[rhizome]

If you loosen your sense of "MBA"...

- Rometty (Chair): Technical degrees, held technical positions for first 10yrs at IBM, then in sales for the 90s, two decades working primarily with finance customers and she worked the PWC acquisition.

- Krishna (CEO): EE, Idea guy.

- Whitehurst (Pres): MBA

- Boville (SVP Cloud): Business degrees (UK)

- Browdy (SVP Legal): IP attorney

- Foster (SVP Services): Art degree, Accenture guy

- Gherson (SVP): Management degrees

- Gil (Dir IBM Research): EE/CS

- Kavanaugh (CFO): MBA

- Got bored

One trait is pretty dominant: decades at IBM

[lol636363]

You don't need MBA to have MBA mindset. A lot of computer science grads use their degree to get foot in the door and then move into management positions.

At IBM, to do anything you need to get permissions from 5 different semi-tech approvers. They have not done any real work in a while but read a few blog posts and come up with their own policies that contradicts each other. It is a pita to want to produce high quality code.

And that is just middle management. All those people higher up can define tech words but hardly anyone can actually explain the definition of those tech terms.

[Graphguy]

The loosening lens is a bit of strawman argument. I would hope someone at the level has experience with the business side of things... Pichai and Nadella weren't tapped to run their business straight after shipping a release.

Also, Howard joined in May (which is an important one...because this press release is about Cloud not about HR/patents.)

[dralley]

Whitehurst has a Computer Science degree (BS) and was using Linux on his personal computers in the 1990s and early 2000s, I think it's unfair to drop him in the MBA bucket.

[x87678r]

Ironically Whitehurst came from Red Hat.