RIP, MBA - The economic crisis has exposed the myth of business-school expertise
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tbm.thebigmoney.com
I just got home from my evening MBA class after a full day of work. I'm the Director of IT at a pharmaceutical manufacturer in Florida and graduated with 4.0 in CS and Econ with Math minor as my undergrad. After my MBA, I'm hoping to pursue a CS/Math PhD degree and I consider myself a lifelong student with no desire to make millions. I mentioned all of this because I want to make it clear that my reasons to defend the pursuit of an MBA program is solely academic in nature and not based on the potential earnings or promotions. I could make a lot more by switching companies, networking, or working overtime. I don't have to get an MBA just to make more money.
An MBA from a good university is HARD and enlightening work. Yes, the barrier to entry is pretty low and I've had the mis-experience of being in groups where 35 year old finance majors with 8 years of field experience didn't know how to use the Excel SUM() function. Nevertheless, the professors are extremely experienced, industry stalwarts from all sorts of background. Tonight an ex-IBM'er with 20+ years of Sales & Marketing experience across various IT sectors taught me about building customer value.
Here on HN we see blog posts by know-it-all nobodies dispense wisdom on "10 ways to blah blah" and all of us discuss the merits and demerits of the post for hours and days. An MBA is a superset of that, formalized and organized. Yes, you can learn business skills anywhere, especially by running your own company. However, that does not mean you cannot benefit from decades of knowledge, wisdom, and research in every field from finance to management to marketing. The goal of a well-designed MBA program is to equip you with the knowledge and skill to make better decisions in addition to letting you employ your gut instincts and intelligence in your ventures.
The problem with MBA programs is that too many people treat them as "bigger paycheck" tickets and smaller universities lower their standards to welcome anyone who can pay them $20K/year. This has the negative side-effect of making even the hard-working MBA graduates appear to be useless greedy monsters like this article portrays.
> The reality is that business school is now chiefly a community of intention. It brings together people who share certain career aspirations—for the most part, to make big bucks—and occupies their time teaching them a few technical things that they don't need to know, along with a code of conduct that says, in essence, whatever is legal is ethical; and if it makes money, it's a positive duty. It's now clear that we would have all been much better off if, instead of cloistering these people on fancy campuses with world-class golf courses, we'd have sent them off to do two years of national service.
This entire paragraph is a complete load of crap. Over and over our professors, books, seminars, and presentations mention that doing the right, socially-beneficial thing is the only way to go. We read cases about bad businesses, identify the good ones, and isolate the bad ones pretending to be good. Not once has any of my professors even so much as sugar-coated what Enron, Worldcom, Lehman, AIG, or any of the tons of other companies have done as being acceptable. Yes, profit and shareholder value maximization is the legal requirement for any public corporation but not at the cost of long-term corporate and social goals.
Sorry about the rant but I'm pretty sick of the dumb-greedy-MBA stereotype. Everything I learn in school at night, I get to immediately apply it at my job the next morning. My advice to anyone reading this is if you have a technical background and have often lacked in management and leadership skills, an MBA from a good university will genuinely help you be a well-rounded entrepreneur. Don't have unrealistic expectations about suddenly being transformed into Steve Jobs but do realize that leadership skills can be learned and 360-degree knowledge of business operations (from tech to finance to sales) will make you a very valuable asset to any organization, including the one that you start.
There's a similar phenomenon in the startup world when you get some fresh MBA who's ready to try his mojo and "has The Great Idea and just needs to find a programmer", again, annoying and leads to this sort of generalization.
But flipping things around it's like saying, "Haha, yeah, coders never shower and have never had a date!" Sure, there are people that fit the stereotype, but they don't have exclusive rights on business or technical study.
My co-founder has his masters in business and communication. So far as I know, he's never had a computing course. He uses Ubuntu, can sling a little PHP, CSS and JS and discuss graph clustering and collaborative filtering in an overview-ish way. Oh, right, but he's supposed to be dumb.
