5 ms·

It is strange that the MBA was such a coveted designation for such a long time. Is there literally no value in management?

SmellTheGlove 6y ago
I'm management, albeit not at Intel, and I don't have/have no interest in an MBA, so read in whatever biases you'd like. Or decide I'm full of shit, that's possible too. There is value in management, but management has to realize that it doesn't exist for its own sake. That's a tough one when "management is the company" is effectively what anyone's been taught for decades now. The problem is, I think, that it is an oversimplification. Nominally management makes the decisions, but we aren't where the product gets built or sold. The company is as successful as its products, and so maybe the product is the company, and we're all doing our part to make it the best thing that people want. I'd like to think I'm a good leader. Probably not the best one - there are plenty of folks I look up to. Probably not the worst one, but that's not for me to decide. In any case, as middle management, [0] I see three major components to my role: 1. Hire and retain really talented people who are good at what we do; 2. Decide what we'll work on now, what we'll do later, and what we won't do; [1] and 3. Sponsor my team and provide air cover for #2 I generally have a pretty good idea of _what_ to do, but not always exactly. I used to know _how_ to do it, but I'm probably not the best at that today. My goal is to hire or develop a team that can put a fine point on the _what_, or challenge me when I'm wrong, and to own the _how_. In terms of sponsorship and air cover, it's taking 1 and 2 above, and keeping it on the rails with minimal disruption. I see good middle management as needing to be very team-focused, caring for the health and composition of the team above all. Sometimes that means absorbing a lot coming from above, and sometimes it means being really pushy upwards to get what we need to be successful. But the team should be free to execute if we're doing our jobs well, and their end of the bargain is to deliver what we agreed to do. This is not the philosophy of all middle managers, and I'm sure there are other models that work. This is the one I can speak to. -- [0]: "Middle management" defined as someone who manages other managers but is not C-level. [1]: This doesn't mean I cook this shit up. I'm listening to the team I manage, as well as the priorities and directives coming from above, and applying my filters. Gotta figure they hired me because I know generally what to do in my space, and the team agreed to work with me because I have the ability to point them toward the critical path and push the debris out of the way before they run into it. Without management, there are either too many ideas to harmonize, or you get lucky and the team converges on the right one. I think good middle management helps us converge on the right ideas faster.
rich_sasha 6y ago
MBAs teach you a load of useful skills, in particular a great breadth of business problems. HR. Accounting. Strategic planning. International expansion. Supply chain considerations. Micro and macroeconomics. Negotiation. The list goes on. It doesn't make you experienced, or a leader. But it does give you the essential skills to run a business, that are so diverse that they are hard to acquire organically. A good MBA is perhaps like a good coding Boot Camp. It will basically teach you enough that you can survive 3 months of a junior dev job, and if you're smart, bootstrap yourself up from that. But if you staff a company with no-one but people from such Boot Camps with no other experience, who will just then resonate against each other, that won't go anywhere.
- rjzzleep 6y ago
  About as much detail as I can learn from 1 week on coursera. More often than not it teaches them the arrogance to believe they can do everything on their own and that they know the law because they have an MBA. I'm currently closely observing a sequoia invested startup run by a bunch of TOP 3 MBA program invested people. Questionable legal decision, terrible HR, abusive bullying management. It's all a big circle jerk. Let's not kid ourselves. The real thing MBAs learn in school is how to network and score their next company they will destroy.
  - rich_sasha 6y ago
    Is there any experience to corroborate it, or is this your impression? My wife is doing an MBA right now, on a top-100 uni globally; so not Harvard but good. I am genuinely impressed at the breadth and detail they go into. As I say, these don’t turn you into experts or experienced business people, but from my perspective, very valuable.
    - rjzzleep 6y ago
      It's my personal observation. In my experience there is a strong difference between people that study MBA for the sake of studying MBAs and people that are engineers or have other experiencing, want to create something but feel like they're lacking from a business perspective. Those people seem to do comparatively better, and seem to have better functioning companies if they choose to run them after the MBA.
wpietri 6y ago
You might enjoy reading "Confronting Managerialism", which looks at the history of the ideology and how it has become basically a caste system. Or read some of the Lean literature on how non-MBA-driven companies approach things. E.g., "Toyota Kata". As an occasional manager, there's some value to the work that some managers do. But managerialism itself often extractive (that is, part of its function is to justify siphoning a lot of cash into the pockets of managers and execs) and value-destroying (both through optimizing for value-negative things and empowering bad decisions). A good example is what private equity does to companies: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmons.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmon... Or the way MBA ideology tends to look at everything through a quarter-by-quarter financial lens, leading to underinvestment in R&D, staff, etc.
DebtDeflation 6y ago
"MBA" has become a sort of shorthand for everything that is wrong with modern American business culture. The pattern is typically something like: 1) Management awards themselves a bunch of stock and sets annual cash bonus targets tied to short term financial metrics. 2) Management then focuses entirely on optimizing for short term metric attainment (e.g., quarterly EPS) and current stock price, by minimizing investment in R&D and new products, reducing worker headcount, engaging in financial engineering like stock buybacks, etc. 3) Management extracts as much value for themselves as possible through the above and then leaves before it all falls apart, to repeat the process somewhere else. MBAs might be over-represented within this group, but this isn't something taught in MBA curricula, not all MBAs are engaged in this abhorrent behavior, and non-MBAs do it as well.

