3 ms·
I respect your MBA skills, but ... back in the early 90's I did a multi-year consulting gig at Eli Lilly (pharmaceuticals, if you didn't know: Prozac, among oth
by Vivtek 15y ago
I respect your MBA skills, but ... back in the early 90's I did a multi-year consulting gig at Eli Lilly (pharmaceuticals, if you didn't know: Prozac, among others) and they've got the MBA disease bad.
The MBA disease - and this is what the article is about, obliquely - is thinking you don't need to know anything about the business itself to manage it, because business as a whole is a uniform set of actions. At Lilly this was endemic to the point that people were advised - I kid you not - to avoid learning any technical information or anything too specific about their areas, because it would harm their careers. Lilly people were discouraged from associating too much with contractors, because contractors were hired to do specific domain-knowledge things like, oh, develop key software that governed their manufacturing procedures, including generating all expiration dates for the company. (God forbid anybody at Lilly should sully themselves with learning how expiration dating works - I sure enjoyed it, though.)
So you're right, business administration is an essential set of skills, but the point here is that without knowledge of the business you're administrating, you can't make valid decisions - except on the basis of short-term financial goals that ultimately result in the downfall of society.
(Lilly was unreal. They don't have fountains in the courtyard, they have water features. The whole place reeks of pretentiousness. Corporate headquarters rocks, though; long, long ago, Eli Lilly himself ended up buying the whole street of old brick buildings, which are now perfectly preserved under a common roof. Architecturally fantastic! The Lilly people hate it; it's too old and has weird corners. They are all idiots.)
- CoffeeDregs 15y agoNice point. And, as you noted, I might have missed the real point of TFA, but it was so generally written it was difficult to see the point of it (wasn't the point kinda: listen to the customer ?). And I completely agree about the "MBA disease", but ... that without knowledge of the business you're [XYZing], you can't make valid decisions Agreed, but this is true of all disciplines (XYZ). How often have you seen random software or features because the product, dev, QA, whatever group didn't understand the business or were wrapped up in politics? The biggest difference between the "MBA disease" and the "computer science disease" was that we identified the "computer science disease" and proposed a number of cures (e.g. waterfall, agile, scrum, nom du jour). "Business" is less well-defined, so we're just discovering and looking to cure the "MBA disease". That said, we got too damn many MBAs...
- Vivtek 15y agoWell, but the CS disease may be suffered by individuals and - occasionally, you're right - groups or even the IT department as a whole. The MBA disease is currently suffered by top management of huge multinational conglomerates, because its vector is in fact the people within companies who allocate all the money. It's like the difference between the flu and AIDS - if the disease targets the immune system you're dead. Regarding discovering it, though, speak for yourself about the just-nowness. When the corporate raider became front magazine cover hero in the 80's, that's when it became endemic. Since then, America has been eating its seed corn. I was in high school and college at the time, so I didn't know what was going on, but looking back, it should have been obvious. And like I say, I figured it out in the early 90's. I've been self-employed since that job and never regretted it.