16 ms·

Bulldoze the business school

344 points by merraksh 8y ago

kapauldo 8y ago
I am a business school graduate. It's a little shocking to read this but also hard to argue. I think many degrees have no value except for serving as a requirement for entry into a career.
- jaclaz 8y ago
  >I am a business school graduate. It's a little shocking to read this but also hard to argue. I think many degrees have no value except for serving as a requirement for entry into a career. I would add a further element of uncertainty, that applies not specifically to business schools only but to a number of schools/universities. The professors/dean/etc. may control what is taught at the university, but rarely they can control what the students actiually learn. If the student perceives the degree as a mere requirement for entry into a career, he/she will not study to learn, he/she will study to pass the exams, which is not at all the same thing and learn and participate as little as possible. If this is the case, there is no real incentive to teach "better" or teach "more", and what is taught little by little starts diverging from what the industry expects from a graduate, reinforcing the feeling (IMHO correct nowadays) that the degree is just a sort of badge to allow the entry to the club. The job market however insists on asking these qualificatons even for jobs where they make no sense whatsoever, fueling this perverse mechanism.
bkohlmann 8y ago
I graduated from business school last spring. It’s not that they need to be bulldozed, but rather, treated as a trade school. Our highest rated classes were taught by practitioners - those in the Arena, leading men and women, making the difficult ethical choices, then posing them to us to wrestle through. These were the classes we all wanted to take, but were deeply oversubscribed and only a fraction of us got to take. The practitioners were sidelined by the academics. The theorists and mere paper-writers - many of whom either utterly failed at business or never spent a day outside the university environment. Not one of my MBA classmates planned to teach - yet we spent most of our required class time being taught by those in power with the least relevance to the real world. The real revolution in business education will occur when the academics relinquish control, and let those who’ve learned through hard fought experience take the reins. My experience was incredible - my classmates were the most impressive folks I’ve ever met. And the value there was incalculable. But the education was easily replicable, aside from the phenomenal courses taught by practitioners.
- flyingcircus3 8y ago
  This is largely the duality between a school of engineering, and a school of technology as well. Purdue University has both. Engineering is this 150 year tradition that literally made Indiana the crossroads of America. Top 5 in most of it's disciplines year after year. But that consistency has brought the hordes. Thus, freshman engineering is this gauntlet to run. Profressors are busy with reasearch, TAs are just reciting teleprompters. If you make it through, it's because you were self sufficient, and didn't rely on the university for much of anything. The school of technology, on the other hand, requires professors have 15 years experience in industry. No research is performed. Every single core class has a lab section. It is literally disrupting the school of engineering by taking the students who aren't yet polyglots at 18, and actually teaching them to be engineers. It is effectively a bypass to the same destination of becoming an Engineer. But there's more lanes, better signage,its well lit, more efficient maintenance, and I arrive at my destination refreshed, instead of frazzled because of all that big city gridlock.
  - dhimes 8y ago
    Is there someplace I can learn more about this? Any writeups or articles you know of?
    - flyingcircus3 8y ago
      This is all anecdotal. I've found though from simply asking around, that most Engineering schools, as well as other fields, have weed out classes. They aren't technically labelled as such, but there is no better description, given their passing rates. They are curved grading, so by simple distribution of scores, large numbers of people will fail. There are so many students per teacher, the scarcity of resources demands a competition. I suppose on the larger scale though, as universities compete for students, and their money, it makes sense economically to let in anyone with the base level of aptitude, because there are plenty of other programs you can switch to from engineering. But the easiest time to lock in your customer base is when they are making the decision to buy for the very first time. Almost like a car salesman. Just keep them on the lot long enough to convince them to buy something, in lieu of the thing they wanted when they first showed up.
amoorthy 8y ago
I'm a Stanford business school grad and harbour no fanatical love for it. I penned a public letter to my Dean [1] five years ago suggesting changes to a curriculum I saw as myopic. But this article strikes me as a diatribe against capitalism rather than business school alone. And the author's track record of railing against an industry he taught in for years sounds a bit like a publicity effort. Fwiw, my experience at Stanford was very positive and I found some of the academics to be quite useful even ten years later. And my classmate are incredible and many remain close friends and advisors. [1] http://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/120424/Reform-Stanford-Business-School-or-keep-paying-lip-service-to-motto http://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/120424/Reform-Stanfor...
- kolbe 8y ago
  > my classmate are incredible and many remain close friends That's a more significant aspect of business school than the classes themselves. In fact, I suspect the curriculum are designed more to maximize the creation of friendships (i.e. fairly easy and communal) than it is to actually fill people with knowledge.
  - dba7dba 8y ago
    An acquaintance of mine who graduated from USC MBA said basically you will do well if you can carry on good conversation over beer. And another who went to Harvard Law said everyone at Harvard Law viewed folks at Harvard MBA as idiots.
- Mauricio_ 8y ago
  >this article strikes me as a diatribe against capitalism rather than business school Exactly the same reaction I got.
lordnacho 8y ago
He's got a point, and I studied at a top business school. The points he makes are mostly valid. Not sure if he mentioned this one, though: The existence of business schools gives society the unjustified idea that there are positions for which business graduates are better suited than most other people. To compare, medical schools do the same but it is justified. I wouldn't have surgery performed on me by someone who hadn't been to medical school, but I would be indifferent to hiring a manager who hadn't gone to business school. (One interesting line of thought I did learn at business school was that in the Germanic world, they are less likely to accept the Anglo-Saxon view that management is a separate skill to working. So they get more people stepping up from the ranks.) So why do I think this? When I studied the business school, it was just very weak intellectually. Kinda like watching documentaries all day; interesting, makes you think you understand something, but ultimately superficial. Reading about Betamax vs VHS is the same; you think you're gaining insight as you do it, but there's nothing really deep in there. There's not really a method or organising principle to decision making, other than "try to think about it in an organized way, keeping in mind relevant precedents" (like SWOT). Basically just common sense as a degree. That's mostly the strategy part I'm addressing there, which is probably the piece most people associate with business school. The other parts are also better taught by other departments. Finance can get very interesting when it comes to derivatives and investment strategies, but you're never going to learn this without having a strong applied math background. Organization behaviour and Human Resource Management, there are scientific departments that reach into the same space. Again, there's a big gap between what we can learn about human psychology and how you should use that information practically. Worst of all is the philosophical angle. So many times I thought to myself "how do you actually know this" with very little answer. If you want to learn how to solve business problems, there is a course that is uniquely suited for this. Software Engineering. You look at business problems, look at what resources you have available, see how other people solved them (hashmap, quicksort), and cook up your own solution using the same tools that professionals use (git, IDEs, terminals).
- walshemj 8y ago
  Are they I though there was a hard to break ceiling between "technicans" and professional in Germany - they had to relax it a bit due to eu rules but.
mbesto 8y ago
Drucker, the person most attributed with founding modern management, himself stated that you cannot teach management: Prof Drucker expounds: "Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management." His view is that management is neither an art nor a science but a practice - in which achievement is measured not by academic awards but by results. https://www.ft.com/content/5e78a9cc-3732-11d9-a8bb-00000e2511c8 https://www.ft.com/content/5e78a9cc-3732-11d9-a8bb-00000e251...
- walshemj 8y ago
  The original idea of bschools where they where for mid career mangers where considered high flyers. Now it seems the higher level degree status is used to game visa applications. Maybe a MBA should only be issued if you can prove 10 or 15 years real world work experience which would return the MBA to its roots as a course for experienced people
  - baybal2 8y ago
    No respectable business school should admit people without substantial existing work experience into any graduate course. Unfortunately, it looks that more than a half of big name universities are happy to admit people without such, or even no undergraduate studies background.
    - vostok 8y ago
      In the US typical average age at matriculation is around 27-28 at top business schools and they have formal/informal work experience requirements. People who get in straight out of college are typically doing 2+2 or similar programs although I know that submatriculation is technically possible at Wharton. To your comment about people getting in with no undergraduate studies, this is extremely uncommon. The exceptions tend to be people like Blake Gottesman who went on to be very successful.
    - gaius 8y ago
Jedd 8y ago
John Ralston-Saul, writing in The Doubter's Companion in 1994: > BUSINESS SCHOOLS: Acting schools which train experts in abstract management methods to pretend they are capitalists. > The graduates of these institutions have dominated Western business leadership for the last quarter-century. This corresponds exactly with a severe economic crisis in the West, which has included runaway inflation, endemic unemployment, almost no real growth, record levels of bankruptcy, and a collapse in industrial production. Manufacturing, the sector which they have been trained to manage, has suffered more than any other. > This raises two questions: > 1. Is there any indication—practical, statistical, philosophical or financial—that training future business leaders in specialized management schools has benefited business or the economy? > 2. Has this new élite — approximately a quarter of the university population — been able to communicate to society any convincing program for ending the crisis? > Not surprisingly, an education which above all teaches the management of structures is impervious to failure. Those within the structure continue to define the economy’s needs in their own terms and so seek out successive new generations of business school graduates. > In 1993 the Harvard Business School reacted to growing criticism of its methods by announcing a new curriculum. In the future students would “focus less on specific disciplines and more on combining skills to solve problems.” But it is precisely their obsession with problem-solving that is the heart of the problem. To organize the training of business leaders from the point of view of the corporate executive is rather like training athletes to compete from the point of view of the team’s office manager. > The outside observer might conclude dispassionately that these schools should be shut down or their methodology revolutionized. The graduate will argue, like the World War I staff officer, that failure could be turned into success if only there were more of his own kind in positions of power. Just one more wave of bodies heaved out of the trenches for a charge and the war will be won.