I remember joining my first forum - I was 13, and everybody who said anything and sounded decisive was a "pro" to me. I remember telling my father that Squaresoft was making Final Fantasy games based on the work these people were doing, and getting mad when he told me that wasn't the case, because this guy said it online. I also find that every time I join a new "scene" online, there's the same reaction. When I was a big user of TheAdminZone, there were a lot of people running huge forums that knew their shit, and a lot who just got lucky and would spout pretty stupid things, and it took me a little while to realize that these was this disparity. Same thing with the writers on DeviantART, the community managers at Zoints, the popular blog scene at Tumblr, and especially with Gawker, which is the one that I feel makes the biggest rift in my online communities today.
On the Internet, everybody's a noob and an authority. If I want to diss Tim O'Reilly and say he doesn't know anything, I can, and somebody will read my diss and be influenced by it. On the other hand, there're a lot of people online who are famous for being famous: people like Julia Allison or Cory Doctorow come to mind.
Finally, there's the fact that we're all still pretty much n00bs here. The Internet's less than 20: this isn't like the world of, say, movie making, which has a century's knowledge to it. Furthermore, everybody's aware of this lack of precedent, and so everybody wants to be the person that gets known for the equivalent of Orwell's tips on writing. We're a very postmodern medium in that regard, because the discussion happens on the same plane as the publication. Everybody's as much of a celebrity as other people say they are, and there is no distinct authority.
I'd be willing to bet that 20 years into movie-making things were similar. In fact, the one similarly young industry today - the gaming industry - suffers from the same problems of amateurism and groupthink.
> The Internet's less than 20
The web is less than 20, the internet is significantly older, having been put together in the late 1960ies and early 1970ies:
that line doesn't seem to follow logically from it's previous one. seems almost like you went out of your way to diss these people on the internet. in any case, i have to say that i've enjoyed what few i've read from doctorow.
Julia Allison is pretty harmless - she's a socialite, and part of being a socialite has always been fame-seeking - but Doctorow is a lot more insidious. Here's a guy who has no credentials other than that he started a big blog, and somehow he's become an authority on art and writing and copyright. I think that a part of his popularity is that he's championing something people like to like - end copyright and all that - and so even though his writings are fairly clueless, people read them because they're simple and agreeable. But it pisses me off when I see him in newspapers writing about things like the future of art, because there are a lot of really bright people (Clay Shirky?) writing about this who actually know somewhat what they're talking about, and they're all better writers than Doctorow is too, but they're less read because they have less public attention.
Sometimes I think there ought to be a movement online attempting to highlight those bright people who don't seek attention. I don't know how it would work objectively, but I still feel that some very bright people get overlooked.
Side note: Good News, I think this Allison person is less famous that you think. I'd never heard of her at least.
Doctorow is a "clear thinker" if you're fine with his oversimplifying matters and making a lot of assumptions about things that he shouldn't be making. He's a bit too bloodthirsty about killing copyright: he seems all-too-willing to abandon all traditions just because things are changing. I don't think that "get rid of everything" is at all a measured response to the issues at hand. Similarly, whenever he talks about art I want to jab a fork between my eyes. The guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He knows less about what he's talking about than I do on the same issues, and I'm not particularly well-versed in the subject.
His fiction is terrible. That he was nominated for awards with that one story of his just saddens me. It's cliched, poorly-written, and really not all that interesting.
but back to your original claim, you may not like his writing but you have to acknowledge that other people do. not only does he write, but he does so about important and relevant topics, and from a point of view too often ignored by a large part of society. in the very least, to write him off as a paris hilton is dishonest if not asinine.
That's what bugs me. Doctorow is certainly a Paris Hilton: he does things for attention and he uses that attention to do things he couldn't do otherwise. That doesn't make him stupid (nor do I think Paris Hilton is particularly stupid, though she certainly plays the part): it just makes him somebody who doesn't deserve the box he gets.
I don't know how to tell you to get your street cred back, but you'd better start excluding the riff-raff somehow.
