8 ms·

Business shcool, as best i can tell, have elevated the operations of a widget factory to a religion. And thus MBAs everywhere attempt to turn every institution

Business shcool, as best i can tell, have elevated the operations of a widget factory to a religion. And thus MBAs everywhere attempt to turn every institution they are put to manage, into an assembly line to fit their religion. Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end.

amorphid 10y ago
<sarcasm>Us MBA's have stuff figured out. When I run your code through my mean-time-between-failures Excel spreadsheet analyzer, I can predict with 95% confidence how long it will be before programs running your code will crash. I'm also able to manage you as a knowledge worker, because like you, I am a developer; I wrote one of the VB macros in my previously mentioned spreadsheet. Lastly, you'll benefit from my ethics & morality training, as it's not clear to me that you have a strong enough foundation in how to make decisions that impact the lives of others. Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month.</sarcasm>
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month Your "story" sounds like it has a cliche MBA as well as a cliche IT guy, the latter of whom believes they're oh-so-smart for having technical knowledge that others don't. Both are jerks.
anotherhacker 10y ago
Yep... and it all started in the 1920s with Taylorism - the idea that management could be a scientific process. Taylorism is why, for example, some companies still use lines of code written as a measure of productivity.
- CalChris 10y ago
  Google seems very Taylor.
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  You may appreciate my favorite Dijkstra quote: [I]f we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.
  - Buttons840 10y ago
    My favorite is from Bill Gates: “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” It's appropriate on so many levels. Lines of code can be part of a measure of what has been accomplished, just like a heavy airplane is a great accomplishment so long as it flies. Yet we would never consider adding weight to be our goal.
    - dozzie 10y ago
      > My favorite is from Bill Gates: > “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” Nice. And then we have Windows that needs dozens of gigabytes disk space and can do nothing useful at all, while debootstrapped Debian chroot can easily serve a dynamic website backed by a database and weigh two orders of magnitude less (minus the data, obviously). The analogy is quite apt, but the context of the author's company makes the sentence hilarious.
      - Clubber 10y ago
        Triggered :)
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - user5994461 10y ago
dbg31415 10y ago
I agree with all this, but generally speaking the kids who come from name-brand MBA programs are bright. They come in, they know enough, and they have excellent work ethics. I don't put a lot of stock in the training the MBA provides, but I do think on the whole MBA grads tend to be better hires than non-MBA grads. For recent grads, all things being equal, I'd take the MBA-grad. Is it that extra year or two of age? Possibly... Is it the personality type of someone driven to get an MBA in the first place? Possibly... Is it the training and networking and exposure to other like-minded individuals via group projects? Possibly...
- gsylvie 10y ago
  I see the MBA as a rfid badge into a different class of society: - Do you already have an undergrad degree? - Can you afford MBA tuition? - Can you afford the 1-2 years required (not counting the tuition)? Okay, you can be one of us. Of course there's a pecking order within the MBA club based on school and year & model of porsche and professional reputation, and your work will always speak for you. But I really get this sense that it's essentially a membership card into a social club and that the members prefer their own kind.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Yes. So much of what people have been trained to believe are important and necessary qualifications are actually just the result of an ingroup creating a contrived process of hoops to a) limit the number of potential competitors; b) haze newcomers and make them prove they are worthy to be "one of us"; c) inflate the ingroup's reputation and "credibility" by making everyone think they're super smart (and, as always in such exercises, the most important target of positive ego manipulation is one's self); d) thoroughly beat out, primarily by cultural reinforcement, any potentially disruptive ideas before someone is given the authority to practice anything professionally. By the time a licensing body is given legal authority to codify an ingroup's arbitrary ritual as a pre-requisite for gainful employment, the plot has been lost and the industry is a stagnant circlejerk. The truth is that we waste a huge amount of time on so-called "training" so that the upper class can continue to feel wise and lordly, and readily whip out the "proof" of said lordly wisdom whenever someone challenges them. We'd be much better off with apprenticeship-style programs. I have 20x more respect for someone who has been in the trenches creating actual value than I have for someone who believes that their licenses, degrees, or awards entitle them to anything.
bplsports92 10y ago
How are you a product at the end? The person isn't sold and their information isn't sold to anyone. The patient buys the product which is the healthcare. I don't see how thats relevant to business management at all.
auganov 10y ago
