online traffic reporting.

At the end of the workshop, the organizers announced the winners of the Innovation Tournament. Each team won on a specific metric, such as most pageviews for the business website or best real world application. While the “everyone wins” spirit is helpful in a classroom setting, in the real business world there are often clear winners and losers — something the workshop didn’t dive into. In addition, due to the short time span, the workshop didn’t discuss how to identify and deal with competitive businesses. New businesses launch all the time and many companies are competing for the same customers. Being able to set your business apart from all of the others, can mean the difference between success and failure.

The team that won based on pageviews and marketing created Chow4You, a service that helps you find meals based on nutritional value and dietary needs. Rohan Mirchandani, the acting CEO of Chow4You, said, “The workshop was focused on learning the steps to take to make a business viable, especially focusing on user experience, which I found to be the most important topic”. The program is just a prototype now, but based on his experience in the course, Mirchandani said he felt confident that he could launch Chow4You as a real business.

The Innovation Tournament is in its fourth year and has launched about one successful business from each workshop. Karl Ulrich, the Vice Dean of Innovation at Wharton, teaches the four day workshop at the beginning of January at Wharton West, the San Francisco campus for the Wharton School.

I usually hear the “Should I get my MBA?” question at least once a month. If you’re an entrepreneur, the glib answer is “no.”  It’s also the wrong answer.

Last week I was having coffee with an ex engineering student of mine now on his second startup (and for a change it wasn’t a Web 2.0 startup) who wanted to chat about career choices.  “I’m thinking of going back to school to get my MBA.”

It was said less as a clear declaration than a question. It was six years since he had left school and three and a half years ago he had joined an 8-person startup as a product manager. The company was now 4-years old and 70+ people, profitable and growing fast.

I didn’t say anything as he continued, “I’m now director of product management, but I think I’m missing stuff I ought to know; finance, marketing, and operations management. We’re starting to hire senior execs as VP’s and all the jobs specs have ‘MBA’ as a requirement.  What should I do?”

The easy answer would have been, “Yes, go back and get an MBA. You fit the perfect profile; you have an engineering background, work experience in two startups and you’ll be limited in your career growth without one.”  But the answer I gave him was a bit different.

In between the coffee and breakfast I drew the diagram below:

I explained that as startups grow, they go from the box on the left to the box on the right and the skills people need at each step of a company’s growth evolve and change. The skills required when they were an 8-person startup trying to “search for the business model” wasn’t the same set of skills needed now that they were a 70-person company “executing the business model.”  I offered that it sounded to me as if his company was going through the transition (the box in the middle) where it was starting to put in place the processes needed to build and execute the business model.

I suggested that perhaps his first question shouldn’t be whether he needed an MBA. Rather the question he should be thinking of was: In which part of a company’s lifecycle did he think he wanted to spend the rest of his career?  Did he enjoy the early chaotic stage of the startup?  Was he fondly telling stories of how much better it was when the company was smaller? After the rocketship ride of this successful startup, did he now want to be a founder of his own startup?

Or was he more comfortable now that there was more structure, repeatability and he was managing a staff? Was his goal to be a large company executive managing large groups of people?  And if a larger company was his destination, did he want to manage complex technology projects or did he see himself in more general management in sales, marketing or finance?

His vision about the trajectory of his career would answer what type of education he should get – and where he might get it.

I pointed out that if he wanted to work in a larger company he actually had two choices – go to business school for an MBA degree or go back to a graduate school of engineering for a Engineering Management degree.  (I find a disconcerting number of my MBA students with engineering backgrounds realized too late that they ought to have been in an engineering management program. They had picked the MBA route because it was trendy or they hadn’t thought through that managing engineering projects was what really excited them.)

I could see I was having an effect when he blurted out, “You know my happiest times in these startups were when we were a small team figuring out the business model. The chaos and camaraderie gave me an adrenalin rush and incredible satisfaction. While I’m really good at managing the process, this phase of the company feels like a job. I’ve been bouncing some ideas about a company with some fellow employees who feel the same way. Maybe I do want to do startups as a career.”

Then he asked me the real hard question. “So what type of graduate school do I go to get the skills to be a great entrepreneur?”

I congratulated him.  “You already have started your apprenticeship. You have two startups under your belt as one of the first 10 employees. If you decide that you want to be a founder of a startup you’ve made a good start.”

“But where do I learn all the things a founder needs to know, not just an early employee? Team building? Creativity and innovation? Entrepreneurial finance? Agile Development? This Lean startup stuff?  Where’s the school for that?”

I said, “Welcome to the wonderful world of entrepreneurial education.  It’s everywhere and nowhere.”

Almost all business schools now have entrepreneurship programs or departments. (At U.C. Berkeley that’s exactly the program I teach in.) But you can also find entrepreneurship programs in most engineering schools. (At Stanford that’s the program I teach in as well.)

And startup “accelerators” like Y-Combinator, Techstars, etc. also offer a crash course in Darwinian education.

Of course, if your passion is starting your own company, learning by doing is also an equally viable choice.

Now that three years have passed since I got my graduate degree (and since the founding of my current startup), I think I can make fun of my alma mater a bit.   Please note: Only a moderate amount of harm was inflicted on MBAs – and investment bankers, in the making of this article.

10 things most MBA programs fail to teach you about startups

1.  No amount of strategic planning will ever substitute for managing your cash flow.  Financial statements are great.  The most important one is your bank account statement.

2.  There are always more things to do than there is time to do them.  Startups are a continuous exercise in deciding what not to do.  You can sometimes win by just not doing things faster than your competition.

3.  Sleep is that time you’re working on startup problems with your eyes closed.

4.  It helps if you don’t call people “human resources”.  They’re people.  And, as it turns out, people like to be treated like people. Go figure.

5.  No amount of academic theories on efficient pricing will prepare you completely for what people will actually do. Finding the “optimal” price is really hard.  In the meantime, remember that a sub-optimal price is a lot better than no price at all.

6.  Price discrimination (in an economic sense) is a wonderful thing — except that it often ignores the real costs in terms of organizational complexity.  Every time you add a new product or product option, a small part of your company dies.

7.  There are an infinite number of ways to spend money on marketing.  You have no idea what’s actually going to work.  The idea is to experiment broadly and learn lessons cheaply.  On a related note, no amount of MBA marketing classes will prepare you for the day that you have to produce leads in order to close sales.  As it turns out, marketing is about more than product feature matrices and the right shade of blue for your logo.

8.  To recruit the best people, fair compensation and equity are only a start.  Company culture and a demonstrated passion for your vision are hugely important.  (Oh, and your vision should be on the larger path to truth, justice and overall goodness).  Your vision should not involve harming kittens.  They’re adorable.

9.  There’s a lot of value to being likable.  Good things happen when people like you.  When people like you, bad things have less of a chance of being fatal.  I advise being likable.  That’s why I advise against being an investment banker after getting an MBA.  (I also advise against being an investment banker before getting an MBA).

10.  Advanced game theory is exceptionally useful.  Basic game theory is dangerous – because it assumes that you’re dealing with a bunch of rational “players”.  It’s like trying to design a real car that’s going to be driven on a theoretically frictionless surface, with no air resistance and no idiots on the road.