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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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"
I think it's just hard to get fired for taking the easy way out.
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.
Taylorism is why, for example, some companies still use lines of code written as a measure of productivity.
[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.
“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.
It starts at zero and increases as the big pieces are added. It stops at a well defined number that is specified.
> “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.
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?
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:
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.
Sure. At the company I work for, we almost always deliver on time. You don't need Taylorism to do that.
Any learning that happens is in spite of Taylorism.
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>
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.
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.
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...
- 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.
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.
and, btw, as a person who has spent 10 years analyzing the healthcare industry, we need more "medical factory" thinking not less.