As much as one can criticize formal Business education, that's just not accurate. The operational side is not the main focus or even covered in depth. Pretty much every Business curriculum will start with a firm denunciation of Taylorism. It's very interdisciplinary. Basically an amalgamation of psychology, sociology, anthropology and even philosophy in an organizational context. The soft-science status is very much acknowledged. Personally, I'd even say far too often it strays into self-help territory. There's just a natural bias towards Fortune-500-sized organizations.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Then why do i keep seeing orgs run on basic of "units shipped" when it makes zero sense to do so?
  - RyanZAG 10y ago
    Practicality of management (as opposed to actual good management). This isn't really the fault of MBA, but rather the fault of office politics. In a large modern corporation with a constantly revolving door, everyone moving their careers through that organization is looking out mainly for themselves. How does someone who has just moved into an executive level at a business he doesn't understand cope with all of the office politics around him? High performance big name people constantly looking out for promotions, bonuses, threatening to leave if their demands aren't met? In the age when the owner of a business built that business up himself, knew how it worked, and knew the people he worked with, it came down to real experience. But in this new age of modern professional short term management, most of the people up and down the organizational chart don't really know anything about the depths of the business. So the only real solution is to simplify the business into "units shipped". If you can put simple numbers and KPIs on everything, you can tell right away who is valuable. Everyone now knows who is valuable. It cuts down politics dramatically as everyone is now pulling in the same direction. Instead of one employee doing all the work being outshone by another employee who does nothing but brag about himself to new hires, you have real hard numbers. Everyone knows how to succeed - make some number go up. Obviously this only works if the numbers actually align with the business. Most of the time, they actually do correlate, which is why this system continues to be used and why it makes profits go up. Does it correlate particularly well? Usually not. But it doesn't have to - the loss from the lack of correlation between reality and the simplified numbers merely has to be less than the lack of production from uncertainty and misalignment. So "units shipped" wins out. What you really need to be blaming is the concepts of professional management and job hopping. I'm hopeful both of those concepts will be uprooted within a century or two by smaller, more focused, and more efficient companies. I believe the future of companies will be single person businesses with zero employees all linked to other single person businesses through an efficient market. With each business being owned, run and controlled by a single expert individual taking the optimal choices.
KirinDave 10y ago
> Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end. Quite the contrary, doctors prefer a personal approach and researchers have been trying to reign them in because the science is very clear: playing "by the book" and not over-personalizing diagnosis or care leads to better medical outcomes for everything but long term pain management and mental health care. This is not MBAs run amok, that's people starting to listen to the science and act on it. Now, if you want to see where things go wrong we'd look to how hospitals bill and suppliers set prices.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  That is jumping from one extreme to another.
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    It is really immaterial how you or I want to interpret it when the data is quite clear.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
bigchewy 10y ago
you must not have gone to b-school, nor know many graduates. The one thing that b school doesn't do is teach people operations. Many professors consider operations easy / tactical / something vs strategy. I actually think b school would be much better off if it did concentrate on teaching students how to properly operate. and, btw, as a person who has spent 10 years analyzing the healthcare industry, we need more "medical factory" thinking not less.
neovive 10y ago
Whenever I read about widgets and business school, I can't help but remember the scene from "Back to School" [1] when Thornton Melon attends Economics class and the professor introduces "widgets". Thornton, being a successful entrepreneur, challenges everything the professor says based on his real-world experience and gives the class "practical" advice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_School [1]
FLUX-YOU 10y ago
>Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end. I'm not sure how else it's supposed to function. There are not enough doctors and nurses to spend exorbitant amounts of time answering every medical curiosity. Making you healthy again is pretty much everyone's goal (if it's possible for your case). What are you saying that MBAs are taking away from patient care? Personally I have seen the opposite: non-profits with a large percentage of income from government programs. Project Managers that buy a hundred-thousand dollar contract for a piece of software and then end up not using it. Unwillingness to address basic IT problems that drain time away from caregivers in favor of prestigious projects.

