Great perspective. My takeaway is that people today are still overall undereducated. Business skills and corporate strategy should be taught earlier, at the highschool levels, instead of requiring a dedicated MBA.
> Business skills and corporate strategy should be taught earlier, at the highschool levels, instead of requiring a dedicated MBA.
How would you teach corporate strategy in a way that’s simultaneously honest (and useful to the individual) and palatable?
Maybe if you limited yourself to strategy within coops, where the individual’s incentives really are aligned with the incentives of everyone else in the organization, or mid-level management, where you only have a certain category of power - but that’s less useful because coops aren’t so common and mid-level management is ultimately subjected to what the upper levels decide.
In the end, individuals with positions where they have to worry about “business skills” or “corporate strategy” don’t usually have incentives which are aligned with the people at other rungs on the ladder. If you teach corporate strategy in an honest fashion, a not-insignificant portion of your material will be how to effectively redirect money from other areas in the organization to yourself. Most of your students will see that at stealing.
Or maybe you don’t teach how to leverage these strategies, but just how to spot them in action?
Either way, K-12 is traditionally focused on skills that are more foundational and generally useful. Admittedly, that’s changing as some schools introduce things like CS courses, but usually these are electives and not part of the core curriculum.
If I were exposed to corporate strategy without having any business experience whatsoever that usually accompanies an MBA, the subject would go in one ear and out the other without registering one bit.
What really ought to be taught is personal finance and basic investing - those subjects can be molded into information for any age group.
It seems to me those domains lack a well-defined paradigm that can be taught in a easily digestible way in a classroom environment.
I imagine some of the known valuable skills can be taught to a certain degree. Problem-solving, learning how to learn, assessing opportunities, looking for inefficiencies, communication, telling a compelling narrative, and so on. But I don't think it is easy to teach those things in a highly effective manner, at least not in a short amount of time.
How would you teach corporate strategy in a way that’s simultaneously honest (and useful to the individual) and palatable?
Maybe if you limited yourself to strategy within coops, where the individual’s incentives really are aligned with the incentives of everyone else in the organization, or mid-level management, where you only have a certain category of power - but that’s less useful because coops aren’t so common and mid-level management is ultimately subjected to what the upper levels decide.
In the end, individuals with positions where they have to worry about “business skills” or “corporate strategy” don’t usually have incentives which are aligned with the people at other rungs on the ladder. If you teach corporate strategy in an honest fashion, a not-insignificant portion of your material will be how to effectively redirect money from other areas in the organization to yourself. Most of your students will see that at stealing.
Or maybe you don’t teach how to leverage these strategies, but just how to spot them in action?
Either way, K-12 is traditionally focused on skills that are more foundational and generally useful. Admittedly, that’s changing as some schools introduce things like CS courses, but usually these are electives and not part of the core curriculum.