4 ms·

Not really... I mean sure you can make an argument about the mechanics of a business being the same. But how you do actually position an organization to build p

Not really... I mean sure you can make an argument about the mechanics of a business being the same. But how you do actually position an organization to build products that people actually want to buy? That is a non-trivial problem that has very different answers depending on industry, depending on maturity of both the company and the industry itself, depending on sales model and competitive landscape. Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem.

toyg 6y ago
You say business is about building products, but it really isn't. Business is about making money. Building products is only useful insofar as it enables selling products, which is one way to make money (possibly one of the hardest). So the question becomes, "how do you position an organization to make money?" - and that has a bunch of different answers depending on many factors. Some of these answers are generic cross-sectors and some are not, and recognising the difference is where the much-maligned MBA types can fall short.
maxsilver 6y ago
> But how you do actually position an organization to build products that people actually want to buy? I wish that mattered, but I'm not sure it does. Many (more than half?) of all US business are either in non-competitive fields or have semi-locked in customer bases. These companies are effectively money-trees, they could do almost anything and never actually lose enough money to need to fix themselves. Imagine AT&T gets a bad CEO. Or Comcast. Or Ford. Or GE. Or WalMart. Or CVS. Or UnitedHealth. Or ExxonMobile. These companies basically can't get into major trouble, no matter how many bad calls they make in the next 5 years. If you are starting something new from scratch, then you have to worry about product (a new company, or a major new product in a new market, etc). But unless your doing that, your leadership-types often never have to learn anything about the business itself. They can pretend every business is just an identical spreadsheet of numbers, and even if they're wildly wrong, they'll almost never get punished for it (internally, or even by the market at large). This is probably where MBA types get that impression from in the first place. > Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem. I wish this was true. But my experience has been that this is not nearly true enough. Terrible leadership can hang on for decades and never really get in any meaningful trouble for it.

toyg 6y ago

You say business is about building products, but it really isn't. Business is about making money. Building products is only useful insofar as it enables selling products, which is one way to make money (possibly one of the hardest). So the question becomes, "how do you position an organization to make money?" - and that has a bunch of different answers depending on many factors. Some of these answers are generic cross-sectors and some are not, and recognising the difference is where the much-maligned MBA types can fall short.

maxsilver 6y ago

> But how you do actually position an organization to build products that people actually want to buy? I wish that mattered, but I'm not sure it does. Many (more than half?) of all US business are either in non-competitive fields or have semi-locked in customer bases. These companies are effectively money-trees, they could do almost anything and never actually lose enough money to need to fix themselves. Imagine AT&T gets a bad CEO. Or Comcast. Or Ford. Or GE. Or WalMart. Or CVS. Or UnitedHealth. Or ExxonMobile. These companies basically can't get into major trouble, no matter how many bad calls they make in the next 5 years. If you are starting something new from scratch, then you have to worry about product (a new company, or a major new product in a new market, etc). But unless your doing that, your leadership-types often never have to learn anything about the business itself. They can pretend every business is just an identical spreadsheet of numbers, and even if they're wildly wrong, they'll almost never get punished for it (internally, or even by the market at large). This is probably where MBA types get that impression from in the first place. > Successful business leadership needs to make the right strategic decisions and that is not a trivial problem. I wish this was true. But my experience has been that this is not nearly true enough. Terrible leadership can hang on for decades and never really get in any meaningful trouble for it.