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It confuses me endlessly that MBAs should be so misunderstood by so many people, it being suggested that they are only good for networking, that people with MBA

by anjc 11y ago

It confuses me endlessly that MBAs should be so misunderstood by so many people, it being suggested that they are only good for networking, that people with MBAs are cold and evil, and so on. They're simply a course which teach you the fundamentals of several areas which are relevant to business. It'd be like saying that a degree in CS would be superfluous for somebody who wants to program. If you love programming, then you'll get value from every aspect of a CS degree. Likewise for an MBA and business. Also, truly they only teach the fundamentals. An MBA's exposure to marketing/accounting/management would be far more diluted than that of an 18 year old who pursues a degree in one of these specific areas, so I'm not sure why people seem to be so threatened by the MBA. It's also funny to read in the article that Thiel has said MBAs are useless, because his books are a joke when compared to the most basic business courses. It's also laughable that Sandberg would say this, having already gotten an education from a place which has been central to business trends globally for decades. It's likely that Facebook et al would not exist without HBS and similar institutions in the US.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
The usual criticism is that MBAs believe the degree endows them with far more strategic intelligence than they really have. It's like officer school. The worst graduates come out absolutely convinced they can run an entire army, when in fact they're still almost completely clueless. Aside from the networking - which is not trivial - the benefits of an MBA for talented individuals seem to be exposure to the idea that strategy, cost/benefit analysis, accounting, marketing, and the rest all exist, and are more relevant to a business than the code base. This can be a surprise to straight CS people, many of whom only care about code. But by analogy, many MBAs only seem to care about money. There's more to running a successful business than the bottom line - or at least there should be - and more subtle management principles that build businesses by making customers and employees happy as well as making shareholders rich don't seem to figure at all in MBA schools. The MBA point of view seems to be that happiness doesn't matter when there's profit to be made. Ironically, there's a lot of poverty in that view - not just morally, but politically and economically. In the longer term it leads to the kind of economic picture we have today, where there's a lot of profit being made, but at the cost of rapidly shrinking broad prosperity and economic freedom for most of the population.
- anjc 11y ago
  I can't agree on your interpretation of an MBA point of view, but I will say that it does seem to be the most prevalent interpretation. Thinking solely about the bottom line could be the result of a twisted grounding in accounting, but no other course in an MBA relates to profit in any direct way. Almost every class typically/simply involves being grounded in decades of research in complicated areas. It seems to me that your interpretation is more of a criticism of public shareholding and the duties of the board. Coincidentally, board members in public companies may be MBAs, and their consultants may be MBAs, but the Masters isn't why they're pursuing profit. Lastly, I had whole courses on the happiness of employees (Organisational Behaviour, HR), but like Strategy and Marketing and every other class, they were extremely theoretical and totally unrelated to practicalities of business such as profit.
- stvswn 11y ago
  Haha cracking up over here. I went to West Point, was an officer, got an MBA and now I work at a big tech company. I must really suck.
jevgeni 11y ago
Exactly. Also, I remember reading somewhere that one of the Google founders (Brin, I think) was actually proud of not having an MBA. Not 100% about the validity of the story though. Thing is, if it's true, I can understand the sentiment of rebelling against the older business culture that people with MBAs represented at the time. Thing is, all the VCs that bankrolled early Silicon Valley did (and do) have MBAs. So the point is the stance is a bit hypocritical.
- crpatino 11y ago
  The older business culture do not hold MBAs more often than not. They usually came from finance/accounting backgrounds. The better ones had some operations experience before going to university for a bachelors degree. That or were former engineers who had learned finance on their own. The contempt I have often seen towards MBA holders has more to do with them being young people with little or no experience in operations, but with huge amounts of encyclopedic knowledge on "business stuff" (strategy, management theory, etc). They are good to have as tacticians if you can pair them up with some greybeard who can provide context, but left to their own devices they tend to abstract away too much details of the businesss. Or maybe that is what you refer by "old" and what I am talking about is "ancient history".
superuser2 11y ago
My complaint (and I suspect many others') is with the idea that someone who has studied the discipline of "business" is qualified to run any business, regardless of what it does. That they know better than, and should have authority over, the people who are actually domain experts in what the business does. When we complain about empty-suit MBAs running a software company, that's assuming the suits are just MBAs, not engineers who also got MBAs. They have no skill in or respect for the craft of programming, they probably don't even understand what it consists of, and yet they are in charge and the programmers are not. Working for a technical or formerly technical manager, rather than an MBA who studied Information Systems 10 years ago and reads InfoWorld, as if that qualifies him to be CIO/CTO, is in large part what draws people to Silicon Valley and away from corporate IT departments.
- anjc 11y ago
  I think you sum it up in your first sentence: an MBA involves the study of the discipline of business. It's distinct from the practice of actually running a business, and the courses/classes are almost always highly theoretical and research based. I have a masters in business and I can assure you that no company will let me manage shit, because the course didn't confer 'experience' unto me. I'm sure that all competent managers of programmers respect the craft. I've met several managers who didn't respect programmers though, but my perception of them was that they weren't competent ;)
- ScottBurson 11y ago
  > My complaint (and I suspect many others') is with the idea that someone who has studied the discipline of "business" is qualified to run any business, regardless of what it does. Yes, this is my impression too, having once worked for a CEO whose primary qualification seemed to have been his MBA. What they taught him seemed to be applicable to running a division of a large company; it seemed anywhere between irrelevant and outright wrong when applied to a software startup. Maybe the efforts of people like Peter Thiel and Steve Blank will help get out the word that managing a startup requires a very different skill set. In general, it's my observation that different kinds of businesses need to be managed very differently. While there probably are some general principles, I have the impression that business schools underemphasize the variety that's out there, and the importance of understanding the business before trying to manage it.

