Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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I noticed a trend among Colleagues and Friends who have been or are doing Part-time aka Executive MBAs, after working as an engineer for a number of years. Atleast one I know, who left work for a fulltime MBA course which costs more, directly in fees ($100,000 is typical.) and in loss of income.
The whole path should take 3-5 years including the GMAT preparation and the courses typically cost U$50,000-80,000 in fees, plus maybe U$10,000 in expenses and lots of study and hardwork in the middle.
I tried a reverse path to see if some current CEO have reached through that path and I found one, interestingly, he runs a people search company.

Jaideep Singh is CEO of Spock, a People search website & company. From Linkedin Profile, I would get the following which kind of shows the path, my friends might go through.

• Engineer & Manager at WindRiver systems for around 8 years, from 1994 to 2002
• Did his MBA at Wharton (I would guess the program they have in San Francisco, see link below) from 2000-2002.
• Changed to Product Management and Business Development at WindRiver from 2002 to 2006 as well as consulted with Clearstone Venture Partners as Investment Professional
• Did a stint as EIR(Entrepreneur In Residence) for six months from late 2005, again at Clearstone Venture Partners
• Started Spock in 2006 as Co-Founder and CEO.

Definitely a pretty good career path so far. I would calculate, nine years from decision (say 1997 to 2006) to CEO.
If you are in the San Jose aka San Francisco Bay Area aka Silicon Valley, some Executive MBA options are

• Wharton in San Francisco
• Haas School, Berkeley
• Leavey School, Santa Clara

PS: Marc Andreessen, Founder of Netscape mentions Sales and Finance among skills to maximize your potential in his career guide.