Now's not the time to be abandoning the title. Now is the time for courage and a level of pride in what you've accomplished.
If MBA programs are a place where people are taught technical details they won't need to know to fulfill the get-rich-quick fantasy that brought them there, what are those irrelevant technical details?
What's your curricula, and what makes it valuable or not valuable?
MBA is the more generic one, where you get to learn fewer skills, many of which you can learn while working. Somebody with real finance skills, is more valuable in my eyes.
Having done a year part time program, I can say that the number one thing I learned there was that MBA is very overrated, and you can pick a lot of skills/more by being in the right place (small company).
It might be valuable for people that are looking into higher title in the coorporate world/consulting (an MBA is more like a gateway to some jobs), but for all those startupers, it is really of little value.
You waste a lot of money and 2 years of your life that you could have been spending creating a real product.
Now with all that financial engineering bubble going away, we will see the real value of the MBA.
First of all, the top-tier programs aren't all the same. The University of Chicago MBA program, for instance, is widely considered finance-centric since it has a relatively low number of required core courses, so a student can (and many do) choose a curriculum that is very finance heavy and will end up with a better finance education than most people with straight finance degrees. However, you could end up pigeon-holing yourself in the same way you would with a straight finance degree, and this is a common reason for someone deciding against University of Chicago, especially if they already have a strong finance background.
The fact is that someone with an MBA in finance will be better equipped for pretty much any senior position than someone with a straight finance degree. There are plenty of people who can do finance, there's even probably an oversupply right now, but senior finance positions typically require a lot more than sitting in your office generating reports, which is what you'll likely end up doing with a finance degree. The fact is that a whole lot of people with straight finance degrees never learn the range of skills needed to run a business.
In fact, the value of MBAs has been made more obvious during the recent crisis in every business I'm familiar with (mostly private financial firms or web-oriented companies). People who have gone through MBA programs studying other businesses experiences in similar conditions and learning to analyze businesses in various stages and situations have been able to come up with effective strategies to keep the businesses profitable despite the odds.
MBA is the more generic one, where you get to learn fewer skills, many of which you can learn while working.
Not true. It's actually the opposite, you learn a wider variety of skills and concepts that you wouldn't have time to learn or even get exposed to at all while working.
Could you elucidate what is "HARD" ? I am NOT being sarcastic. I am genuinely curious, but I've found MBA coursework , (except in advanced finance) to be relatively easy compared to, say, a compilers class.
Running a real marketing campaign could be hard (depending on the context) but what is hard about the MBA course work in marketing?
Could you give couple of examples of what was hard about your MBA so we can understand better? (repeat, I am NOT being sarcastic or mocking you)
Take marketing, for example. It is often misinterpreted as purely "promotion" when really it also encompasses product development, pricing and placement. For me, product development and placement come naturally while I find branding to be tremendously difficult, certainly more difficult than any technical challenge I've ever faced. What one person finds "easy" or "hard" is dependent on a lot of factors, including personality type, skills, what sector that person is operating in, etc. For one product or service, pricing may be extremely simple while in another it might require significant market analysis.
Also, whether a person finds something "hard" or not doesn't directly relate to its value. I wouldn't find it "hard" to spend hours reading case studies, but they are tremendously valuable since you can learn from other companies' successes and failures and apply them to your own company. On the other hand, someone might find advanced corporate finance "hard," but unless he or she wants to work in a job in which it would apply, it's largely useless for that person.
FWIW, I'm not in an MBA program, but I do the web business thing while my wife is in a top-tier MBA program and is an exec in the financial industry. She has an analytical background but prefers strategy and operations. I know one of the things she finds both challenging and valuable is being exposed to fields that are outside of her interests but are important for having a well-rounded view of how businesses and marketplaces function. In bad business conditions this is especially valuable since you can't just stumble and guess your way around like you can when money flows easily.
no doubt but the question was explicitly what part of the coursework was hard, not the actual practice of business, which we all acknowledge is very hard.