amorphid 10y ago

<sarcasm>Us MBA's have stuff figured out. When I run your code through my mean-time-between-failures Excel spreadsheet analyzer, I can predict with 95% confidence how long it will be before programs running your code will crash. I'm also able to manage you as a knowledge worker, because like you, I am a developer; I wrote one of the VB macros in my previously mentioned spreadsheet. Lastly, you'll benefit from my ethics & morality training, as it's not clear to me that you have a strong enough foundation in how to make decisions that impact the lives of others. Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month.</sarcasm>

forgetsusername 10y ago
>Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month Your "story" sounds like it has a cliche MBA as well as a cliche IT guy, the latter of whom believes they're oh-so-smart for having technical knowledge that others don't. Both are jerks.

anotherhacker 10y ago

Yep... and it all started in the 1920s with Taylorism - the idea that management could be a scientific process. Taylorism is why, for example, some companies still use lines of code written as a measure of productivity.

CalChris 10y ago
Google seems very Taylor.
ScottBurson 10y ago
You may appreciate my favorite Dijkstra quote: [I]f we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.
- Buttons840 10y ago
  My favorite is from Bill Gates: “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” It's appropriate on so many levels. Lines of code can be part of a measure of what has been accomplished, just like a heavy airplane is a great accomplishment so long as it flies. Yet we would never consider adding weight to be our goal.
  - dozzie 10y ago
    > My favorite is from Bill Gates: > “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” Nice. And then we have Windows that needs dozens of gigabytes disk space and can do nothing useful at all, while debootstrapped Debian chroot can easily serve a dynamic website backed by a database and weigh two orders of magnitude less (minus the data, obviously). The analogy is quite apt, but the context of the author's company makes the sentence hilarious.
    - Clubber 10y ago
      Triggered :)
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - user5994461 10y ago

dbg31415 10y ago

I agree with all this, but generally speaking the kids who come from name-brand MBA programs are bright. They come in, they know enough, and they have excellent work ethics. I don't put a lot of stock in the training the MBA provides, but I do think on the whole MBA grads tend to be better hires than non-MBA grads. For recent grads, all things being equal, I'd take the MBA-grad. Is it that extra year or two of age? Possibly... Is it the personality type of someone driven to get an MBA in the first place? Possibly... Is it the training and networking and exposure to other like-minded individuals via group projects? Possibly...

gsylvie 10y ago
I see the MBA as a rfid badge into a different class of society: - Do you already have an undergrad degree? - Can you afford MBA tuition? - Can you afford the 1-2 years required (not counting the tuition)? Okay, you can be one of us. Of course there's a pecking order within the MBA club based on school and year & model of porsche and professional reputation, and your work will always speak for you. But I really get this sense that it's essentially a membership card into a social club and that the members prefer their own kind.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Yes. So much of what people have been trained to believe are important and necessary qualifications are actually just the result of an ingroup creating a contrived process of hoops to a) limit the number of potential competitors; b) haze newcomers and make them prove they are worthy to be "one of us"; c) inflate the ingroup's reputation and "credibility" by making everyone think they're super smart (and, as always in such exercises, the most important target of positive ego manipulation is one's self); d) thoroughly beat out, primarily by cultural reinforcement, any potentially disruptive ideas before someone is given the authority to practice anything professionally. By the time a licensing body is given legal authority to codify an ingroup's arbitrary ritual as a pre-requisite for gainful employment, the plot has been lost and the industry is a stagnant circlejerk. The truth is that we waste a huge amount of time on so-called "training" so that the upper class can continue to feel wise and lordly, and readily whip out the "proof" of said lordly wisdom whenever someone challenges them. We'd be much better off with apprenticeship-style programs. I have 20x more respect for someone who has been in the trenches creating actual value than I have for someone who believes that their licenses, degrees, or awards entitle them to anything.

bplsports92 10y ago

How are you a product at the end? The person isn't sold and their information isn't sold to anyone. The patient buys the product which is the healthcare. I don't see how thats relevant to business management at all.

