[anotherhacker]

The problem lies in business schools and degrees like the MBA.

Check out the faculty list at Harvard Business school [link below]. I randomly looked at profiles of 14 of them and not a single one had real world business experience. If there are any who do have real world experience, it's often superficial.

To carry on this article's analogy, business schools are the Catholic church of 1500: incestuous, detached, and self-serving.

Harvard Busisness school faculty: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/browse.aspx

[lordnacho]

I went to business school (top European) as part of my engineering degree.

They actually do make a point of mentioning that there's more than one philosophy of management. For instance, in the Germanic world, it's common to promote managers from the ranks of whatever business is being managed, whereas it's a bit of an anglo thing to have a "manager" who is somewhat business agnostic.

But of course there's a problem. If you tell people they need specific experience in the car industry to be a car industry manager, or as a software dev to manage devs, then WTF are you doing in a business school? Especially as an undergrad? You gonna manage the student bar?

So then when it comes to all the case studies, you have to kid yourself that what happened to Betamax in the 1980s is going to be relevant to you in 2016. It's interesting to read all this historical "strategy" stuff, but the students I hung out with (being engineers, technically competent and skeptical of BS) tended to see them as something akin to a history class. Sure there are lessons, but a lot of it is just interpretation and conjecture. Nothing in it with the rigour of an engineering course.

As to why MBAs are useful, it seems it's really a question of signalling. If you pay a few hundred grand in fees, rent, and opportunity cost to do an MBA, you probably have some motivation. And there is some value in generic management; not every line of business requires deep technical knowledge, and those are fine for hiring some guy who's happy to work long hours and fly around a lot. It's a problem for something like software dev though.

[wpietri]

Excellent points.

> whereas it's a bit of an anglo thing to have a "manager" who is somewhat business agnostic

I now see this as a piece of a self-justifying ideology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism

A while back I read an eye-opening book called "Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance". [1] They see US-style management as a primarily a caste system.

One of the odd things about business in the US is that most people can't even conceive that there are other approaches to business beyond the standard US MBA dogmas. Even when those other approaches clearly are successful, and even when one's ass is getting kicked by somebody using them.

E.g, Amazon, which has been crushing competitors for nearly 20 years by ignoring short-term numbers and focusing on creating long-term customer value. Or Toyota, which went from a nearly-bankrupt company in war-ravaged Japan to the world's dominant car maker using a totally different philosophy of business. Toyota even took one of GM's worst plants as part of a joint venture and made it one of the best ones, but GM couldn't absorb the lessons. This American Life did a very moving piece about that plant. [2]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec...

[2] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561

[otoburb]

>>One of the odd things about business in the US is that most people can't even conceive that there are other approaches to business beyond the standard US MBA dogmas. Even when those other approaches clearly are successful, and even when one's ass is getting kicked by somebody using them.

I appreciate the comment, but your Amazon example was jarring because it seems that HN does not like Amazon's culture in part due to the dominance of MBAs in the senior management ranks. This anecdata aligns with graduation numbers across some of the top 20 US business schools in 2015, and one would presume this leads to an overwhelmingly US MBA-centric Amazon management style, albeit one that may be different than "other" US MBA dogma.[1]

[1] http://qz.com/636539/amazon-is-hiring-the-most-mbas-in-tech-...

[wpietri]

Yeah, I don't know much about Amazon's internals. I'm pointing more at the way analysts have been saying for 15 years that Bezos isn't focused enough on quarterly profits, isn't returning enough to the shareholders, invests too much in long-term pipe dreams. But Kindle, AWS, and Prime have turned out to be giant competitive advantages.

[aserafini]

They're not a good example because Amazon is full of MBAs at the middle management and even individual contributor level.

But I agree with the general point that 'conventional' business wisdom might not lead you to Amazon's strategy.

[wpietri]

Thanks for the correction.

[rtpg]

I'm more on the "managers need technical knowledge" side of things, but I think there is value in the professional manager.

Imagine you need someone to help support a team of compiler writers. The kind of support is mainly protecting the team from too much bullshit above, and also just making sure the team has what it needs (someone's gotta get those chairs for them).

How much compiler experience do you need? It definitely helps to know about the constraints of development (difficulty in measuring project length, need for longer periods of concentration), but apart from "street cred" coming from importing within, there's a good argument that someone who's managed across multiple industries will be good at absorbing the right stuff to manage well.