"Also, whether a person finds something "hard" or not doesn't directly relate to its value. I wouldn't find it "hard" to spend hours reading case studies, but they are tremendously valuable since you can learn from other companies' successes and failures and apply them to your own company."
I didn't claim any of that. The question was solely about a statement in the original post and asking for examples in order to understand the point made, because in my experience MBA coursework is an order of magnitude easier than a masters in say Physics. My experience is not necessarily universal of course.
I don't believe an MBA is useless, but I am not so sure what quantum of value it does have. Hence the question.
An MBA is practicing business, at least at the top tier schools (possibly at the others, I don't know). Most of the focus is on case studies and group projects tackling real business issues, usually from real businesses, sometimes simulating what you would do and sometimes actually dealing with the actual company. Group projects in part time programs are frequently based on things actually occurring at a business one of the group members works at or runs, while in full time programs students will work with companies on existing issues. Traditional coursework is more commonly found in the the strictly analytical finance and economics classes.
This is the first time I've ever heard an mba as practice (vs a study of theory) in running a business. Great insight (if true).
"Most of the focus is on case studies"
A case study is not quite practice, more like a review I'd think. If this concept is adopted , analysing Napoleon's campaigns would be "practicing war" , reading about Bruce Lee's fighting style(and even debating about it) would be "practicing KUng Fu" and an analysis of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony would be "practicing music".
" and group projects tackling real business issues,"
This is more like it. What percentage of an MBA do you think would involve running (parts of) a real business? 25 %, 50 %?
"This past quarter, for instance, her group in one class did all the business planning for a group member's business that he is now creating."
Well, this will become a "real business" when it is actually running? I mean, till it runs this planning is as good as anyone else's?
"In other cases, they've done restructuring plans that are then implemented by the company. "
This is more in line with "practicing business". Thanks for the input. Thought provoking.
Considering that this is the basic model of MBA programs, not to mention that it's also the basic model of pretty much any professional graduate program in pretty much any field, I'm left wondering how this is the first time you've encountered it.
A case study is not quite practice, more like a review I'd think.
When you are reading, but not a project. Even if it's a project to make a decision based on historical conditions, students are doing exactly what they'd be doing if they were running the company or division, and in most cases they are or will be running those or similar companies and divisions making the same kinds of decisions in the same ways, which is the whole point.
This is more like it
During the course of working on the project it's really exactly the same as the above.
Well, this will become a "real business" when it is actually running? I mean, till it runs this planning is as good as anyone else's? ... This is more in line with "practicing business"
It's really no different. Look, her school is a top-tier business school and the business we are talking about aren't social web startups. When you are dealing with industries that require a large capital investment, it's often much harder to start and the consequences much worse when you fail. I've had to take more than 6 figures of investment for a web company and I've never needed to give up more than equity and sometimes some strategic guidance, whereas in other industries I might expect to be signing a personal guarantee, possibly even having an investor become an integral part of operations. So when we are talking about planning a business, we aren't talking about a web company with a one page business plan.
I up-vote on this alone! I actually have an essay about this that I plan on posting one day. Marketing is one of the most misunderstood aspects of business from those not involved in it. I'd guess that 9 out of 10 people think marketing is advertising and promotion.
In reality, as you said, developing a product is marketing. Understanding markets, segments, what the segments value and how to create a competitive product within those boundaries is extremely difficult and really is The the core of what a business is. The marketing strategy lies well beyond promotions and really encompasses the life of the business.
A little more practical and more marketing aligned, doing real market research for a natural foods store to determine if they should expand their footprint to other locations or just increase the size of their current store. It took over a month to design the questionnaire before the prof deemed it acceptable.
With that said, the real challenge, and what any top school does, is teach students how to prioritize. They give you so much work that you can not possibly get it all complete at the level of excellence in which you want to operate so you have to learn when something is good enough and move on to the next pressing issue. Which, BTW, is pretty much what you need to do in a startup as well.
