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MBAs teach you a load of useful skills, in particular a great breadth of business problems. HR. Accounting. Strategic planning. International expansion. Supply

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.
    - rich_sasha 6y ago
      Yeah, I'm not questioning this. If you want to start a company, you need a good product, and you won't magic one out from an MBA. Equally, running a large corporation without people who understand so many complex business dynamics (and crucially, you'll need some who appreciate how they interact) seems crazy-suboptimal to me.
      - wpietri 6y ago
        It's a mistake to think the only way to understand something complex is with an MBA. A good example is Toyota versus the US Big 3 automakers. GM basically invented the modern American management the MBA came out of. Toyota was run by engineers. Toyota came out of the post WWII decimation of Japan to become the world's largest automaker, kicking the asses of US automakers in terms of cost and quality. Toyota was happy to teach how they did it, and even set up a joint venture with GM, the NUMMI plant. The plant worked fine, but GM was unable to adopt the lessons. This American Life tells the tail well: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 I think this is directly related to the MBA ideology, an important part of which is that you can take privileged people, give them a short general education covering a number of disciplines, and then make them part of the managerial caste that controls everybody else. A core notion of the MBA is that management is a universal skill. This is both historically novel and distinct from elements of the Toyota Way, which strongly honor the people doing the actual work and their accumulated knowledge.
        rich_sasha 6y ago
        MBA is not the only way to understand anything complex. MBA is a good starting place to understand complex business problems. It won't make you a good engineer. And yet even engineering companies have supply chains to manage, contracts to negotiate, labour force to grow and keep motivated, finance deals to secure, multi-year strategic planning etc. I know for a fact engineers are, by and large, not good at that. Doing an MBA won't magically make you good at that, but at least gives you a head start thinking about those problems and standard industry solutions (if you take more than arrogance and networking out of it). Similar to how an engineering/science degree doesn't tell you how to build a Tesla, but gives you the basics to bootstrap yourself from that point. Even if many a Stanford engineering grad thinks they'll build the next Decacorn because they are so great. I really can't see what's controversial about it.
- wpietri 6y ago
  I think you're spot on with the arrogance bit. I've had friends who have done MBAs and some of them came out of it with an enormous performative confidence despite actually knowing much about whatever topic was under discussion. It was exhausting to be around until they learned to moderate it. It reminds me of a friend's complaint about having done debate in high school. He says it took him years to unlearn the habits it gave him. Including the notion that whatever take first occurred to him in a discussion is one that must be defended at all costs. Or treating all discussions as gladiatorial to-the-death combat. Learning that sort of faux certitude is certainly helpful in persuading people. So I get why people invest so much in learning it. But it seems to be to be double edged.
wpietri 6y ago
Huh. What's the source for your claims? They teach you about those topics. But it's not clear how much they teach actual skills beyond finance and presentation, in that there's no actual business to run. One can read about negotiation, for example, but actual negotiation skills come from negotiating deals. A friend of mine went back for a high-end MBA after a few years working for large companies as a (non-software) engineer. His basic take was that the curriculum only had one thing that he couldn't have figured out just by thinking about the topic for a bit. (It was the principle of comparative advantage, which is a bit of a mind-bender.) He says what he really got out of it was strong relationships with a network of people that were soon highly placed in a bunch of major companies.
- rich_sasha 6y ago
  As per my other comment, my wife is currently doing an MBA. Again, skills are not replacement for experience, or even good ideas. They won't make you a pro in those things either. It's a bit like saying a CS degree is useless, because it's impractical, and with programming, you learn by doing anyway. And you can't build a business out of a CS degree alone. Undoubtedly so, and yet a CS degree shows you how large the computer world is, so to speak.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    And again, I don't think the MBA program teaches skills, the main exception being presenting confidently when you don't in fact know much. And I'm not saying an MBA is useless. As I said above, it's very useful for establishing a network. It's also an entry ticket into a bunch of high-caste jobs and a thorough indoctrination into the ideology of managerialism. The starting salary for MBA is proof of its usefulness to their holders. I agree there's some analogy with a CS degree. The main difference being that nobody puts a fresh CS grad in charge of anything important, because we understand they don't know much yet. An MBA, on the other hand, puts people in positions of significant influence despite them knowing little or nothing about the actual work. It's as if somebody went through the book-learning part of a medical degree and then was turned loose to practice on real patients.