OTOH, if you promote from within, you might be getting someone with good potential. But they likely won't have management experience, and their job changed from "ship this product" to "make sure the team doesn't implode (also ship the product)". If you have the slack to handle the learning curve, it's good. But hiring experienced people for a job is useful.

100% agree abut absorbing lessons though. When you start off with a certain mindset, it takes a while to absorb a new one. But your job is to make the company run well, not to be an advocate for whatever you learned at school

[wpietri]

The common approach in Silicon Valley is that everybody starts as a programmer. At some point, the career ladder bifurcates. Those who prefer to work with people issues become people managers, getting trained in related skills. (They often also work as tech leads, which is an in-between role, and for which smart companies also provide training.) Those who prefer technical issues keep rising up a technical ladder.

I think that's much more sensible than taking somebody who doesn't know much of anything, putting them in an MBA program, and then expecting them to have universal management mojo. So we're not talking about somebody who has managed across multiple industries. We're talking about somebody who, often, has managed across none.

I really don't believe managers from other industries can, on average, manage software teams. I thin software is too different from other kinds of labor. So many behaviors that are arguably reasonable in other industries are clearly catastrophic in software.

[cookiecaper]

>Those who prefer technical issues keep rising up a technical ladder.

The issue being that technical ladder is usually much shorter than the related "people ladder".

Let's call it what it is. If you have the look and act like a hyper-politically-conscious MBA, they'll let you in the club of high-level corporate people that make millions of dollars. If you look like some nerd who hasn't had a tan since 1st grade, you're stuck to the top of the technical ladder, where you're lucky to get $135k ($250k for San Francisco/other high COL areas).

[SkyMarshal]

False dichotomy, dude. You can also look like Vint Cerf or Peter Norvig and be high-ranking high-paid Chief Scientists and the like.

[maverick_iceman]

>someone's gotta get those chairs for them

This seems more like a job for an administrative assistant than a manager.

[badlucklottery]

OP might mean something more like fighting the stupid "why do they need $800+ chairs instead of the cheap $100 ones we already have in storage?" questions coming from above.

[forgetsusername]

>Toyota even took one of GM's worst plants as part of a joint venture and made it one of the best ones, but GM couldn't absorb the lessons. This American Life did a very moving piece about that plant.

Which was closed in 2010, and purchased by Tesla.

[akytt]

It's not that bad. Toyota Production System is taught as part of an MBA curriculum in better schools. Like it says in "Skunk Works", 2/3MBA=BS. The trouble is deciding which part that is. The best schools, in my experience, have realized that.

[icebraining]

Most people I know with an MBA (which, granted, it's less than 10) got it after working for a few years in some industry (including software). The concept of a business school, and of gaining more general business/management knowledge that you can evaluate under your experience as a professional, seems reasonable.

[digi_owl]

Business shcool, as best i can tell, have elevated the operations of a widget factory to a religion. And thus MBAs everywhere attempt to turn every institution they are put to manage, into an assembly line to fit their religion.

Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end.

[auganov]

As much as one can criticize formal Business education, that's just not accurate. The operational side is not the main focus or even covered in depth. Pretty much every Business curriculum will start with a firm denunciation of Taylorism.

It's very interdisciplinary. Basically an amalgamation of psychology, sociology, anthropology and even philosophy in an organizational context. The soft-science status is very much acknowledged.

Personally, I'd even say far too often it strays into self-help territory.

There's just a natural bias towards Fortune-500-sized organizations.

[digi_owl]

Then why do i keep seeing orgs run on basic of "units shipped" when it makes zero sense to do so?

[RyanZAG]

Practicality of management (as opposed to actual good management). This isn't really the fault of MBA, but rather the fault of office politics.

In a large modern corporation with a constantly revolving door, everyone moving their careers through that organization is looking out mainly for themselves. How does someone who has just moved into an executive level at a business he doesn't understand cope with all of the office politics around him? High performance big name people constantly looking out for promotions, bonuses, threatening to leave if their demands aren't met?