Well I don't think the y combinator is a particularly complex concept and I did accept finance as hard and explicitly asked for non finance examples, :-) but that said I see your point (upvoted!).
"doing real market research for a natural foods store to determine if they should expand their footprint to other locations or just increase the size of their current store. It took over a month to design the questionnaire before the prof deemed it acceptable."
If I understand this correctly, the coursework is hard to the degree it intersects running a real business (in this case, as you said, doing " real market research for a natural foods store".
"With that said, the real challenge, and what any top school does, is teach students how to prioritize."
yes, but this is hardly unique to an MBA :-)
The uniqueness of an MBA is that it teaches how to think strategically about a business.
While I can not articulate exactly 'what' it teaches, I do know that often times in the face of new circumstances and rapidly changing conditions it has enabled me to ask the right questions and create the right framework to make a decision.
What I love about startups is they require this type of thinking. It has helped me tremendously in scaling technology companies.
If you acquired this by doing an MBA this is certainly a definite value add :-).
One of the more difficult courses I had focused on managing small-to-medium businesses. The issues and cases we discussed tended not to be quantitative in nature, but really honed critical thinking. A particular case I remember dealt with a struggling, family-owned company whose founder/CEO had just died in the midst of an IP lawsuit, etc. (I don't remember all the details). Imagine you are brought in to run the company. What do you do first, second, third, fourth? The challenges are legal, financial, technical, and interpersonal. There are multiple crises: which do you delegate, which have to be dealt with immediately, and which can wait? What information do you need and from where are you going to get it? The answers are not always obvious and don't necessarily fit inside a neat framework. This is "hard" in a different way from advanced quantitative analysis of futures and options.
And how do you know any of the answers you come up with to the above questions are the correct ones?
For example, "There are multiple crises: which do you delegate, which have to be dealt with immediately, and which can wait?"
So I say "delegate crisis one and deal with crisis two immediately". You reverse that answer. Who is right? I am sure two intelligent people can go back and forth for quite a while justifying each answer. Such questions arise in the social sciences as well.
If you have at least a simulation, you can ,(within the assumptions of the simulation - how these map to the real world is a separate discussion/debate) try out your "answers" and see which one works better.
In the absence of a vlaidating/correcting mechanism, how can you ever know what the right answer is or how good your "solution" is?
I've personally found MBA case studies of dubious instructional value (but great entertainment value). It gives you something to do in class, but how much does it really teach?
Where there isn't a way to judge the validity or otherwise of an answer, (in my experience) the most articulate person "wins" and since you are not responsible for implementing the answer in the real word and suffer the consequences therof, it is fairly easy to construct an argument for one ooption or the other. What stops this from happening in an MBA "case study"?
MBAs, Lawyers, etc, all have a bad image because, as you point out, they are chiefly a community of - make big bucks/whatever is legal is ethical - people.
And while it is unquestionable that a lot of people do NOT belong to that group, a majority do.
Therefore the public's perception is accurate.
Sad, especially unfortunate for the good lawyers and MBAs, but true.
The MBA experience shaped the way I think about problems as much as my undergrad in computer engineering. A good program teaches students to think through problems using an economic framework while engineering school promotes a technical one. Both are valuable (as are many other ways of thinking).
Here's a specific example: Is Amazon's new EC2 dedicated instance pricing a good deal? A naive analysis requires simply adding up the sum total of all costs and comparing the difference. What's wrong with that?
1. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. How much more? That depends on your unique circumstances. You're a start-up? It's really expensive to spend money today. You'd much rather pay more later when your concept is proven out. Are you GE and can borrow at rates only slightly higher than the government? Then, a dollar now isn't much different than a dollar tomorrow. So, you have to establish what's referred to as a discount factor to compare payments made at different times.
2. The dedicated instance program has characteristics of an option. You have the right but not the obligation to purchase server hours. So, your economic model has to allow for the future decision to switch over to the per-hour model if prices drop drastically.