ilamont 8y ago
The problem is that business ethics and corporate social responsibility are subjects used as window dressing in the marketing of the business school, and as a fig leaf to cover the conscience of B-school deans – as if talking about ethics and responsibility were the same as doing something about it. At the business school I attended, there was a soaring mission statement that mentioned "high ethical standards" and "improving the world." And there were some people (faculty, students, program managers) who really did try to live up to the statement in terms of the focus of their studies, the special programs they launched, and the cross-campus collaborations that they took part in. But it was also abundantly clear that some parts of the school could care less about the mission. They were there to make money, period. Roll out the red carpet for Wall Street recruiters, management consultancies, and private equity firms. Sign multimillion dollar academic "collaborations" with cash-rich countries run by dictators and monarchies. Treat ethics as an afterthought. I remember in our microeconomics class (taught by a tenured professor who had been at the school for decades) the very first week we had to read a case about a team at Harrah's who designed a loyalty program for frequent gamblers. I remember the professor or someone in a video interview we watched crowing, "it was like printing money." The "big question" at the conclusion of the case reads: When asked about the company’s long-term vision for its RM system, a member of Harrah’s RM team became thoughtful for a moment. He responded that, while all of the near and longer-term developments described above were critical, he thought there was one important aspect of all RM systems that needed further development. "What I’d really like to know — and I pose this as a question for researchers in revenue management — is how to integrate information about price elasticity into these systems. Clearly, changes in price affect the level of demand we experience. However, none of the systems we are familiar with capture this effect." (https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/ited.1090.0031cs https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/ited.1090.003...) Neither the case nor the instructor had anything to say about the fact that this was basically a technology-driven scheme to extract as much money as possible from members of the public, including gambling addicts and other vulnerable populations. I regret not raising my hand at that point, and asking, "WTF?" Later in the program, we did get exposed to professors with moral and ethical compasses, and wanted to impress upon us the real risks to human life and well-being. They included instructors teaching macroeconomics, finance, innovation, and management law. In other academic units, people most definitely were attuned to doing the right thing (one faculty member famously has her incoming students watch "Black Mirror"). I went in knowing almost nothing about business or the way to navigate certain situations, and came out the other end a lot more comfortable about creating a successful business based on high ethical standards. But some other experiences -- not to mention the obvious conflicts between the school's mission and the way it pandered to some of the most ethically challenged elements of global capitalism -- left a bad taste in my mouth.
galacticpony2 8y ago
So, an article in "The Guardian" laments the immorality of teaching capitalism to future would-be capitalists. Color me shocked! What should we teach them instead? The importance of social responsibility, sustainability, diversity and warm feelings and how capitalism is really evil and how they should feel bad about employing its principles? In other words, shall we turn them into sheep to be let loose among the wolves (and charge them for it)? There's an argument to be made against many practices taught to MBAs, but those arguments better be supported by some science (like behavioral economics). It all has to make sense and support the bottom line. Let's take the example of the manager who fires a hundred workers and who pays himself a 500,000$ bonus (half of which will fall to taxes). He's in it for the money, just like those workers. Should he give up on his bonus and save ten employees for one year? Will that increase productivity or is he better off increasing his own wealth? We're talking about a man who rose to the top, someone whose education (or indoctrination) will not have destroyed his sense of self-interest.
- Jedd 8y ago
  > So, an article in "The Guardian" laments the immorality of teaching capitalism to future would-be capitalists. Hmm. From TFA, the author laments that: Within the business school, capitalism is assumed to be the end of history, an economic model that has trumped all the others, and is now taught as science, rather than ideology. And then: The business school assumes capitalism, corporations and managers as the default form of organisation, and everything else as history, anomaly, exception, alternative. Reasonable, and substantiated, concerns around economics as a subject (rather than pretending to be an actual science). > Let's take the example of the manager who fires a hundred workers and who pays himself a 500,000$ bonus ... We're talking about a man who rose to the top, someone whose education (or indoctrination) will not have destroyed his sense of self-interest. Your commitment to the masculine is probably merely a habit, but you've inadvertently highlighted one of the problems exacerbated by the teachings of the average business school -- self-interest at any cost is acceptable, because it's an inherent property of capitalism. Self-interest is fine and dandy, but the example you're citing -- dispense with a hundred people in order to obtain a half a million dollars -- is not an overly productive practice for most societies.
baybal2 8y ago
I, under great pressure from my parents decided to go for one. Through my youth I dreamed of doing some hardcore engineering work, yet me taking a look on the job market made me reconsider (that was right in the middle of credit bubble,) engineering job at that time looked like a great lottery where you pay 80k for 6 years of uncertainty, and 2 in 3 chance to not to get a substantial job in a year. Yet, your studies take much dedication, and leave you no chance to earn properly while you study. Given all above, we settled on a compromise solution, I were to go for a 2 year intensive BCIT undergrad business course with as much edge in tech as possible, and to which I will get as much study credit transfer possible from Russian PTU and courses I did as an exchange student in Nanyang, Singapore. In total, it took $60k of living expenses and study fees for 2 years. I was able to work while I study more or less freely, though with arguable legality with my student visa. I found my first job through the company I was interning with. I never went into debt besides $20k I took from my parents at the very end of my studies, when fees were finally closing on to eat through my savings (they never did, but I had just $1.9k by the time I graduated). In the end, by tech background took me back into tech, and my second job after graduation had close to no business side, aside from what I learned on marketing courses (I was a webmaster for an electronics startup with a lot of liberty in what I put into marketing drivel.) My thoughts: 1. Some base skills like financial modelling/planning, bookkeeping, doing accounting reports, business law do have genuine value. I regularly see tech managers nearing C-Suite positions who have great trouble when it comes to comprehension of such basics. 2. The further you go, the more ephemeral and metaphysical do your studies get, the thicker the coolaid, the harder they try to persuade you into believing into value of such studies. By the time you get to writing "executive case studies," if you have not realized that, then, with all respect to you you are a lost cause. 3. People who endure and get through, by the time they graduate, have their view of reality warped. No red pill will help them. Even if some do come close to realisation of errors in their ways, and can ask for feedback, it takes extreme effort to persuade them to adopt proper ways. You need to show them that they don't only concede their position on a particular issue, but make them accept that their original reasoning that leads them to their erroneous position is not working. 4. In China, I saw great great many youngster coming back from America after B-School, putting the knowledge they were taught to a level nearing an ultimate religious revelation. My short relationship with TCL's (a Chinese electronics company) product group was like that: Me - man, this is not a lifestyle brand no matter how you twist it, and it will not be one no matter what the marketing dept. think they can do. You are not becoming a lifestyle brand through any actions of a marketing dept. Product manager Joe - but this is not how it is supposed to be, a guru of management studies B said this, so we will be doing so. This is the trust our company's supreme leadership puts into progressive Western ways! ... After the end of the gig, I decided to not to accept their new offers. For the next few months after that, their above standing managers were contacting me. All of them sounded rather surprised with my reasoning for me not willing to work with them. I think, all of them asked me something like "were we really doing something wrong there?"
kolbe 8y ago
An MBA, much like most schooling, is all about signaling. Anyone who frames our educational system in any other way is missing the point.
- analog31 8y ago
  In my view, there is a grain of truth to the "signaling" hypothesis, but it also sounds like: 1. A legitimate grievance from people who didn't get an education and are having it arbitrarily held against them. 2. Sour grapes from people who got nothing from their time spent in school. Higher education is whatever you make of it. You're legally an adult, and can make your own choices. No two people will experience it in the same way. My kid will start college next year. I've given her a couple of analogies (roll your eyes after each one): 1. It's like going to California during the gold rush, and being handed a shovel and a bag. You get to keep the contents of the bag in four years. 2. It's a tiny elite college hidden inside a giant Big Ten party school. There is intense social pressure for you to join the party school. You decide.
  - kurtisc 8y ago
    That grain of truth was enough to win a Nobel prize.
    - analog31 8y ago
      Indeed, but like many social science results, "signaling" has taken on a life of its own in the popular consciousness. In the post above mine, signaling has gone from being an interesting and potentially measurable effect, to being the entire effect of education. Emphasis mine: >>> An MBA, much like most schooling, is all about signaling. Anyone who frames our educational system in any other way is missing the point.
seanahrens 8y ago