by anjc 11y ago

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

The usual criticism is that MBAs believe the degree endows them with far more strategic intelligence than they really have. It's like officer school. The worst graduates come out absolutely convinced they can run an entire army, when in fact they're still almost completely clueless. Aside from the networking - which is not trivial - the benefits of an MBA for talented individuals seem to be exposure to the idea that strategy, cost/benefit analysis, accounting, marketing, and the rest all exist, and are more relevant to a business than the code base. This can be a surprise to straight CS people, many of whom only care about code. But by analogy, many MBAs only seem to care about money. There's more to running a successful business than the bottom line - or at least there should be - and more subtle management principles that build businesses by making customers and employees happy as well as making shareholders rich don't seem to figure at all in MBA schools. The MBA point of view seems to be that happiness doesn't matter when there's profit to be made. Ironically, there's a lot of poverty in that view - not just morally, but politically and economically. In the longer term it leads to the kind of economic picture we have today, where there's a lot of profit being made, but at the cost of rapidly shrinking broad prosperity and economic freedom for most of the population.

anjc 11y ago
I can't agree on your interpretation of an MBA point of view, but I will say that it does seem to be the most prevalent interpretation. Thinking solely about the bottom line could be the result of a twisted grounding in accounting, but no other course in an MBA relates to profit in any direct way. Almost every class typically/simply involves being grounded in decades of research in complicated areas. It seems to me that your interpretation is more of a criticism of public shareholding and the duties of the board. Coincidentally, board members in public companies may be MBAs, and their consultants may be MBAs, but the Masters isn't why they're pursuing profit. Lastly, I had whole courses on the happiness of employees (Organisational Behaviour, HR), but like Strategy and Marketing and every other class, they were extremely theoretical and totally unrelated to practicalities of business such as profit.
stvswn 11y ago
Haha cracking up over here. I went to West Point, was an officer, got an MBA and now I work at a big tech company. I must really suck.

jevgeni 11y ago

Exactly. Also, I remember reading somewhere that one of the Google founders (Brin, I think) was actually proud of not having an MBA. Not 100% about the validity of the story though. Thing is, if it's true, I can understand the sentiment of rebelling against the older business culture that people with MBAs represented at the time. Thing is, all the VCs that bankrolled early Silicon Valley did (and do) have MBAs. So the point is the stance is a bit hypocritical.

crpatino 11y ago
The older business culture do not hold MBAs more often than not. They usually came from finance/accounting backgrounds. The better ones had some operations experience before going to university for a bachelors degree. That or were former engineers who had learned finance on their own. The contempt I have often seen towards MBA holders has more to do with them being young people with little or no experience in operations, but with huge amounts of encyclopedic knowledge on "business stuff" (strategy, management theory, etc). They are good to have as tacticians if you can pair them up with some greybeard who can provide context, but left to their own devices they tend to abstract away too much details of the businesss. Or maybe that is what you refer by "old" and what I am talking about is "ancient history".

superuser2 11y ago

My complaint (and I suspect many others') is with the idea that someone who has studied the discipline of "business" is qualified to run any business, regardless of what it does. That they know better than, and should have authority over, the people who are actually domain experts in what the business does. When we complain about empty-suit MBAs running a software company, that's assuming the suits are just MBAs, not engineers who also got MBAs. They have no skill in or respect for the craft of programming, they probably don't even understand what it consists of, and yet they are in charge and the programmers are not. Working for a technical or formerly technical manager, rather than an MBA who studied Information Systems 10 years ago and reads InfoWorld, as if that qualifies him to be CIO/CTO, is in large part what draws people to Silicon Valley and away from corporate IT departments.

anjc 11y ago
I think you sum it up in your first sentence: an MBA involves the study of the discipline of business. It's distinct from the practice of actually running a business, and the courses/classes are almost always highly theoretical and research based. I have a masters in business and I can assure you that no company will let me manage shit, because the course didn't confer 'experience' unto me. I'm sure that all competent managers of programmers respect the craft. I've met several managers who didn't respect programmers though, but my perception of them was that they weren't competent ;)
ScottBurson 11y ago
> My complaint (and I suspect many others') is with the idea that someone who has studied the discipline of "business" is qualified to run any business, regardless of what it does. Yes, this is my impression too, having once worked for a CEO whose primary qualification seemed to have been his MBA. What they taught him seemed to be applicable to running a division of a large company; it seemed anywhere between irrelevant and outright wrong when applied to a software startup. Maybe the efforts of people like Peter Thiel and Steve Blank will help get out the word that managing a startup requires a very different skill set. In general, it's my observation that different kinds of businesses need to be managed very differently. While there probably are some general principles, I have the impression that business schools underemphasize the variety that's out there, and the importance of understanding the business before trying to manage it.