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Comment by datenhorst | Hacker News Reader

I believe Harvard Business School and its ilk deserve a lot of blame for the instilling of a profit-at-any-cost culture across the US.

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I studied abroad in the US as a European and the first sentence the microeconomics professor blurts out: "Greed is good."

At that point I wasn't as gobsmacked anymore because several days before some 17 year old girl yelled in a 300 person biology lecture at the professor to stop telling lies about evolution (first week of college).

But "greed is good" struck me as an oddly American way of viewing the world. Europe isn't free of greedy people, by any means, but it's sort of not the first rule you learn in school.

I guess it depends. I have a German engineering degree and took a business administration course as a part of that. And in one of the first lectures our professor told us that The formal goal of the company is to maximize profit. Which seems to be just a more formal way of expressing Greed is good. But then again, this might be influenced by American business culture…

Agreed, and I obviously suffer from some bias since I could not experience college in both countries.

But the microeconomics angle seemed more personal - as in attempting to describe interaction between people with some extrapolation to larger entities.

IMO the business school of though is the one which is currently hindering progression, holding on to values from the industrial revolution. It's as we all know a philosophy of top-down management of expendible resources. This way of thinking simply doesn't apply today. We need a breakthrough of the servant leadership way of thinking.

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