My finance professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley preached that maximizing profit was our ultimate service to the world---so much so--that he taught that if we were running a company and had an option to maximize profits by producing a product that would seriously harm the health of people (eg. give them a medical condition), we should undoubtedly DO IT. Because we would have maximized profit for shareholders, made something great for our customers, and (if we needed) we could take the extra profits and make medical payments to the people harmed to make it whole. He made this argument in front of 150+ person lecture class. I was so dumbfounded and shell-shocked at the argument that I couldn't believe what I just heard. I looked around at the undergrad business finance students around me, and it looked as if they were absorbing it in. That was the day I knew I chose the wrong major. I really did think about raising my hand in that class to respond to the hellish ethics he just espoused. But this professor frequently shouted down students or used ridicule to make people regret raising their hands, and I didn't have the worldview I now have to be able to tell him precisely and irrefutably why what he was teaching us was so so wrong. The real trouble, however, is that this professor was just a preacher for the doctrine of modern day American capitalism. I just expected to hear the doctrine in a much more sugar-coated and digestible form. He literally read the doctrine to us right out of the book. UC Berkeley allows undergrads to study at their Haas School of Business and earn a BS (bachelor of SCIENCE) in Business Administration. This is what I was studying. Luckily I had enough time left in undergrad after this lecture to switch to studying computer science at the College of Engineering--where I then felt like I was learning real skills.
- ukulele 8y ago
  I had several instances of the opposite while across the Bay: put ethics above profit always. It sounds like you just had a bad professor (which you already know).
  - eric_h 8y ago
    "But this professor frequently shouted down students or used ridicule to make people regret raising their hands" Pretty much the definition of a bad professor, IMO.
olivermarks 8y ago
Gary Hamel has been very effective in calling out the emperor's lack of clothes in business 'education' for years - I was at an event in 2009 when he went on an epic rant after the banking 'crisis'. https://www.london.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty/profiles/h/hamel-g#.WuSUpvdFVE4 https://www.london.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty/profiles... Ironically both Mr Parker and Mr Hamel are being paid well for teaching at the institutions they despise. I see an analogy with the vast 'San Francisco Academy of Art University', now the largest property owner in San Francisco. It's a highly successful business teaching all sorts of art courses, but a common criticism is that it's a mill, taking young people's money to 'learn art' in an expensive, beautiful city. The fact it is there is demand and it's hugely profitable, just like BSchool. Doesn't mean you are a good businessman or artist at the end of it - I believe like Drucker you have to learn as a trade in context not as a theory - but highly successful businesses cater to demand...
ngrilly 8y ago
On the same topic, I absolutely recommend reading "Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance" by Robert R. Locke and J.-C. Spender. https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Economic-Controversies/dp/178032071X https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...
pcmoney 8y ago
1. He makes a good point 2. Its not the point he thinks he makes 3. Full disclosure one of my degrees is a B.S in finance but I work as an engineer. He makes a point that "At the end of it all, most business-school graduates won’t become high-level managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks." But isn't that true of most degrees? I would argue even most STEM grads end up in the cubicle farm. I saw plenty there working for a defense contractor. I also think him saying this is objectively bad is a little elitist. Depending on background and family socio-economic status the cubicle farm might be a step up and even a point of pride. All of his criticism is from the point of view that people in business schools take advantage of others, how about people go to business school to not be taken advantage of? To know how to negotiate a salary, to know the rough rules of the game. If you don't come from a family of means I would argue a decent business school and STEM are about equivalent in terms of increasing your income and providing a long term career. Some don't have the aptitude or inclination to do STEM. Just like many STEM grads couldn't sell someone a $100 bill for $95. Another claim is that: "Another suggested that the likelihood of committing some form of corporate crime increased if the individual concerned had experience of graduate business education, or military service. (Both careers presumably involve absolving responsibility to an organisation.)" How about people who know a field and are in the field are more likely to commit a crime in it? I am sure the number of blue collar embezzlement is dominated by plumbers/electricians etc. Not even going into criminal medical issues such as corrupt doctors being opioid prescription factories. I am not saying all business schools are useful, or that they do the job perfectly but his opinion seems shockingly naive. Also business school might not be a good place to be if you don't have some degree of faith in capitalism (the single greatest eradicator of poverty over the past 50 years), it would be like being a flat-earther in an astrophysics department. Finally, I would much rather be managed or HR-ed by someone with at least some formal training on how to treat people with dignity in difficult complex situations. I have seen conflict/layoffs/firings etc. handled absolutely atrociously by (albeit young) STEM grads. Admittedly having a degree in Management/HR doesn't mean you are automatically good at this, but education helps. Personal anecdote: My first year in finance taught me a lot about debt, I changed my whole college strategy to graduate debt free. My finance degree also taught me most of the wealth management industry is exploitative of the average investor and have no demonstrable gains over just buying low fee indices. These 2 bits will save me hundreds of thousands of dollars if not over a million dollars throughout my career. Sure they may be obvious but millions of students every year make egregious financial mistakes to get other degrees that may land them in the same cube farm.
megamindbrian2 8y ago
Is this what they are teaching people to do? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/356ea48c-e6cf-11e6-967b-c88452263daf https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/356ea48c-e6c...
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  Click on the link.. and I get no content, only > Make informed decisions. Become an FT Subscriber. Okay - no.
Anirudh25 8y ago
The problem doesn't lie only with business schools but with complete higher education. Being a CS senior at Indian University, I have heard about from so many industry experts railing about the huge difference between industry and academic skills.
macspoofing 8y ago
You can substitute a number of humanities programs and all the criticisms would be equally valid.
jprissi 8y ago
Does it apply to other countries aswell ? In France, we have a pretty specific system called "classes préparatoires" where you spend 2 years before accessing business/engineering schools. As far as I know, the ones intended for business schools give a lot of importance to philosophy, history and geopolitics. This seems to differ a bit from how other business schools are described throughout the article. In the meantime, our business schools seem to follow and try to mimic the American ones. Do other business school teach similar topics ?
laurentl 8y ago
I recently finished an executive MBA at a top European B-school. To echo some of the comments, it was overall way easier than my initial studies (eng school), with some exceptions such as a brutal strategy assignment. There was also a sense of entitlement from some of the participants, especially those who were financed by their company. “Entertain me and give me my diploma” so to speak. On the other hand, due to the executive nature of the program (average age was something like 38-39) the classes were much more nuanced, especially on topics such as HR, management and so forth - when everyone in the room has some degree of managerial experience and a few war stories to share there’s much less room for indoctrination. This was also due to European culture, which is a big part of the school’s DNA and reinforced by the mostly European cohort. I did learn a lot of stuff; what will stay with me the most is what I learned about myself, through introspective assignments and interacting with other students, most of whom had very different backgrounds. But I would never have been able to do this had I taken the program as an undergrad or right after eng school. It’s true that you can’t teach common sense, you must learn it through practice. However having the opportunity to reflect on that practice, formalizing it and sharing it with likeminded persons was tremendously helpful. EDIT: to constrast my experience with the content of TFA, I crossed a few MBA students in NY during a seminar. The discussion went something like this: Me: so what business do you guys want to work in after graduating? One of them: real estate! Me: cool, any particular reason why? Him: to make lots of money and retire early! (Rest of the group nod in agremeent) Me: ... This was in 2017 and I assume they had at least heard of the subprime crisis.
- factsaresacred 8y ago
  > This was in 2017 and I assume they had at least heard of the subprime crisis Brings to mind this from Peter Thiel (exclude the length): Q. You’ve written that you doubt the efficacy of MBA programs to prepare future business leaders. What would an effective MBA program look like? A. The question is, what substance of business are you focused on? The conceit of the MBA is that you don’t need to have any substance at all. It’s just this management science, and you can apply that equally well in a software company or an oil drilling company or a fashion company or a rocket company. That’s the bias I’d want us to cut against. So for the degree, people would learn substantive things and then on the side you’d pick up some business skills. But you wouldn’t treat the business degree as the central thing. I think one challenge a lot of the business schools have is they end up attracting students who are very extroverted and have very low conviction, and they put them in this hot house environment for a few years — at the end of which, a large number of people go into whatever was the last trendy thing to do. They’ve done studies at Harvard Business School where they’ve found that the largest cohort always went into the wrong field. So in 1989, they all went to work for Michael Milken, a year or two before he went to jail. They were never interested in Silicon Valley except for 1999, 2000. The last decade their interest was housing and private equity. So there is something about the way in which business school is decoupled from anything really substantive that I’d want to rethink. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/10/10/peter-thiel-on-what-works-at-work https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/10...
factsaresacred 8y ago
Anybody who found this interesting will like 'The Management Myth': > The thing that makes modern management theory so painful to read isn’t usually the dearth of reliable empirical data. It’s that maddening papal infallibility. Oh sure, there are a few pearls of insight, and one or two stories about hero-CEOs that can hook you like bad popcorn. But the rest is just inane. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/304883/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-man... And previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11931270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11931270