In the age when the owner of a business built that business up himself, knew how it worked, and knew the people he worked with, it came down to real experience. But in this new age of modern professional short term management, most of the people up and down the organizational chart don't really know anything about the depths of the business. So the only real solution is to simplify the business into "units shipped". If you can put simple numbers and KPIs on everything, you can tell right away who is valuable. Everyone now knows who is valuable.

It cuts down politics dramatically as everyone is now pulling in the same direction. Instead of one employee doing all the work being outshone by another employee who does nothing but brag about himself to new hires, you have real hard numbers. Everyone knows how to succeed - make some number go up.

Obviously this only works if the numbers actually align with the business. Most of the time, they actually do correlate, which is why this system continues to be used and why it makes profits go up. Does it correlate particularly well? Usually not. But it doesn't have to - the loss from the lack of correlation between reality and the simplified numbers merely has to be less than the lack of production from uncertainty and misalignment.

So "units shipped" wins out. What you really need to be blaming is the concepts of professional management and job hopping. I'm hopeful both of those concepts will be uprooted within a century or two by smaller, more focused, and more efficient companies. I believe the future of companies will be single person businesses with zero employees all linked to other single person businesses through an efficient market. With each business being owned, run and controlled by a single expert individual taking the optimal choices.

[wpietri]

> What you really need to be blaming is the concepts of professional management and job hopping.

Then why can't I blame MBAs and MBA-producing business schools? The core theory of the MBA is that professional management can be taught divorced from the actual details of the industry. And the value of a credential is to permit job hopping. People who work their way up in a company don't need a credential to prove their worth.

> Most of the time, they actually do correlate, which is why this system continues to be used and why it makes profits go up.

In the short term, anyhow. They generally encourage long-term destruction, though, because that lets you juice the quarterly KPIs. That in turn fuels job hopping in that a) somebody gets to claim that they improved KPIs drastically, and b) there's a real incentive to get out before the bill comes due.

[twblalock]

> And the value of a credential is to permit job hopping. People who work their way up in a company don't need a credential to prove their worth.

Many large companies prefer to promote from within, and require an MBA for promotion above a certain level. Many encourage their employees to get MBAs and help them pay for it, often with a commitment from the employee to remain at the company for some time after finishing the degree.

[RyanZAG]

Well you can blame them, but it won't solve anything. MBAs are filling a business 'need'. Professional management and all that it entails was going very strong before MBAs even came onto the field. If you removed all MBA programmes, I don't think anything would change - you'd still have professional management and revolving doors, you'd still have people chasing these same KPIs to the exclusion of customers.

My point was more that MBA is a symptom, or a result, of the real problem. And someone with an MBA is probably going to be a better manager than someone without. An originally good CEO who built a company is going to become better at his job if he gets an MBA. So the MBA itself does have value, as does all knowledge. It's just misused by many companies. Removing professional management and keeping MBAs would be far more positive than removing MBAs and keeping professional management, provided we had a real and workable alternative to professional management.

[cookiecaper]

>If you can put simple numbers and KPIs on everything, you can tell right away who is valuable. Everyone now knows who is valuable.

>It cuts down politics dramatically as everyone is now pulling in the same direction.

"Cutting down politics dramatically" is definitely not the effect I see out of a system that uses an algorithm to quantify each individual's value. These are fundamentally qualitative judgments that have far-reaching organizational and industry impact.

"Never trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself". When you tie success to a single metric (like PageRank, for instance), humans WILL find ways to game it. Important decisions should be computer-assisted, but humans are still needed to make real judgments.

You seem to be justifying the existing system that's been artificially manufactured by accountants, lawyers, and MBAs to keep them in a revolving-door of highly-paid executive and VP-level positions.

That we see nothing unusual about an accountant, lawyer, or academic being brought in to lead something he/she doesn't actually know anything about speaks volumes to how silly things have gotten. I would say that's a strong signal that we need to re-evaluate how we calculate value and qualifications.

[yuhong]

I think they still have a place in for example manufacturing where it does make sense. I want to fix problems with things like Yishan-style CEOs though.

[rtpg]

(For example) if you're publicly traded, having some sort of measurement of success is useful for your financial filings, so you can talk about progress.

VCs ask about Monthly Active Users all the time, even in business where that doesn't actually translate to anything. But numbers are usually easier to work with than a screed about "well, we saw more stuff happen than last year"

[garry]

My experience working with 700 startups is the opposite. Founders who lead with an essay will systematically fail because they don't face reality. Founders who lead with numbers are far more likely to actually know what's happening with their business, and thus succeed more often.

