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Ex MBA, consultant take: Hire people - not MBAs or PhDs or whatever. Most MBAs have a lot more going for them than their last degree. Don't expect to find the

Ex MBA, consultant take: Hire people - not MBAs or PhDs or whatever. Most MBAs have a lot more going for them than their last degree. Don't expect to find the best from the bottom of the class at any school or consulting company. Keep the overall number of any group of non-core employee down. Too many MBAs/consultants ruined eBay. And, the saying goes, short any industry where the majority of HBS graduates are being hired in to.

jedc 14y ago
> Hire people - not MBAs or PhDs Completely agree. (Full disclosure, I have an MBA) I really like the way Hunter Walk put it in his essay here: http://www.hunterwalk.com/2011/12/its-fine-to-get-mba-but-dont-be-mba.html http://www.hunterwalk.com/2011/12/its-fine-to-get-mba-but-do... "It's fine to get an MBA, but don't be an MBA"
geophile 14y ago
I started twitching when I read that last line. Malcolm Gladwell's post-mortem on Enron (in which HBS grads figured prominently) has stuck with me. Especially because I read it while working at a company that had a large HBS contingent. What a bunch of arrogant, ignorant, self-satisfied, know-nothing blowhards. Loved to hear themselves talk. And talk and talk and talk, saying exactly nothing. Many of them had a consulting background and they loved to bring in their clones to do their job for them. But the clones didn't do their jobs very well, so they would bring in another batch of clones who would start from scratch and also not do their jobs very well. This resulted in a web-based service that was a year late, and way, way over budget. This was theoretically a startup, and this was the cream of the HBS crop, but they made every mistake a startup absolutely should not make: Spending money extravagantly (and this was post-dotcom blowup); not going live until the website was perfect "because you only have one chance to make a first impression"; feature bloat; no follow-through on anything (that was for their less glamorous underlings). There, that feels better, I've stopped twitching now.

jedc 14y ago

> Hire people - not MBAs or PhDs Completely agree. (Full disclosure, I have an MBA) I really like the way Hunter Walk put it in his essay here: http://www.hunterwalk.com/2011/12/its-fine-to-get-mba-but-dont-be-mba.html http://www.hunterwalk.com/2011/12/its-fine-to-get-mba-but-do... "It's fine to get an MBA, but don't be an MBA"

geophile 14y ago

I started twitching when I read that last line. Malcolm Gladwell's post-mortem on Enron (in which HBS grads figured prominently) has stuck with me. Especially because I read it while working at a company that had a large HBS contingent. What a bunch of arrogant, ignorant, self-satisfied, know-nothing blowhards. Loved to hear themselves talk. And talk and talk and talk, saying exactly nothing. Many of them had a consulting background and they loved to bring in their clones to do their job for them. But the clones didn't do their jobs very well, so they would bring in another batch of clones who would start from scratch and also not do their jobs very well. This resulted in a web-based service that was a year late, and way, way over budget. This was theoretically a startup, and this was the cream of the HBS crop, but they made every mistake a startup absolutely should not make: Spending money extravagantly (and this was post-dotcom blowup); not going live until the website was perfect "because you only have one chance to make a first impression"; feature bloat; no follow-through on anything (that was for their less glamorous underlings). There, that feels better, I've stopped twitching now.