seem_2211 8y ago
I have an undergrad business degree, and a lot of the criticism in the piece is fair. Most of what you learn is common sense. There's a reason there are plenty of people in history that have been able to build multimillion dollar businesses without very little formal schooling, it's simply not as difficult as engineering or chemistry. I was a marketing major, and really there is no value in the credential past an undegraduate level. The journals that professors publish in have no relevance to people working in the field, and are borderline gibberish. To have a masters or PhD in marketing is entirely useless unless you want to become an academic. There's also a lot of make work in the business school. I studied political science as my minor and found the papers had a lot less "work" from a volume point of view, but I learnt a lot more and was challenged to think a lot.
ismail 8y ago
Not sure what the curriculum in the USA/EU is like. Would love to understand what the US/EU model is? Here is some perspective from some of the top business schools [0] in South Africa: > ‘What can I do to make the most money?’ and the manner in which faculty members teach allows students to regard the moral consequences of their actions as mere afterthoughts.” and > "The problem is that business ethics and corporate social responsibility are subjects used as window dressing in the marketing of the business school, and as a fig leaf to cover the conscience of B-school deans" Not really the general case. Ethics is done right up front. All the major philosophical ethical theories are covered including: Virtue ethics, Utilitarianism, Duties and rights, Justice, Caring The consequences of actions is a thread that runs throughout every single course. For each assignment/paper submitted you are required to conduct an ethical analysis of your actions or decisions. This is done to identify any implications or negative consequences. > " If we want those in power to become more responsible, then we must stop teaching students that heroic transformational leaders are the answer to every problem, or that the purpose of learning about taxation laws is to evade taxation, or that creating new desires is the purpose of marketing." From what i have seen this is very far from what is taught here in South Africa. You will find lively debates on the purpose of marketing, is it to create demand or to fulfill demand? > " In terms of the classroom, they expect the teaching of uncomplicated and practical concepts and tools that they deem will be helpful to them in their future careers. Philosophy is for the birds." Philosophy is actually covered. You are expected to submit a dissertation/thesis as part of the requirement to complete your MBA. In the past the MBA was academically rated lower than a masters from another faculty. You could not even gain entrance to a PHD programme. There has since been a complete overhaul with the academic requirements significantly increased. The current qualification is rated the same as a masters from another faculty in terms of academic requirements. > "Why then do we assume that degree courses in business should only teach one form of organisation – capitalism – as if that were the only way in which human life could be arranged?" Some B-Schools are known to have very 'socialist leanings' in the guise of social innovation/sustainability. With a very strong emphasis on this. The only way i can describe it it is like socialism and capitalism mixed. They pretty much teach you that Friedman [1] is not correct and one needs to move beyond this. Students that complete typically end up with a bunch of mental models to reason about the world. A student coming out of B-School is faced with a choice: (A): The B-School perspective becomes their primary perspective on seeing and reasoning about the world (B): It is only one of the perspectives available to you, that you can pull out when the appropriate situation arises. The schools themselves help you to identify this and it is up to the student which of these options they take. As one grad described it to me: > "They teach you all the mental models, then they break them all down and show you how they are incorrect and the negative consequences of them" > "The problem is that business ethics and corporate social responsibility are subjects used as window dressing in the marketing of the business school, and as a fig leaf to cover the conscience of B-school deans " Are schools in the US/EU still teaching social responsibility? The schools here teach you that social responsibility is BS. You are thought that CSR (corporate social responsibility) is not the answer, but really 'window dressing'. What you really need to do is embed sustainability practices[2] throughout your organisation. It is not an afterthought, but should be a core part of business. [0] https://www.gsb.uct.ac.za/ https://www.gsb.uct.ac.za/ https://www.gibs.co.za https://www.gibs.co.za http://www.usb.ac.za http://www.usb.ac.za [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/240845-there-is-one-and-only-one-social-responsibility-of-business-to https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/240845-there-is-one-and-onl... [2] https://embeddingproject.org/ https://embeddingproject.org/
tzm 8y ago
Companies should stop treating an MBA as a technical requirement for employment.
yuhong 8y ago
What is fun is CEOs like Jack Dorsey who leads two companies.
- askafriend 8y ago
  What is the difference between Jack, who leads 2 companies, and Sundar Pichai who arguably leads an order of magnitude more "companies"? or Tim Cook who leads multiple multi-billion dollar revenue products some of which could be Fortune 500 companies on their own?
  - yuhong 8y ago
    The point is to joke about random MBAs that leads companies they know almost nothing about.
willbw 8y ago
I agree with many points in the article, but it seems to me his core point is that alternatively economic and political models to capitalism should be taught in business schools. It isn't clear to me that this is a job for graduate business education. The author clearly has an agenda to change either some aspects or capitalism, or to change economic systems entirely. I don't know why he thinks educating business school students differently is going to be something of a catalyst for change of this magnitude. People are studying these degrees with the sole aim of advancing their careers within a capitalist system. If you want political or economic change, these ideas are going to have to be spread throughout the general populace, as most of us here live in democracies. I also don't think its clear what system would be better than capitalism, despite its flaws, and asking a curriculum to give focus on some alternative system which is completely unproven is a big ask.
fwn 8y ago
> Take finance, for instance. This is a field concerned with understanding how people with money invest it. Actual finance is mostly concerned with pure money management, agnostic of the entity holding the money. If it's not a person, company or administrative body it's probably a mixture of those. > [...] it also assumes substantial inequalities of income and wealth. This is not true. For the most part it assumes that there is some need to allocate capital. Whether it is from a pension fund, an evil dictator or the Red Cross is mostly only a concern regarding specific constrains like regulation, objectives, etc. > The greater the inequalities within any given society, the greater the interest in finance, as well as the market in luxury yachts. No. The more capital to allocate, the greater the interest in allocating it. An economy with a greater financialization therefore requires a greater amount of financial knowledge and services. One can argue that such developments might be bad - completely fine. It is however awfully inaccurate to describe financial services as Veblen goods (luxury stuff where demand increases with price). I like the general attitude of the article and I believe that there might be some benefit in questioning the study of management. I just do not like beating strawmen.
mbagraduate 8y ago
Years after spending close to 200K at an elite MBA program I've come to the conclusion that they are a waste of time for most candidates. While students can be very smart and professors highly acclaimed, the MBA is a failed enterprise. In my opinion, business school only delivers an illusion of achievement and learning. MBA programs are too generic and formulaic to deliver meaningful value. Most notably: 1. Management science is even less scientific than Psychology. Yes, you can apply decision analysis, probability and game theory to business problems, but do these form a cohesive knowledge base? If management science does in fact exist, why do MBA programs' teachings differ so much from school to school? MBA students get exposed to theories and frameworks transplanted from the sciences but they walk away with only a shallow understanding of these models. Are we training managers as confidence artists? As the business school alumni move across corporate ranks they ossify and think they get it, when in fact they are just managing randomly without rigorous understanding of the complexities underlying their decisions. And yes, these business school alumni are to blame for the collapse of 2008 and many others. 2. Shareholder value maximization should not be a way of life. Very few business school graduates can think of businesses in holistic terms. The shareholder value maximization mentality incubates the many destructive forces that turn corporations into sociopaths. 3. Business schools are toxic environments created by mixing a myriad of backgrounds in a room and expecting highly divergent people to learn at the same pace or even to coalesce. In my experience, racism, discrimination, exclusion and backstabbing were the norm. Bankers drank with bankers, white Americans labeled the Chinese as "yet another international student", African Americans were severely under represented and military transplants were systematically labeled. My B-School experience was traumatic but not uncommon. I was literally swimming in a shark tank. 4.You will definitely learn a lot about corruption. I lost my faith in human nature after listening to business students talk about putting profits before lives. This are the type of people that will do anything for that bonus. In sum, business schools are a playground for corporations to shop for high (but not very high) IQ, good appearance, business aptitude and ambitious candidates. Business school is just a runway of highly accomplished students who think they get it but in reality don't. Management can't be taught. It needs to be experienced. Business schools are the most salient cancer in academia and they need to disappear.
macawfish 8y ago
We don't need rich bosses. We need hands-on leaders who aren't afraid to make the world a better place and who respect the integrity of all their collaborators. Replace business schools with institutions that foster leadership, collaboration, and inclusive positive project management skills from a wide variety of alternative forms of organization. For example: cooperatives are a legitimate, sustainable form of business, so why aren't they being taught and innovated in business schools? Also, project management skills should be something everyone gets. Every working person should be afforded opportunities to grow in their ability to lead.
ataturk 8y ago
Every time Ritz Crackers shrinks its packaging size I shake my fist at the completely un-original MBAs who keep taking "one more pickle out of the jar." Idiots. I stopped buying crackers completely. I hope they fucking choke on them. 13.7 ounces and falling from what was once a 16oz. box.

