Former GM exec, Bob Lutz: Fire the MBAs and let the engineers run the show

If MBAs were good. They would make their own businesses and win. Is it the case or not?

As for your view of the "average" MBA, that may very well be the case. There's plenty to write about how MBA programs suck, even (or especially) the "elite" ones. From that to argue that we as a society should have no ambition to teach business seems strange to me.

Full Disclosure: I have a Stanford MBA

Despite the general level of incompetence among GM's leadership there were a few smart people there. Lutz was one of them. He has a strong track record of developing successful products and has never been shy about criticizing his bosses.

And to get to his point, it's fluff

It's not fluff. Perhaps this synopsis of his book didn't provide sufficient detail, but his point is broadly acknowledged as one of the major problems with the US auto industry. If you look at a US made car from the early 2000's, the level of cost optimization at the expense of all other factors is embarrassing. It's indisputable that as MBAs have gained prominence in the US auto industry, the products have become less compelling. Lutz is simply advocating that the people who love the product be the ones who have the final say.

(Disclosure: I'm an automotive engineer)

Anyway, there honestly wasn't much of a problem with doing things that way from most customers' point of view: Bell owned the telephone equipment, but that was a good thing because it was expensive stuff, and they would maintain it for you. Moreover, there just wasn't much opportunity for differentiation in CPEs (customer premise equipment, the stuff in your house): battery technology wasn't at the point where wireless handsets made sense, commodity answering machines were a long way off, et cetera. In total, in terms of Bell's ability to roll out the network quickly, it was probably a net win with regard to the technology that they kept the whole thing closed.

Now, obviously it also gave them the opportunity to act pretty anti-competitively, and obviously that was not good for customers. But it's often been observed that huge infrastructure buildouts are much more efficiently done under central control, and given the choice between the Federal government doing it and Ma Bell doing it, I'll take the latter.

[1] I've read and implemented most of the Bellcore standards; in the past I worked on a team doing integrated telephone line control circuits (SLICs), and if you think fifteen years of web standards turns into a rats nest, try implementing 100 years of standards plus working around well-known cases that break those standards but are too widespread to ignore. The telephony equivalent of IE6 is the Casio Phonemate answering machine. That single piece of equipment is, I shit you not, singlehandedly responsible for about a 10% bloat in the cost of telephony equipment because it sold so many units and yet so badly breaks the ringing standard.

http://engineering.curiouscatblog.net/2007/06/05/sp-500-ceos...

I think there is a problem in business school focus on short-term optimization. There's data showing the while businesses have fatter profit margins than ever, total profit growth has been much weaker than in past decades. Hmm I think I saw that data in a Umair Haique presentation.

Note: I'm not saying immigration is any less broken.