My company is going through a phase where someone thought "We're doing pretty well by promoting engineers into management/business positions. How well could we

My company is going through a phase where someone thought "We're doing pretty well by promoting engineers into management/business positions. How well could we do if we put some people with "real" business backgrounds (MBAs) in charge?" It's a disaster. It seems that finding a technical person and having them learn the business skills is more common and easier than taking a business person and hoping they can learn enough technical skills to be able to understand the piece of the business they're in charge of. In my situation, it's a manufacturing engineer with an MBA who was asked to manage a design engineering department. What happened was that he forced the implementation of procedures and checklists on immature processes. So the procedures were immediately out of date and because the processes were immature, there's no solid theory of operation - just lists of steps that engineers and techs execute blindly.