344 points by merraksh 8y ago

I am a business school graduate. It's a little shocking to read this but also hard to argue. I think many degrees have no value except for serving as a requirement for entry into a career.

jaclaz 8y ago
>I am a business school graduate. It's a little shocking to read this but also hard to argue. I think many degrees have no value except for serving as a requirement for entry into a career. I would add a further element of uncertainty, that applies not specifically to business schools only but to a number of schools/universities. The professors/dean/etc. may control what is taught at the university, but rarely they can control what the students actiually learn. If the student perceives the degree as a mere requirement for entry into a career, he/she will not study to learn, he/she will study to pass the exams, which is not at all the same thing and learn and participate as little as possible. If this is the case, there is no real incentive to teach "better" or teach "more", and what is taught little by little starts diverging from what the industry expects from a graduate, reinforcing the feeling (IMHO correct nowadays) that the degree is just a sort of badge to allow the entry to the club. The job market however insists on asking these qualificatons even for jobs where they make no sense whatsoever, fueling this perverse mechanism.

bkohlmann 8y ago

I graduated from business school last spring. It’s not that they need to be bulldozed, but rather, treated as a trade school. Our highest rated classes were taught by practitioners - those in the Arena, leading men and women, making the difficult ethical choices, then posing them to us to wrestle through. These were the classes we all wanted to take, but were deeply oversubscribed and only a fraction of us got to take. The practitioners were sidelined by the academics. The theorists and mere paper-writers - many of whom either utterly failed at business or never spent a day outside the university environment. Not one of my MBA classmates planned to teach - yet we spent most of our required class time being taught by those in power with the least relevance to the real world. The real revolution in business education will occur when the academics relinquish control, and let those who’ve learned through hard fought experience take the reins. My experience was incredible - my classmates were the most impressive folks I’ve ever met. And the value there was incalculable. But the education was easily replicable, aside from the phenomenal courses taught by practitioners.

flyingcircus3 8y ago
This is largely the duality between a school of engineering, and a school of technology as well. Purdue University has both. Engineering is this 150 year tradition that literally made Indiana the crossroads of America. Top 5 in most of it's disciplines year after year. But that consistency has brought the hordes. Thus, freshman engineering is this gauntlet to run. Profressors are busy with reasearch, TAs are just reciting teleprompters. If you make it through, it's because you were self sufficient, and didn't rely on the university for much of anything. The school of technology, on the other hand, requires professors have 15 years experience in industry. No research is performed. Every single core class has a lab section. It is literally disrupting the school of engineering by taking the students who aren't yet polyglots at 18, and actually teaching them to be engineers. It is effectively a bypass to the same destination of becoming an Engineer. But there's more lanes, better signage,its well lit, more efficient maintenance, and I arrive at my destination refreshed, instead of frazzled because of all that big city gridlock.
- dhimes 8y ago
  Is there someplace I can learn more about this? Any writeups or articles you know of?
  - flyingcircus3 8y ago
    This is all anecdotal. I've found though from simply asking around, that most Engineering schools, as well as other fields, have weed out classes. They aren't technically labelled as such, but there is no better description, given their passing rates. They are curved grading, so by simple distribution of scores, large numbers of people will fail. There are so many students per teacher, the scarcity of resources demands a competition. I suppose on the larger scale though, as universities compete for students, and their money, it makes sense economically to let in anyone with the base level of aptitude, because there are plenty of other programs you can switch to from engineering. But the easiest time to lock in your customer base is when they are making the decision to buy for the very first time. Almost like a car salesman. Just keep them on the lot long enough to convince them to buy something, in lieu of the thing they wanted when they first showed up.

amoorthy 8y ago

I'm a Stanford business school grad and harbour no fanatical love for it. I penned a public letter to my Dean [1] five years ago suggesting changes to a curriculum I saw as myopic. But this article strikes me as a diatribe against capitalism rather than business school alone. And the author's track record of railing against an industry he taught in for years sounds a bit like a publicity effort. Fwiw, my experience at Stanford was very positive and I found some of the academics to be quite useful even ten years later. And my classmate are incredible and many remain close friends and advisors. [1] http://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/120424/Reform-Stanford-Business-School-or-keep-paying-lip-service-to-motto http://www.curiousjuice.com/blog-0/bid/120424/Reform-Stanfor...

kolbe 8y ago
> my classmate are incredible and many remain close friends That's a more significant aspect of business school than the classes themselves. In fact, I suspect the curriculum are designed more to maximize the creation of friendships (i.e. fairly easy and communal) than it is to actually fill people with knowledge.
- dba7dba 8y ago
  An acquaintance of mine who graduated from USC MBA said basically you will do well if you can carry on good conversation over beer. And another who went to Harvard Law said everyone at Harvard Law viewed folks at Harvard MBA as idiots.
Mauricio_ 8y ago
>this article strikes me as a diatribe against capitalism rather than business school Exactly the same reaction I got.

lordnacho 8y ago

He's got a point, and I studied at a top business school. The points he makes are mostly valid. Not sure if he mentioned this one, though: The existence of business schools gives society the unjustified idea that there are positions for which business graduates are better suited than most other people. To compare, medical schools do the same but it is justified. I wouldn't have surgery performed on me by someone who hadn't been to medical school, but I would be indifferent to hiring a manager who hadn't gone to business school. (One interesting line of thought I did learn at business school was that in the Germanic world, they are less likely to accept the Anglo-Saxon view that management is a separate skill to working. So they get more people stepping up from the ranks.) So why do I think this? When I studied the business school, it was just very weak intellectually. Kinda like watching documentaries all day; interesting, makes you think you understand something, but ultimately superficial. Reading about Betamax vs VHS is the same; you think you're gaining insight as you do it, but there's nothing really deep in there. There's not really a method or organising principle to decision making, other than "try to think about it in an organized way, keeping in mind relevant precedents" (like SWOT). Basically just common sense as a degree. That's mostly the strategy part I'm addressing there, which is probably the piece most people associate with business school. The other parts are also better taught by other departments. Finance can get very interesting when it comes to derivatives and investment strategies, but you're never going to learn this without having a strong applied math background. Organization behaviour and Human Resource Management, there are scientific departments that reach into the same space. Again, there's a big gap between what we can learn about human psychology and how you should use that information practically. Worst of all is the philosophical angle. So many times I thought to myself "how do you actually know this" with very little answer. If you want to learn how to solve business problems, there is a course that is uniquely suited for this. Software Engineering. You look at business problems, look at what resources you have available, see how other people solved them (hashmap, quicksort), and cook up your own solution using the same tools that professionals use (git, IDEs, terminals).

walshemj 8y ago
Are they I though there was a hard to break ceiling between "technicans" and professional in Germany - they had to relax it a bit due to eu rules but.

mbesto 8y ago

Drucker, the person most attributed with founding modern management, himself stated that you cannot teach management: Prof Drucker expounds: "Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management." His view is that management is neither an art nor a science but a practice - in which achievement is measured not by academic awards but by results. https://www.ft.com/content/5e78a9cc-3732-11d9-a8bb-00000e2511c8 https://www.ft.com/content/5e78a9cc-3732-11d9-a8bb-00000e251...

walshemj 8y ago
The original idea of bschools where they where for mid career mangers where considered high flyers. Now it seems the higher level degree status is used to game visa applications. Maybe a MBA should only be issued if you can prove 10 or 15 years real world work experience which would return the MBA to its roots as a course for experienced people
- baybal2 8y ago
  No respectable business school should admit people without substantial existing work experience into any graduate course. Unfortunately, it looks that more than a half of big name universities are happy to admit people without such, or even no undergraduate studies background.
  - vostok 8y ago
    In the US typical average age at matriculation is around 27-28 at top business schools and they have formal/informal work experience requirements. People who get in straight out of college are typically doing 2+2 or similar programs although I know that submatriculation is technically possible at Wharton. To your comment about people getting in with no undergraduate studies, this is extremely uncommon. The exceptions tend to be people like Blake Gottesman who went on to be very successful.
  - gaius 8y ago

Jedd 8y ago

John Ralston-Saul, writing in The Doubter's Companion in 1994: > BUSINESS SCHOOLS: Acting schools which train experts in abstract management methods to pretend they are capitalists. > The graduates of these institutions have dominated Western business leadership for the last quarter-century. This corresponds exactly with a severe economic crisis in the West, which has included runaway inflation, endemic unemployment, almost no real growth, record levels of bankruptcy, and a collapse in industrial production. Manufacturing, the sector which they have been trained to manage, has suffered more than any other. > This raises two questions: > 1. Is there any indication—practical, statistical, philosophical or financial—that training future business leaders in specialized management schools has benefited business or the economy? > 2. Has this new élite — approximately a quarter of the university population — been able to communicate to society any convincing program for ending the crisis? > Not surprisingly, an education which above all teaches the management of structures is impervious to failure. Those within the structure continue to define the economy’s needs in their own terms and so seek out successive new generations of business school graduates. > In 1993 the Harvard Business School reacted to growing criticism of its methods by announcing a new curriculum. In the future students would “focus less on specific disciplines and more on combining skills to solve problems.” But it is precisely their obsession with problem-solving that is the heart of the problem. To organize the training of business leaders from the point of view of the corporate executive is rather like training athletes to compete from the point of view of the team’s office manager. > The outside observer might conclude dispassionately that these schools should be shut down or their methodology revolutionized. The graduate will argue, like the World War I staff officer, that failure could be turned into success if only there were more of his own kind in positions of power. Just one more wave of bodies heaved out of the trenches for a charge and the war will be won.

