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I'm not arguing for hard skills over soft skills. I'm asking if MBAs actually provide transferrable hard skills.

They don’t. All MBAs I’ve met in my career have been replaced easily.

That's not an argument against MBA's having hard skills. It's an argument for a finely standardized product.

MBAs are a commodity, but they do or at least can have hard skills. I've wasted plenty of time and money on subpar market entry and expansion that could have been saved had I worked with people with some theoretical background on those.

You haven’t met good ones, and that’s likely why they were replaced.

You could write an encyclopedic book of counter intuitive organizational dynamics. While I don't know that this is the case with all of them, perhaps MBAs could be understood as internalizing the combination of such an encyclopedia with a few others besides and gaining insight into how they interplay with supply line logistics.

The insight mostly comes from experiences; the knowledge of what to reference to find where to find where to find what to find could be (boringly) boiled down to rote memorization and distributed through your standard classroom practices.

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