SmellTheGlove 6y ago

I'm management, albeit not at Intel, and I don't have/have no interest in an MBA, so read in whatever biases you'd like. Or decide I'm full of shit, that's possible too. There is value in management, but management has to realize that it doesn't exist for its own sake. That's a tough one when "management is the company" is effectively what anyone's been taught for decades now. The problem is, I think, that it is an oversimplification. Nominally management makes the decisions, but we aren't where the product gets built or sold. The company is as successful as its products, and so maybe the product is the company, and we're all doing our part to make it the best thing that people want. I'd like to think I'm a good leader. Probably not the best one - there are plenty of folks I look up to. Probably not the worst one, but that's not for me to decide. In any case, as middle management, [0] I see three major components to my role: 1. Hire and retain really talented people who are good at what we do; 2. Decide what we'll work on now, what we'll do later, and what we won't do; [1] and 3. Sponsor my team and provide air cover for #2 I generally have a pretty good idea of _what_ to do, but not always exactly. I used to know _how_ to do it, but I'm probably not the best at that today. My goal is to hire or develop a team that can put a fine point on the _what_, or challenge me when I'm wrong, and to own the _how_. In terms of sponsorship and air cover, it's taking 1 and 2 above, and keeping it on the rails with minimal disruption. I see good middle management as needing to be very team-focused, caring for the health and composition of the team above all. Sometimes that means absorbing a lot coming from above, and sometimes it means being really pushy upwards to get what we need to be successful. But the team should be free to execute if we're doing our jobs well, and their end of the bargain is to deliver what we agreed to do. This is not the philosophy of all middle managers, and I'm sure there are other models that work. This is the one I can speak to. -- [0]: "Middle management" defined as someone who manages other managers but is not C-level. [1]: This doesn't mean I cook this shit up. I'm listening to the team I manage, as well as the priorities and directives coming from above, and applying my filters. Gotta figure they hired me because I know generally what to do in my space, and the team agreed to work with me because I have the ability to point them toward the critical path and push the debris out of the way before they run into it. Without management, there are either too many ideas to harmonize, or you get lucky and the team converges on the right one. I think good middle management helps us converge on the right ideas faster.

rich_sasha 6y ago

MBAs teach you a load of useful skills, in particular a great breadth of business problems. HR. Accounting. Strategic planning. International expansion. Supply chain considerations. Micro and macroeconomics. Negotiation. The list goes on. It doesn't make you experienced, or a leader. But it does give you the essential skills to run a business, that are so diverse that they are hard to acquire organically. A good MBA is perhaps like a good coding Boot Camp. It will basically teach you enough that you can survive 3 months of a junior dev job, and if you're smart, bootstrap yourself up from that. But if you staff a company with no-one but people from such Boot Camps with no other experience, who will just then resonate against each other, that won't go anywhere.

rjzzleep 6y ago
About as much detail as I can learn from 1 week on coursera. More often than not it teaches them the arrogance to believe they can do everything on their own and that they know the law because they have an MBA. I'm currently closely observing a sequoia invested startup run by a bunch of TOP 3 MBA program invested people. Questionable legal decision, terrible HR, abusive bullying management. It's all a big circle jerk. Let's not kid ourselves. The real thing MBAs learn in school is how to network and score their next company they will destroy.
- rich_sasha 6y ago
  Is there any experience to corroborate it, or is this your impression? My wife is doing an MBA right now, on a top-100 uni globally; so not Harvard but good. I am genuinely impressed at the breadth and detail they go into. As I say, these don’t turn you into experts or experienced business people, but from my perspective, very valuable.
  - rjzzleep 6y ago
    It's my personal observation. In my experience there is a strong difference between people that study MBA for the sake of studying MBAs and people that are engineers or have other experiencing, want to create something but feel like they're lacking from a business perspective. Those people seem to do comparatively better, and seem to have better functioning companies if they choose to run them after the MBA.

wpietri 6y ago

You might enjoy reading "Confronting Managerialism", which looks at the history of the ideology and how it has become basically a caste system. Or read some of the Lean literature on how non-MBA-driven companies approach things. E.g., "Toyota Kata". As an occasional manager, there's some value to the work that some managers do. But managerialism itself often extractive (that is, part of its function is to justify siphoning a lot of cash into the pockets of managers and execs) and value-destroying (both through optimizing for value-negative things and empowering bad decisions). A good example is what private equity does to companies: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmons.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmon... Or the way MBA ideology tends to look at everything through a quarter-by-quarter financial lens, leading to underinvestment in R&D, staff, etc.

DebtDeflation 6y ago

"MBA" has become a sort of shorthand for everything that is wrong with modern American business culture. The pattern is typically something like: 1) Management awards themselves a bunch of stock and sets annual cash bonus targets tied to short term financial metrics. 2) Management then focuses entirely on optimizing for short term metric attainment (e.g., quarterly EPS) and current stock price, by minimizing investment in R&D and new products, reducing worker headcount, engaging in financial engineering like stock buybacks, etc. 3) Management extracts as much value for themselves as possible through the above and then leaves before it all falls apart, to repeat the process somewhere else. MBAs might be over-represented within this group, but this isn't something taught in MBA curricula, not all MBAs are engaged in this abhorrent behavior, and non-MBAs do it as well.