ilamont 8y ago

The problem is that business ethics and corporate social responsibility are subjects used as window dressing in the marketing of the business school, and as a fig leaf to cover the conscience of B-school deans – as if talking about ethics and responsibility were the same as doing something about it. At the business school I attended, there was a soaring mission statement that mentioned "high ethical standards" and "improving the world." And there were some people (faculty, students, program managers) who really did try to live up to the statement in terms of the focus of their studies, the special programs they launched, and the cross-campus collaborations that they took part in. But it was also abundantly clear that some parts of the school could care less about the mission. They were there to make money, period. Roll out the red carpet for Wall Street recruiters, management consultancies, and private equity firms. Sign multimillion dollar academic "collaborations" with cash-rich countries run by dictators and monarchies. Treat ethics as an afterthought. I remember in our microeconomics class (taught by a tenured professor who had been at the school for decades) the very first week we had to read a case about a team at Harrah's who designed a loyalty program for frequent gamblers. I remember the professor or someone in a video interview we watched crowing, "it was like printing money." The "big question" at the conclusion of the case reads: When asked about the company’s long-term vision for its RM system, a member of Harrah’s RM team became thoughtful for a moment. He responded that, while all of the near and longer-term developments described above were critical, he thought there was one important aspect of all RM systems that needed further development. "What I’d really like to know — and I pose this as a question for researchers in revenue management — is how to integrate information about price elasticity into these systems. Clearly, changes in price affect the level of demand we experience. However, none of the systems we are familiar with capture this effect." (https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/ited.1090.0031cs https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/ited.1090.003...) Neither the case nor the instructor had anything to say about the fact that this was basically a technology-driven scheme to extract as much money as possible from members of the public, including gambling addicts and other vulnerable populations. I regret not raising my hand at that point, and asking, "WTF?" Later in the program, we did get exposed to professors with moral and ethical compasses, and wanted to impress upon us the real risks to human life and well-being. They included instructors teaching macroeconomics, finance, innovation, and management law. In other academic units, people most definitely were attuned to doing the right thing (one faculty member famously has her incoming students watch "Black Mirror"). I went in knowing almost nothing about business or the way to navigate certain situations, and came out the other end a lot more comfortable about creating a successful business based on high ethical standards. But some other experiences -- not to mention the obvious conflicts between the school's mission and the way it pandered to some of the most ethically challenged elements of global capitalism -- left a bad taste in my mouth.

galacticpony2 8y ago

So, an article in "The Guardian" laments the immorality of teaching capitalism to future would-be capitalists. Color me shocked! What should we teach them instead? The importance of social responsibility, sustainability, diversity and warm feelings and how capitalism is really evil and how they should feel bad about employing its principles? In other words, shall we turn them into sheep to be let loose among the wolves (and charge them for it)? There's an argument to be made against many practices taught to MBAs, but those arguments better be supported by some science (like behavioral economics). It all has to make sense and support the bottom line. Let's take the example of the manager who fires a hundred workers and who pays himself a 500,000$ bonus (half of which will fall to taxes). He's in it for the money, just like those workers. Should he give up on his bonus and save ten employees for one year? Will that increase productivity or is he better off increasing his own wealth? We're talking about a man who rose to the top, someone whose education (or indoctrination) will not have destroyed his sense of self-interest.

Jedd 8y ago
> So, an article in "The Guardian" laments the immorality of teaching capitalism to future would-be capitalists. Hmm. From TFA, the author laments that: Within the business school, capitalism is assumed to be the end of history, an economic model that has trumped all the others, and is now taught as science, rather than ideology. And then: The business school assumes capitalism, corporations and managers as the default form of organisation, and everything else as history, anomaly, exception, alternative. Reasonable, and substantiated, concerns around economics as a subject (rather than pretending to be an actual science). > Let's take the example of the manager who fires a hundred workers and who pays himself a 500,000$ bonus ... We're talking about a man who rose to the top, someone whose education (or indoctrination) will not have destroyed his sense of self-interest. Your commitment to the masculine is probably merely a habit, but you've inadvertently highlighted one of the problems exacerbated by the teachings of the average business school -- self-interest at any cost is acceptable, because it's an inherent property of capitalism. Self-interest is fine and dandy, but the example you're citing -- dispense with a hundred people in order to obtain a half a million dollars -- is not an overly productive practice for most societies.

baybal2 8y ago

I, under great pressure from my parents decided to go for one. Through my youth I dreamed of doing some hardcore engineering work, yet me taking a look on the job market made me reconsider (that was right in the middle of credit bubble,) engineering job at that time looked like a great lottery where you pay 80k for 6 years of uncertainty, and 2 in 3 chance to not to get a substantial job in a year. Yet, your studies take much dedication, and leave you no chance to earn properly while you study. Given all above, we settled on a compromise solution, I were to go for a 2 year intensive BCIT undergrad business course with as much edge in tech as possible, and to which I will get as much study credit transfer possible from Russian PTU and courses I did as an exchange student in Nanyang, Singapore. In total, it took $60k of living expenses and study fees for 2 years. I was able to work while I study more or less freely, though with arguable legality with my student visa. I found my first job through the company I was interning with. I never went into debt besides $20k I took from my parents at the very end of my studies, when fees were finally closing on to eat through my savings (they never did, but I had just $1.9k by the time I graduated). In the end, by tech background took me back into tech, and my second job after graduation had close to no business side, aside from what I learned on marketing courses (I was a webmaster for an electronics startup with a lot of liberty in what I put into marketing drivel.) My thoughts: 1. Some base skills like financial modelling/planning, bookkeeping, doing accounting reports, business law do have genuine value. I regularly see tech managers nearing C-Suite positions who have great trouble when it comes to comprehension of such basics. 2. The further you go, the more ephemeral and metaphysical do your studies get, the thicker the coolaid, the harder they try to persuade you into believing into value of such studies. By the time you get to writing "executive case studies," if you have not realized that, then, with all respect to you you are a lost cause. 3. People who endure and get through, by the time they graduate, have their view of reality warped. No red pill will help them. Even if some do come close to realisation of errors in their ways, and can ask for feedback, it takes extreme effort to persuade them to adopt proper ways. You need to show them that they don't only concede their position on a particular issue, but make them accept that their original reasoning that leads them to their erroneous position is not working. 4. In China, I saw great great many youngster coming back from America after B-School, putting the knowledge they were taught to a level nearing an ultimate religious revelation. My short relationship with TCL's (a Chinese electronics company) product group was like that: Me - man, this is not a lifestyle brand no matter how you twist it, and it will not be one no matter what the marketing dept. think they can do. You are not becoming a lifestyle brand through any actions of a marketing dept. Product manager Joe - but this is not how it is supposed to be, a guru of management studies B said this, so we will be doing so. This is the trust our company's supreme leadership puts into progressive Western ways! ... After the end of the gig, I decided to not to accept their new offers. For the next few months after that, their above standing managers were contacting me. All of them sounded rather surprised with my reasoning for me not willing to work with them. I think, all of them asked me something like "were we really doing something wrong there?"

kolbe 8y ago

An MBA, much like most schooling, is all about signaling. Anyone who frames our educational system in any other way is missing the point.

analog31 8y ago
In my view, there is a grain of truth to the "signaling" hypothesis, but it also sounds like: 1. A legitimate grievance from people who didn't get an education and are having it arbitrarily held against them. 2. Sour grapes from people who got nothing from their time spent in school. Higher education is whatever you make of it. You're legally an adult, and can make your own choices. No two people will experience it in the same way. My kid will start college next year. I've given her a couple of analogies (roll your eyes after each one): 1. It's like going to California during the gold rush, and being handed a shovel and a bag. You get to keep the contents of the bag in four years. 2. It's a tiny elite college hidden inside a giant Big Ten party school. There is intense social pressure for you to join the party school. You decide.
- kurtisc 8y ago
  That grain of truth was enough to win a Nobel prize.
  - analog31 8y ago
    Indeed, but like many social science results, "signaling" has taken on a life of its own in the popular consciousness. In the post above mine, signaling has gone from being an interesting and potentially measurable effect, to being the entire effect of education. Emphasis mine: >>> An MBA, much like most schooling, is all about signaling. Anyone who frames our educational system in any other way is missing the point.

