Boeing's timeline of failure actually matches the trajectory of other MBAified companies.
There’s no such thing as being “MBAified.” An MBA is a generalist degree that contains the bare minimum information you need to operate a corporation.
You know how in undergraduate computer engineering you learn many different subjects like power systems, microcontroller programming, computer programming, transistors, basic processor design, digital/analog circuit design? And how nobody is going to use all those subjects in the real world? That’s exactly what an MBA is like: it’s got subjects like corporate finance, organizational behavior, information systems management, marketing, etc. Just about nobody with an MBA is going to use ever single one of those subjects on a daily basis.
Nobody else is being judged by their degree. It’s ridiculous, and kind of disgusting that people act like learning the set of knowledge contained in an MBA makes you a worse manager. Armchair engineers seem to think they could run a multi-billion dollar aircraft manufacturer using avionics engineering skills alone without understanding the concepts you learn in an MBA like inventory turnover, cash flow, global operations, or how to design the organizational structure of a company with tens of thousands of employees. In what way does an engineering degree prepare you to do that job?
Imagine if you were a nurse and you got told that you were a worse nurse because you got a nursing degree. That’s what the engineer-types who dunk on MBAs are doing.
The whole idea that no matter what a company does, a generic degree holder, with an education heavily centered on accounting and finance can be the ultimate decision maker without taking into input any other aspect behind financials and accounting.
Most business type have this misguided idea that we engineers don't value business and financial knowledge. We do, what we question is the hubris of business people that seem to believe that domain knowledge is not important, and that managing a soft-drink manufacturer is the same as manufacturing a tech company. It is not.
The problem with your analogy, is that no nurse are being taught on nursing programs that all that matters is what they learn on their programs. If this happened, yes, nurses would be worse nurses by having those degrees.
My courses emphasized gathering feedback from employees and empowering them to make decisions. We learned about multiple different ways to compete which were very often not based on “cost cutting.”
MBA also can't really be compared to Nursing, or really most other degrees. Nursing is a real thing, that can have completely quantified measurement on success.
MBA is...not. In some capacity MBAs are a self-fulfilling role, where the existence of the degree and the artificial rarity associated with the "big schools" around it, create a necessity for more MBAs in the future.
The impact of MBAs can't really be quantified either. First, we don't know what firms are working with what employers sometimes until decades later due to the various NDAs and secrecy around them. Sometimes going as far as the firms taking on obvious conflict of interests, but being able to keep them hidden (e.g. taking on the FDA, and addictive drug manufacturers at the same time.) Second, due to how these firms operate, and the impact of short term vs long term thinking - the negative results of MBAified management strategies do not come across for years. And when the negative results do happen, the blame is either pointed at ${politicians}, ${immigrants}, or ${economy}. When was the last time a firm took responsibility for destroying a company? Even if you think MBAs don't actually destroy companies all the time, by just nature of it being an intervention it's bound to happen at least __once__ right? When has a firm taken responsibility for this happening?
And this is again, one of the differences MBAs have with nursing. Nurses do absolutely from time to time make the situation worse for patients. But responsibility is given and understood.
I'd probably start by saying that not all people with MBAs are in the executive leadership team, CEOs, board members, etc. They're not all "the fat cats in charge." In fact, most aren't. You have people like business and financial analysts, salespeople, and people managers with those degrees. For example, a couple of my classes involved learning about effective people management, the kind of thing that would benefit an engineering manager.
> MBA also can't really be compared to Nursing, or really most other degrees.
How so? It's got classes, tests, math, writing, reading, analyzing. It sure felt like a degree to me when I was writing papers, citing sources, putting formulas in spreadsheets, etc.
> In some capacity MBAs are a self-fulfilling role, where the existence of the degree and the artificial rarity associated with the "big schools" around it, create a necessity for more MBAs in the future.
I would ask how is this different than any other job that asks for the candidate to have a degree or a presigious degree? Do I need an engineering degree to write code? Technically, no. For an MBA there really isn't any scarcity unless you are looking for an extremely prestigious job that wants a prestigious degree program, which is the the exact same thing that engineering firms hiring MIT graduates do. It's way easier to find accreddited online MBA programs than it is to find online accredited engineering programs, especially for engineering programs that require in-person lab work.
> First, we don't know what firms are working with what employers sometimes until decades later due to the various NDAs and secrecy around them.
This is quite literally untrue in the context of public companies that have mandatory disclosures like the 10-K. Also, you know how Hacker News has a bunch of articles about the goings-on of businesses on the front page every day? Yeah, those are articles that can be used as information for analysis. I cited TechCrunch a decent number of times during my time as a student. How do you think business leaders analyze their competition? They don't just sit there and twiddle their thumbs and say "I don't know what my competitor is doing, they won't tell me, it's behind an NDA!" No, they gather information about their industry to benchmark just like you and I do.
And sure, the case studies we used in class were sometimes 10 years old but that didn't make them worthless, and quite often they were much newer than that. Some car companies could still learn a thing or two from the Toyota Production System from the 1980s.
Now, let's talk about your last two paragraphs. You are essentially saying that business leaders never take blame for anything, and that everyone else takes responsibility and blame. But that's really not true either: business leaders are more frequently compensated with performance incentives and company stock compared to engineers, nurses, etc. That means that poor long-term company performance will lower their pay.
Sure, there are cases where executives abuse these compensation schemes, but overall those compensation schemes are there to make sure the executive leadership makes the kind of decisions that grow the company and make its shares more valuable.
> When was the last time a firm took responsibility for destroying a company?
When was the last time an engineer took responsibility for destroying a company? Or a nurse or doctor took responsibility for destroying a medical practice? How many doctors are out there agreeing that they engaged malpractice when they get sued? It's kind of a ridiculous question, isn't it? Who is raising their hand and saying "blame me” as a generality? I don't know a lot of general humans like that who volunteer to be fired, be thrown in jail, or face fines.