[auganov]

You're just making the assumption that the behaviour you observed must represent what's taught in Business school.

I think it's just hard to get fired for taking the easy way out.

[ArkyBeagle]

They're like a drunk looking for his keys under a lamppost because the light is better.

[KirinDave]

> Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end.

Quite the contrary, doctors prefer a personal approach and researchers have been trying to reign them in because the science is very clear: playing "by the book" and not over-personalizing diagnosis or care leads to better medical outcomes for everything but long term pain management and mental health care.

This is not MBAs run amok, that's people starting to listen to the science and act on it.

Now, if you want to see where things go wrong we'd look to how hospitals bill and suppliers set prices.

[digi_owl]

That is jumping from one extreme to another.

[KirinDave]

It is really immaterial how you or I want to interpret it when the data is quite clear.

[anotherhacker]

Yep... and it all started in the 1920s with Taylorism - the idea that management could be a scientific process.

Taylorism is why, for example, some companies still use lines of code written as a measure of productivity.

[ScottBurson]

You may appreciate my favorite Dijkstra quote:

[I]f we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.

[Buttons840]

My favorite is from Bill Gates:

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”

It's appropriate on so many levels. Lines of code can be part of a measure of what has been accomplished, just like a heavy airplane is a great accomplishment so long as it flies. Yet we would never consider adding weight to be our goal.

[user5994461]

The weight actually is a reasonable metrics.

It starts at zero and increases as the big pieces are added. It stops at a well defined number that is specified.

[DashRattlesnake]

It might be for aircraft construction but not aircraft design. Since programmers aren't typists entering already-complete programs, programming is more asking to the latter, not the former. You want aircraft to be lighter and programs to be shorter, and measuring progress by movement in the opposite direction is foolish.

[naasking]

But weight relative to a final value is not a reasonable metric for completeness. It's discontinuous with irregular, changes, so it has no utility in predicting how long until completion, for instance.

[dozzie]

> My favorite is from Bill Gates:

> “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”

Nice. And then we have Windows that needs dozens of gigabytes disk space and can do nothing useful at all, while debootstrapped Debian chroot can easily serve a dynamic website backed by a database and weigh two orders of magnitude less (minus the data, obviously).

The analogy is quite apt, but the context of the author's company makes the sentence hilarious.

[Clubber]

Triggered :)

[yummyfajitas]

The fact that people do something stupid and attribute it to a scientific discipline which suggests they shouldn't do it does not discredit that discipline.

Similarly, the Ariane 5 disaster doesn't mean that the idea of measuring the physical world with science is wrong.

There's nothing wrong with Taylorism. It works very well in a variety of fields (e.g. Uber and Amazon use Taylorism very effectively to manage their line workers). The fields where Taylorism isn't used (e.g. software development) are far less reliable and effective - Amazon can guarantee that your package will arrive in 2 days, can you guarantee that your software team will ship on time?

[anotherhacker]

I wouldn't say that Taylorism is why those workers succeeded.

I'd say that those workers were successful in spite of Taylorism. Don't fall into the trap in thinking that just because a methodology was applied, that it contributed to success.

The best evidence I can give in support of this is Deming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehMAwIHGN0Y

[teyc]

Apparently Taylors report was unscientific at best http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-mana...

[yummyfajitas]

Lots of early physics was also not done very well, lots of fudges, etc. Does that discredit the idea of applying science to particle movements? Does Freud discredit the entire idea of psychiatry?

[parenthephobia]

Physicists kept doing science, and it got better. Actual proper science has developed to the point where the computer I'm typing this on has a complex network of billions of logic gates which operates correctly billions of times a second. I can reasonably expect the CPU to continue to work for decades.

When managerial "scientists" can achieve anything even remotely comparable to that level of reliability and reproducibility, it will be time to take it seriously as a science. Until then, it just isn't one.

[icebraining]

can you guarantee that your software team will ship on time?

Sure. At the company I work for, we almost always deliver on time. You don't need Taylorism to do that.