seanahrens 8y ago

My finance professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley preached that maximizing profit was our ultimate service to the world---so much so--that he taught that if we were running a company and had an option to maximize profits by producing a product that would seriously harm the health of people (eg. give them a medical condition), we should undoubtedly DO IT. Because we would have maximized profit for shareholders, made something great for our customers, and (if we needed) we could take the extra profits and make medical payments to the people harmed to make it whole. He made this argument in front of 150+ person lecture class. I was so dumbfounded and shell-shocked at the argument that I couldn't believe what I just heard. I looked around at the undergrad business finance students around me, and it looked as if they were absorbing it in. That was the day I knew I chose the wrong major. I really did think about raising my hand in that class to respond to the hellish ethics he just espoused. But this professor frequently shouted down students or used ridicule to make people regret raising their hands, and I didn't have the worldview I now have to be able to tell him precisely and irrefutably why what he was teaching us was so so wrong. The real trouble, however, is that this professor was just a preacher for the doctrine of modern day American capitalism. I just expected to hear the doctrine in a much more sugar-coated and digestible form. He literally read the doctrine to us right out of the book. UC Berkeley allows undergrads to study at their Haas School of Business and earn a BS (bachelor of SCIENCE) in Business Administration. This is what I was studying. Luckily I had enough time left in undergrad after this lecture to switch to studying computer science at the College of Engineering--where I then felt like I was learning real skills.

ukulele 8y ago
I had several instances of the opposite while across the Bay: put ethics above profit always. It sounds like you just had a bad professor (which you already know).
- eric_h 8y ago
  "But this professor frequently shouted down students or used ridicule to make people regret raising their hands" Pretty much the definition of a bad professor, IMO.

olivermarks 8y ago

Gary Hamel has been very effective in calling out the emperor's lack of clothes in business 'education' for years - I was at an event in 2009 when he went on an epic rant after the banking 'crisis'. https://www.london.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty/profiles/h/hamel-g#.WuSUpvdFVE4 https://www.london.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty/profiles... Ironically both Mr Parker and Mr Hamel are being paid well for teaching at the institutions they despise. I see an analogy with the vast 'San Francisco Academy of Art University', now the largest property owner in San Francisco. It's a highly successful business teaching all sorts of art courses, but a common criticism is that it's a mill, taking young people's money to 'learn art' in an expensive, beautiful city. The fact it is there is demand and it's hugely profitable, just like BSchool. Doesn't mean you are a good businessman or artist at the end of it - I believe like Drucker you have to learn as a trade in context not as a theory - but highly successful businesses cater to demand...

ngrilly 8y ago

On the same topic, I absolutely recommend reading "Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance" by Robert R. Locke and J.-C. Spender. https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Economic-Controversies/dp/178032071X https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

pcmoney 8y ago

1. He makes a good point 2. Its not the point he thinks he makes 3. Full disclosure one of my degrees is a B.S in finance but I work as an engineer. He makes a point that "At the end of it all, most business-school graduates won’t become high-level managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks." But isn't that true of most degrees? I would argue even most STEM grads end up in the cubicle farm. I saw plenty there working for a defense contractor. I also think him saying this is objectively bad is a little elitist. Depending on background and family socio-economic status the cubicle farm might be a step up and even a point of pride. All of his criticism is from the point of view that people in business schools take advantage of others, how about people go to business school to not be taken advantage of? To know how to negotiate a salary, to know the rough rules of the game. If you don't come from a family of means I would argue a decent business school and STEM are about equivalent in terms of increasing your income and providing a long term career. Some don't have the aptitude or inclination to do STEM. Just like many STEM grads couldn't sell someone a $100 bill for $95. Another claim is that: "Another suggested that the likelihood of committing some form of corporate crime increased if the individual concerned had experience of graduate business education, or military service. (Both careers presumably involve absolving responsibility to an organisation.)" How about people who know a field and are in the field are more likely to commit a crime in it? I am sure the number of blue collar embezzlement is dominated by plumbers/electricians etc. Not even going into criminal medical issues such as corrupt doctors being opioid prescription factories. I am not saying all business schools are useful, or that they do the job perfectly but his opinion seems shockingly naive. Also business school might not be a good place to be if you don't have some degree of faith in capitalism (the single greatest eradicator of poverty over the past 50 years), it would be like being a flat-earther in an astrophysics department. Finally, I would much rather be managed or HR-ed by someone with at least some formal training on how to treat people with dignity in difficult complex situations. I have seen conflict/layoffs/firings etc. handled absolutely atrociously by (albeit young) STEM grads. Admittedly having a degree in Management/HR doesn't mean you are automatically good at this, but education helps. Personal anecdote: My first year in finance taught me a lot about debt, I changed my whole college strategy to graduate debt free. My finance degree also taught me most of the wealth management industry is exploitative of the average investor and have no demonstrable gains over just buying low fee indices. These 2 bits will save me hundreds of thousands of dollars if not over a million dollars throughout my career. Sure they may be obvious but millions of students every year make egregious financial mistakes to get other degrees that may land them in the same cube farm.

megamindbrian2 8y ago

Is this what they are teaching people to do? https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/356ea48c-e6cf-11e6-967b-c88452263daf https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/356ea48c-e6c...

ItsMe000001 8y ago
Click on the link.. and I get no content, only > Make informed decisions. Become an FT Subscriber. Okay - no.

Anirudh25 8y ago

The problem doesn't lie only with business schools but with complete higher education. Being a CS senior at Indian University, I have heard about from so many industry experts railing about the huge difference between industry and academic skills.

macspoofing 8y ago

You can substitute a number of humanities programs and all the criticisms would be equally valid.

jprissi 8y ago

Does it apply to other countries aswell ? In France, we have a pretty specific system called "classes préparatoires" where you spend 2 years before accessing business/engineering schools. As far as I know, the ones intended for business schools give a lot of importance to philosophy, history and geopolitics. This seems to differ a bit from how other business schools are described throughout the article. In the meantime, our business schools seem to follow and try to mimic the American ones. Do other business school teach similar topics ?

laurentl 8y ago

I recently finished an executive MBA at a top European B-school. To echo some of the comments, it was overall way easier than my initial studies (eng school), with some exceptions such as a brutal strategy assignment. There was also a sense of entitlement from some of the participants, especially those who were financed by their company. “Entertain me and give me my diploma” so to speak. On the other hand, due to the executive nature of the program (average age was something like 38-39) the classes were much more nuanced, especially on topics such as HR, management and so forth - when everyone in the room has some degree of managerial experience and a few war stories to share there’s much less room for indoctrination. This was also due to European culture, which is a big part of the school’s DNA and reinforced by the mostly European cohort. I did learn a lot of stuff; what will stay with me the most is what I learned about myself, through introspective assignments and interacting with other students, most of whom had very different backgrounds. But I would never have been able to do this had I taken the program as an undergrad or right after eng school. It’s true that you can’t teach common sense, you must learn it through practice. However having the opportunity to reflect on that practice, formalizing it and sharing it with likeminded persons was tremendously helpful. EDIT: to constrast my experience with the content of TFA, I crossed a few MBA students in NY during a seminar. The discussion went something like this: Me: so what business do you guys want to work in after graduating? One of them: real estate! Me: cool, any particular reason why? Him: to make lots of money and retire early! (Rest of the group nod in agremeent) Me: ... This was in 2017 and I assume they had at least heard of the subprime crisis.

factsaresacred 8y ago
> This was in 2017 and I assume they had at least heard of the subprime crisis Brings to mind this from Peter Thiel (exclude the length): Q. You’ve written that you doubt the efficacy of MBA programs to prepare future business leaders. What would an effective MBA program look like? A. The question is, what substance of business are you focused on? The conceit of the MBA is that you don’t need to have any substance at all. It’s just this management science, and you can apply that equally well in a software company or an oil drilling company or a fashion company or a rocket company. That’s the bias I’d want us to cut against. So for the degree, people would learn substantive things and then on the side you’d pick up some business skills. But you wouldn’t treat the business degree as the central thing. I think one challenge a lot of the business schools have is they end up attracting students who are very extroverted and have very low conviction, and they put them in this hot house environment for a few years — at the end of which, a large number of people go into whatever was the last trendy thing to do. They’ve done studies at Harvard Business School where they’ve found that the largest cohort always went into the wrong field. So in 1989, they all went to work for Michael Milken, a year or two before he went to jail. They were never interested in Silicon Valley except for 1999, 2000. The last decade their interest was housing and private equity. So there is something about the way in which business school is decoupled from anything really substantive that I’d want to rethink. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/10/10/peter-thiel-on-what-works-at-work https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/10...

