When will the myth that MBAs can manage everything die?
Particularly among board of directors of large companies.
It's simply not true. One of the few successful tech people I've seen admitting that their MBA helped them is Mark Pincus of Zynga. He said he wished he had paid more attention in his MBA class because he's had to learn those lessons the hard way.
That said, I think an interesting thought experiment would be to ask a manager to run a ... something ... without knowing what it is or what it does. Is it a factory or a retail outlet (which is all most MBA programs teach you how to run, really)? What is made or sold there? Why did production or sales fall? What product should be developed or marketed next?
My suspicion is that most MBAs would complain that this is too little information. And by god they'd be right.
Incidentally, I wonder if any B-schools have studied the performance of C-suite officers comparing Greeks (coming from elsewhere) and Trojans (long-termers with domain exertise).
[1] Try this on: "A good programmer can program anything."