[pjc50]

The fundamental idea of Taylorism isn't bad, it's just hugely overapplied and oversimplified. Using pure Taylorism in the 21st century is like using pure Freudianism. There have been plenty of more recent innovations. We could at least start with W Edwards Deming.

[pekk]

A difference is that Freud didn't put any particular stock in the scientific method. He said that his theories were proven by his "cures" (many of which have turned out to be bogus).

[specialist]

Even more so for contemporary education. Cohorts by age, class scheduling, testing, GPA.

Any learning that happens is in spite of Taylorism.

[CalChris]

Google seems very Taylor.

[amorphid]

<sarcasm>Us MBA's have stuff figured out. When I run your code through my mean-time-between-failures Excel spreadsheet analyzer, I can predict with 95% confidence how long it will be before programs running your code will crash. I'm also able to manage you as a knowledge worker, because like you, I am a developer; I wrote one of the VB macros in my previously mentioned spreadsheet. Lastly, you'll benefit from my ethics & morality training, as it's not clear to me that you have a strong enough foundation in how to make decisions that impact the lives of others.

Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month.</sarcasm>

[forgetsusername]

>Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month

Your "story" sounds like it has a cliche MBA as well as a cliche IT guy, the latter of whom believes they're oh-so-smart for having technical knowledge that others don't. Both are jerks.

[FLUX-YOU]

>Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end.

I'm not sure how else it's supposed to function. There are not enough doctors and nurses to spend exorbitant amounts of time answering every medical curiosity. Making you healthy again is pretty much everyone's goal (if it's possible for your case).

What are you saying that MBAs are taking away from patient care?

Personally I have seen the opposite: non-profits with a large percentage of income from government programs. Project Managers that buy a hundred-thousand dollar contract for a piece of software and then end up not using it. Unwillingness to address basic IT problems that drain time away from caregivers in favor of prestigious projects.

[dbg31415]

I agree with all this, but generally speaking the kids who come from name-brand MBA programs are bright. They come in, they know enough, and they have excellent work ethics.

I don't put a lot of stock in the training the MBA provides, but I do think on the whole MBA grads tend to be better hires than non-MBA grads. For recent grads, all things being equal, I'd take the MBA-grad.

Is it that extra year or two of age? Possibly... Is it the personality type of someone driven to get an MBA in the first place? Possibly... Is it the training and networking and exposure to other like-minded individuals via group projects? Possibly...

[gsylvie]

I see the MBA as a rfid badge into a different class of society:

- Do you already have an undergrad degree?

- Can you afford MBA tuition?

- Can you afford the 1-2 years required (not counting the tuition)?

Okay, you can be one of us.

Of course there's a pecking order within the MBA club based on school and year & model of porsche and professional reputation, and your work will always speak for you.

But I really get this sense that it's essentially a membership card into a social club and that the members prefer their own kind.

[wott]

Please don't put the words 'ethics' and 'MBA' together.

[JakeAl]

Do you assume to know what the ethics of all MBAs are? It's often misconstrued that the goals of the manager or organization are the goals of the individual employee. Individual employees are at the bottom of the food chain because they have the greatest weaknesses when it comes to management and leadership. If they didn't they could prove themselves through success and level up. An employee is hired to do a job. If an employees goals and ideals are not in alignment with the origanization that needs to be corrected through effective leadership or that employee needs to find another job. That applies to all levels of an organization from individual contributor, to manager, to leadership roles.

A disgruntled employee indicates a problem that is not being addressed and solved by managers and leaders. That doesn't mean the employee is right or wrong or that the manager is right or wrong. Weaknesses are in individuals and occur at all levels of business. A poor employee just lacks self-awareness, knowledge acumen and the correct strategy for solving the problems, whatever they may be, at whatever level they are. This is what effective leaders address.

[neovive]

Whenever I read about widgets and business school, I can't help but remember the scene from "Back to School" [1] when Thornton Melon attends Economics class and the professor introduces "widgets". Thornton, being a successful entrepreneur, challenges everything the professor says based on his real-world experience and gives the class "practical" advice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_School [1]

[bigchewy]

you must not have gone to b-school, nor know many graduates. The one thing that b school doesn't do is teach people operations. Many professors consider operations easy / tactical / something vs strategy. I actually think b school would be much better off if it did concentrate on teaching students how to properly operate.

and, btw, as a person who has spent 10 years analyzing the healthcare industry, we need more "medical factory" thinking not less.