factsaresacred 8y ago

Anybody who found this interesting will like 'The Management Myth': > The thing that makes modern management theory so painful to read isn’t usually the dearth of reliable empirical data. It’s that maddening papal infallibility. Oh sure, there are a few pearls of insight, and one or two stories about hero-CEOs that can hook you like bad popcorn. But the rest is just inane. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/304883/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-man... And previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11931270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11931270

seem_2211 8y ago

I have an undergrad business degree, and a lot of the criticism in the piece is fair. Most of what you learn is common sense. There's a reason there are plenty of people in history that have been able to build multimillion dollar businesses without very little formal schooling, it's simply not as difficult as engineering or chemistry. I was a marketing major, and really there is no value in the credential past an undegraduate level. The journals that professors publish in have no relevance to people working in the field, and are borderline gibberish. To have a masters or PhD in marketing is entirely useless unless you want to become an academic. There's also a lot of make work in the business school. I studied political science as my minor and found the papers had a lot less "work" from a volume point of view, but I learnt a lot more and was challenged to think a lot.

ismail 8y ago

Not sure what the curriculum in the USA/EU is like. Would love to understand what the US/EU model is? Here is some perspective from some of the top business schools [0] in South Africa: > ‘What can I do to make the most money?’ and the manner in which faculty members teach allows students to regard the moral consequences of their actions as mere afterthoughts.” and > "The problem is that business ethics and corporate social responsibility are subjects used as window dressing in the marketing of the business school, and as a fig leaf to cover the conscience of B-school deans" Not really the general case. Ethics is done right up front. All the major philosophical ethical theories are covered including: Virtue ethics, Utilitarianism, Duties and rights, Justice, Caring The consequences of actions is a thread that runs throughout every single course. For each assignment/paper submitted you are required to conduct an ethical analysis of your actions or decisions. This is done to identify any implications or negative consequences. > " If we want those in power to become more responsible, then we must stop teaching students that heroic transformational leaders are the answer to every problem, or that the purpose of learning about taxation laws is to evade taxation, or that creating new desires is the purpose of marketing." From what i have seen this is very far from what is taught here in South Africa. You will find lively debates on the purpose of marketing, is it to create demand or to fulfill demand? > " In terms of the classroom, they expect the teaching of uncomplicated and practical concepts and tools that they deem will be helpful to them in their future careers. Philosophy is for the birds." Philosophy is actually covered. You are expected to submit a dissertation/thesis as part of the requirement to complete your MBA. In the past the MBA was academically rated lower than a masters from another faculty. You could not even gain entrance to a PHD programme. There has since been a complete overhaul with the academic requirements significantly increased. The current qualification is rated the same as a masters from another faculty in terms of academic requirements. > "Why then do we assume that degree courses in business should only teach one form of organisation – capitalism – as if that were the only way in which human life could be arranged?" Some B-Schools are known to have very 'socialist leanings' in the guise of social innovation/sustainability. With a very strong emphasis on this. The only way i can describe it it is like socialism and capitalism mixed. They pretty much teach you that Friedman [1] is not correct and one needs to move beyond this. Students that complete typically end up with a bunch of mental models to reason about the world. A student coming out of B-School is faced with a choice: (A): The B-School perspective becomes their primary perspective on seeing and reasoning about the world (B): It is only one of the perspectives available to you, that you can pull out when the appropriate situation arises. The schools themselves help you to identify this and it is up to the student which of these options they take. As one grad described it to me: > "They teach you all the mental models, then they break them all down and show you how they are incorrect and the negative consequences of them" > "The problem is that business ethics and corporate social responsibility are subjects used as window dressing in the marketing of the business school, and as a fig leaf to cover the conscience of B-school deans " Are schools in the US/EU still teaching social responsibility? The schools here teach you that social responsibility is BS. You are thought that CSR (corporate social responsibility) is not the answer, but really 'window dressing'. What you really need to do is embed sustainability practices[2] throughout your organisation. It is not an afterthought, but should be a core part of business. [0] https://www.gsb.uct.ac.za/ https://www.gsb.uct.ac.za/ https://www.gibs.co.za https://www.gibs.co.za http://www.usb.ac.za http://www.usb.ac.za [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/240845-there-is-one-and-only-one-social-responsibility-of-business-to https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/240845-there-is-one-and-onl... [2] https://embeddingproject.org/ https://embeddingproject.org/

tzm 8y ago

Companies should stop treating an MBA as a technical requirement for employment.

yuhong 8y ago

What is fun is CEOs like Jack Dorsey who leads two companies.

askafriend 8y ago
What is the difference between Jack, who leads 2 companies, and Sundar Pichai who arguably leads an order of magnitude more "companies"? or Tim Cook who leads multiple multi-billion dollar revenue products some of which could be Fortune 500 companies on their own?
- yuhong 8y ago
  The point is to joke about random MBAs that leads companies they know almost nothing about.

willbw 8y ago

I agree with many points in the article, but it seems to me his core point is that alternatively economic and political models to capitalism should be taught in business schools. It isn't clear to me that this is a job for graduate business education. The author clearly has an agenda to change either some aspects or capitalism, or to change economic systems entirely. I don't know why he thinks educating business school students differently is going to be something of a catalyst for change of this magnitude. People are studying these degrees with the sole aim of advancing their careers within a capitalist system. If you want political or economic change, these ideas are going to have to be spread throughout the general populace, as most of us here live in democracies. I also don't think its clear what system would be better than capitalism, despite its flaws, and asking a curriculum to give focus on some alternative system which is completely unproven is a big ask.

fwn 8y ago

> Take finance, for instance. This is a field concerned with understanding how people with money invest it. Actual finance is mostly concerned with pure money management, agnostic of the entity holding the money. If it's not a person, company or administrative body it's probably a mixture of those. > [...] it also assumes substantial inequalities of income and wealth. This is not true. For the most part it assumes that there is some need to allocate capital. Whether it is from a pension fund, an evil dictator or the Red Cross is mostly only a concern regarding specific constrains like regulation, objectives, etc. > The greater the inequalities within any given society, the greater the interest in finance, as well as the market in luxury yachts. No. The more capital to allocate, the greater the interest in allocating it. An economy with a greater financialization therefore requires a greater amount of financial knowledge and services. One can argue that such developments might be bad - completely fine. It is however awfully inaccurate to describe financial services as Veblen goods (luxury stuff where demand increases with price). I like the general attitude of the article and I believe that there might be some benefit in questioning the study of management. I just do not like beating strawmen.

mbagraduate 8y ago

Years after spending close to 200K at an elite MBA program I've come to the conclusion that they are a waste of time for most candidates. While students can be very smart and professors highly acclaimed, the MBA is a failed enterprise. In my opinion, business school only delivers an illusion of achievement and learning. MBA programs are too generic and formulaic to deliver meaningful value. Most notably: 1. Management science is even less scientific than Psychology. Yes, you can apply decision analysis, probability and game theory to business problems, but do these form a cohesive knowledge base? If management science does in fact exist, why do MBA programs' teachings differ so much from school to school? MBA students get exposed to theories and frameworks transplanted from the sciences but they walk away with only a shallow understanding of these models. Are we training managers as confidence artists? As the business school alumni move across corporate ranks they ossify and think they get it, when in fact they are just managing randomly without rigorous understanding of the complexities underlying their decisions. And yes, these business school alumni are to blame for the collapse of 2008 and many others. 2. Shareholder value maximization should not be a way of life. Very few business school graduates can think of businesses in holistic terms. The shareholder value maximization mentality incubates the many destructive forces that turn corporations into sociopaths. 3. Business schools are toxic environments created by mixing a myriad of backgrounds in a room and expecting highly divergent people to learn at the same pace or even to coalesce. In my experience, racism, discrimination, exclusion and backstabbing were the norm. Bankers drank with bankers, white Americans labeled the Chinese as "yet another international student", African Americans were severely under represented and military transplants were systematically labeled. My B-School experience was traumatic but not uncommon. I was literally swimming in a shark tank. 4.You will definitely learn a lot about corruption. I lost my faith in human nature after listening to business students talk about putting profits before lives. This are the type of people that will do anything for that bonus. In sum, business schools are a playground for corporations to shop for high (but not very high) IQ, good appearance, business aptitude and ambitious candidates. Business school is just a runway of highly accomplished students who think they get it but in reality don't. Management can't be taught. It needs to be experienced. Business schools are the most salient cancer in academia and they need to disappear.

macawfish 8y ago

We don't need rich bosses. We need hands-on leaders who aren't afraid to make the world a better place and who respect the integrity of all their collaborators. Replace business schools with institutions that foster leadership, collaboration, and inclusive positive project management skills from a wide variety of alternative forms of organization. For example: cooperatives are a legitimate, sustainable form of business, so why aren't they being taught and innovated in business schools? Also, project management skills should be something everyone gets. Every working person should be afforded opportunities to grow in their ability to lead.

ataturk 8y ago

Every time Ritz Crackers shrinks its packaging size I shake my fist at the completely un-original MBAs who keep taking "one more pickle out of the jar." Idiots. I stopped buying crackers completely. I hope they fucking choke on them. 13.7 ounces and falling from what was once a 16oz. box.