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.
  - rich_sasha 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm not questioning this. If you want to start a company, you need a good product, and you won't magic one out from an MBA. Equally, running a large corporation without people who understand so many complex business dynamics (and crucially, you'll need some who appreciate how they interact) seems crazy-suboptimal to me.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      It's a mistake to think the only way to understand something complex is with an MBA. A good example is Toyota versus the US Big 3 automakers. GM basically invented the modern American management the MBA came out of. Toyota was run by engineers. Toyota came out of the post WWII decimation of Japan to become the world's largest automaker, kicking the asses of US automakers in terms of cost and quality. Toyota was happy to teach how they did it, and even set up a joint venture with GM, the NUMMI plant. The plant worked fine, but GM was unable to adopt the lessons. This American Life tells the tail well: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 I think this is directly related to the MBA ideology, an important part of which is that you can take privileged people, give them a short general education covering a number of disciplines, and then make them part of the managerial caste that controls everybody else. A core notion of the MBA is that management is a universal skill. This is both historically novel and distinct from elements of the Toyota Way, which strongly honor the people doing the actual work and their accumulated knowledge.
      - rich_sasha 6y ago
        MBA is not the only way to understand anything complex. MBA is a good starting place to understand complex business problems. It won't make you a good engineer. And yet even engineering companies have supply chains to manage, contracts to negotiate, labour force to grow and keep motivated, finance deals to secure, multi-year strategic planning etc. I know for a fact engineers are, by and large, not good at that. Doing an MBA won't magically make you good at that, but at least gives you a head start thinking about those problems and standard industry solutions (if you take more than arrogance and networking out of it). Similar to how an engineering/science degree doesn't tell you how to build a Tesla, but gives you the basics to bootstrap yourself from that point. Even if many a Stanford engineering grad thinks they'll build the next Decacorn because they are so great. I really can't see what's controversial about it.
wpietri 6y ago
I think you're spot on with the arrogance bit. I've had friends who have done MBAs and some of them came out of it with an enormous performative confidence despite actually knowing much about whatever topic was under discussion. It was exhausting to be around until they learned to moderate it. It reminds me of a friend's complaint about having done debate in high school. He says it took him years to unlearn the habits it gave him. Including the notion that whatever take first occurred to him in a discussion is one that must be defended at all costs. Or treating all discussions as gladiatorial to-the-death combat. Learning that sort of faux certitude is certainly helpful in persuading people. So I get why people invest so much in learning it. But it seems to be to be double edged.

wpietri 6y ago

Huh. What's the source for your claims? They teach you about those topics. But it's not clear how much they teach actual skills beyond finance and presentation, in that there's no actual business to run. One can read about negotiation, for example, but actual negotiation skills come from negotiating deals. A friend of mine went back for a high-end MBA after a few years working for large companies as a (non-software) engineer. His basic take was that the curriculum only had one thing that he couldn't have figured out just by thinking about the topic for a bit. (It was the principle of comparative advantage, which is a bit of a mind-bender.) He says what he really got out of it was strong relationships with a network of people that were soon highly placed in a bunch of major companies.

rich_sasha 6y ago
As per my other comment, my wife is currently doing an MBA. Again, skills are not replacement for experience, or even good ideas. They won't make you a pro in those things either. It's a bit like saying a CS degree is useless, because it's impractical, and with programming, you learn by doing anyway. And you can't build a business out of a CS degree alone. Undoubtedly so, and yet a CS degree shows you how large the computer world is, so to speak.
- wpietri 6y ago
  And again, I don't think the MBA program teaches skills, the main exception being presenting confidently when you don't in fact know much. And I'm not saying an MBA is useless. As I said above, it's very useful for establishing a network. It's also an entry ticket into a bunch of high-caste jobs and a thorough indoctrination into the ideology of managerialism. The starting salary for MBA is proof of its usefulness to their holders. I agree there's some analogy with a CS degree. The main difference being that nobody puts a fresh CS grad in charge of anything important, because we understand they don't know much yet. An MBA, on the other hand, puts people in positions of significant influence despite them knowing little or nothing about the actual work. It's as if somebody went through the book-learning part of a medical degree and then was turned loose to practice on real patients.