[danielrhodes]

You see this same thing happening at law schools as well.

If you look at the faculty of Harvard Law [1], many of the professors have not served in a professional capacity as lawyers.

In fact, many firms have to train their new associates in the actual practice of law because law school itself has become so detached from the reality of being a lawyer. [2]

[1] http://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/index.html?s=15

[2] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/after-law-scho...

[bradleyjg]

Part of the problem is that these instiutions are part of universities in the first place. It is only natural that Harvard Law School is going to be influenced by the rest of Harvard. There's even an increasing trend in law schools of hiring people with Phds in other fields as law professors (the attraction for the Phds is the higher pay, lower teaching requirements, and pro forma tenure review).

[jimnotgym]

But what about all the other grads who are doing jobs that are nothing to do with their degrees at all? Entrants into grad training in UK big 4 accounting firms can have a degree in anything, it doesn't have to be relevant. In fact students seem to consciously choose humanities as they seem less daunting than Mathematics or Economics... Makes me wonder why we make people do degrees at all?

[spangry]

I suspect this is part of a bigger problem, one that I continually see in the public service: people undervalue expertise. There's this strange belief that 'generalists' can do just about any task well. But I've never found that to be the case. In more than a few cases I've seen 'generalists' make a complete hash of something, but because they don't have sufficient domain-specific knowledge they don't actually realise how bad a job they've done.

I wonder if this is why people are sometimes dismissive of MBAs. These people are essentially training to be future leaders and senior executives of large organisations. But how can they possibly make any sort of rational decisions, or build functional systems of work, if they have no specific understanding of the work being done? I've been thinking about this kind of thing a lot, and I've realised why these types of managers love using buzzwords: it's a way of sounding knowledgeable without actually knowing anything, and it minimises the risk of being dragged in to a discussion on specifics.

Then again, who doesn't love synergy?

[jimnotgym]

I think 'business theory' can come across badly to engineers in particular. On the other hand I have worked in a manufacturing company where engineers and scientists had spent whole careers in almost complete isolation from the needs of the business. I remember a particular conversation with the head of a major operation (with an illustrious career in R&D) who couldn't understand the forces applied from head office. "What is their problem with us having too much stock?" he said. Nobody in his long career had ever mentioned the concept of cash. There was a great need in this company for a few generalists, but mainly in mentoring and coaching. Personally I had no time for other generalists there who would not take the time to learn at least what it was that the factory made....so my point if there is one seems to be 'don't generalise about generalists'

[kochthesecond]

I might link your answer to my manager.. Ok I won't. But I completely agree that expertise is undervalued, and generalists that don't even realise how bad their work is, is a real problem that I see every day especially in the public sector.

[treebeard901]

> Then again, who doesn't love synergy?

This problem will likely get worse as automation and cloud services reduces the actual amount of work available. Besides buzzwords, the other focus of the MBA is on "core competencies".

For example, A healthcare company should focus their resources primarily on the things they do well in healthcare. Outsource as much technology as you can because that's not your core business. As "software eats the world", I find this to be increasingly bad advice for companies as technology should become the core competency for everyone.

[pryelluw]

This creates opportunity for those who see the forrest and not the trees. Tech-minded companies are poised to slay those who outsourced or did not invest in tech. There are many industries ripe for the taking due to this little detail.

[canadian_voter]

John Ralston Saul does a great job explicating this in his book Voltaire's Bastards[1].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reaso...

[anotherarray]

Putting the blame on MBAs is laughable.

MBAs and their professors simply replicate and regurgitate an ideology that is outside their own awareness and control.

Lutheranism itself is more to blame than the whole faculty of HBS and SBS combined.

It's a problem of universals, not individuals.

[reitanqild]

Lutheranism itself is more to blame than the whole faculty of HBS and SBS combined.

Why?

[crdoconnor]

It runs way deeper than just Harvard.

I don't think the ridiculousness of what they preach matters all that much. It's more about linking the network of power brokers than it is about perpetuating the neoliberal religion.

[hinkley]

The tip of the iceberg is evidence of the hazard.

[yuhong]

Horrible idea of course, but I wonder if there are companies who pick CEOs randomly from new MBA graduates and pay them an extremely high salary with no stock options or other incentives.