[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.

[wpietri]

I suspect that's even worse. Requiring everybody to get 2 years worth of education is a lot, especially when it's same degree fresh-faced 25-year-olds get so they can join the ranks of management. A well-run company could look at an individual and say, "You should really improve your knowledge of X, go take this course." But requiring external validation of something they can evaluate internally is a sign of poor HR processes and poor personnel management.

[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.

[wpietri]

I disagree on pretty much all counts here.

I especially disagree with your proposition that people with MBAs are likely to be better at running businesses.

An engineer friend of mine went back for an MBA from a top school. He said the one non-obvious thing he learned in two years was the principle of comparative advantage. The rest was stuff he could figure out from first principles and a modest amount of thought. He said the real value to his career was the the networking with other young up-and-comers.

Moreover, not all knowledge is beneficial. A chunk of MBA training is in effect learning to be glib about business while sounding authoritative. That training might be beneficial to the degree-holder, but it can be harmful to others, including the company.

Or look at the extent to which a firm replete with Harvard MBAs totally destroyed a company while profiting handsomely: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmons...

I also don't think you can separate MBAs and professional management. The MBA is the infection vector for many of the worst ideas in management. It's also self-perpetuating: MBAs extract cash from companies and donate heavily to business schools, perpetuating both the ideas and the caste system.