auganov 10y ago

As much as one can criticize formal Business education, that's just not accurate. The operational side is not the main focus or even covered in depth. Pretty much every Business curriculum will start with a firm denunciation of Taylorism. It's very interdisciplinary. Basically an amalgamation of psychology, sociology, anthropology and even philosophy in an organizational context. The soft-science status is very much acknowledged. Personally, I'd even say far too often it strays into self-help territory. There's just a natural bias towards Fortune-500-sized organizations.

digi_owl 10y ago
Then why do i keep seeing orgs run on basic of "units shipped" when it makes zero sense to do so?
- RyanZAG 10y ago
  Practicality of management (as opposed to actual good management). This isn't really the fault of MBA, but rather the fault of office politics. In a large modern corporation with a constantly revolving door, everyone moving their careers through that organization is looking out mainly for themselves. How does someone who has just moved into an executive level at a business he doesn't understand cope with all of the office politics around him? High performance big name people constantly looking out for promotions, bonuses, threatening to leave if their demands aren't met? In the age when the owner of a business built that business up himself, knew how it worked, and knew the people he worked with, it came down to real experience. But in this new age of modern professional short term management, most of the people up and down the organizational chart don't really know anything about the depths of the business. So the only real solution is to simplify the business into "units shipped". If you can put simple numbers and KPIs on everything, you can tell right away who is valuable. Everyone now knows who is valuable. It cuts down politics dramatically as everyone is now pulling in the same direction. Instead of one employee doing all the work being outshone by another employee who does nothing but brag about himself to new hires, you have real hard numbers. Everyone knows how to succeed - make some number go up. Obviously this only works if the numbers actually align with the business. Most of the time, they actually do correlate, which is why this system continues to be used and why it makes profits go up. Does it correlate particularly well? Usually not. But it doesn't have to - the loss from the lack of correlation between reality and the simplified numbers merely has to be less than the lack of production from uncertainty and misalignment. So "units shipped" wins out. What you really need to be blaming is the concepts of professional management and job hopping. I'm hopeful both of those concepts will be uprooted within a century or two by smaller, more focused, and more efficient companies. I believe the future of companies will be single person businesses with zero employees all linked to other single person businesses through an efficient market. With each business being owned, run and controlled by a single expert individual taking the optimal choices.

KirinDave 10y ago

> Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end. Quite the contrary, doctors prefer a personal approach and researchers have been trying to reign them in because the science is very clear: playing "by the book" and not over-personalizing diagnosis or care leads to better medical outcomes for everything but long term pain management and mental health care. This is not MBAs run amok, that's people starting to listen to the science and act on it. Now, if you want to see where things go wrong we'd look to how hospitals bill and suppliers set prices.

digi_owl 10y ago
That is jumping from one extreme to another.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  It is really immaterial how you or I want to interpret it when the data is quite clear.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

bigchewy 10y ago

you must not have gone to b-school, nor know many graduates. The one thing that b school doesn't do is teach people operations. Many professors consider operations easy / tactical / something vs strategy. I actually think b school would be much better off if it did concentrate on teaching students how to properly operate. and, btw, as a person who has spent 10 years analyzing the healthcare industry, we need more "medical factory" thinking not less.

neovive 10y ago

Whenever I read about widgets and business school, I can't help but remember the scene from "Back to School" [1] when Thornton Melon attends Economics class and the professor introduces "widgets". Thornton, being a successful entrepreneur, challenges everything the professor says based on his real-world experience and gives the class "practical" advice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_School [1]

FLUX-YOU 10y ago

>Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end. I'm not sure how else it's supposed to function. There are not enough doctors and nurses to spend exorbitant amounts of time answering every medical curiosity. Making you healthy again is pretty much everyone's goal (if it's possible for your case). What are you saying that MBAs are taking away from patient care? Personally I have seen the opposite: non-profits with a large percentage of income from government programs. Project Managers that buy a hundred-thousand dollar contract for a piece of software and then end up not using it. Unwillingness to address basic IT problems that drain time away from caregivers in favor of prestigious projects.