3. The "strike price" (using the term loosely) of the option is fixed even though Moore's law is likely to hold over the life of the option. Is paying $500 now for the right to purchase server hours for 70% off a good deal if server hours only cost 1/5th of what they do now at the time of the option's expiration? How steeply can prices decline so that you are still at the point of indifference between paying up-front and paying later?
4. A quick analysis of the marketplace for on-demand computing suggests that it is quickly becoming commoditized (at least at the basic levels). Price competition for commodity-like goods is tremendous, so we should expect prices to drop as more competitors emerge. Even if Moore's Law didn't hold, one shouldn't evaluate the option based on today's pricing.
5. The option doesn't appear to be transferable. What discount factor does one place on purchasing something valuable that he can not sell?
I actually put together such a model. Even under optimistic Moore's Law cases and high discount rates, dedicated instances are a good deal (presuming you will use all three years with certainty or can transfer your rights).
Actually, now that I read through it again, I'm not sure it's even worth dissecting. It strikes me less as a merely illogical diatribe against business education as much as an intentionally misleading hit piece against something the author neither understands nor respects.
Now, I personally do not agree with that argument, but your criticism of author's argument is unfounded.
To but it a different way economics is about how the rules of an economic system are created. Business school is about teaching the student to work within the rules already created in the existing system.
Its unfortunate that this article focused solely on the financial industry. I agree that some schools seems to breed more of what the author is referring to in the industry. Yet I think its a blanket generalization to all MBA programs. The MBA typically gets a bad wrap when any economic problems start to occur. Most people will then start to quote statistics that say most of the top companies do not have MBAs at the helm, so why do we need these MBA programs? What about those that have worked on Social Ventures during their MBAs? Are they guilty of wasting their time in an MBA program?
I chose to get an MBA so that I could understand the business side of things more and to build a professional business network, the latter being the most important. You'd be surprised at the background of people you meet in school. Do I think that everything taught to me in the program should be taken as gospel? No.
Business School is a place that allows people with motivation and the will to change the world to share ideas with each other. Of course, there are also some people who are more keen in getting a comfortable job and lead a comfortable life. But so far for me, attending business school has extended my horizon greatly (I did figure out that finance is not my cup of tea and technology is my true passion). I have learnt a lot about people skills, finance (to help me understand term sheets when I startup), business strategy and ways to grow businesses so my ideas can achieve the biggest impact on people's lives.
"Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School" https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594201757?tag=dedasys-20 (yes, it has my affiliate link)
It's written by a pleasantly cynical, yet curious Englishman. It's pretty interesting to hear about the whole experience, the mindset, and some of the people involved. A particularly relevant (for me) passage:
"Rubenstein looked like any other Wall Street elder statesman, in a blue pinstriped suit and owlish tortoiseshell glasses. But the moment he spoke, eh revealed a droll, self-deprecating wit. The difference between corporate leaders and those who start their own businesses, I had observed, was startling. The latter come across as so much smarter and independent-minded, so much less prone to platitudes, so much more comfortable in their own skins. There seems to be an anarchic streak in anyone who has taken a real risk in his life. And even when it has to burn its way through a pinstriped suit, it shows."
That sort of hints at one of the "problems" with teaching business - there's lots of useful stuff you can learn, but there is also some natural, innate talent there, that doesn't necessarily correspond to doing well at an MBA course. So perhaps it's best to get out there, get some experience, and then just do it.
I don't have an MBA, nor do I plan on getting one. I don't see it as good use of my time but I still highly doubt that the MBA will die anytime soon.
The "M" in an MBA still stands for Master's degree. Master degrees are certainly not worthless. If the author of the article wants to disparage graduate level studies, he certainly ought to go after more than one particular brand of degree. The MBA hating is getting really old.
I have moderately fallen into it, getting a BBA along with my engineering degree.
yes, business courses are really that easy
i took accounting course back then, the first couple weeks it didn't make sense (too simple). i thought a better way (aka ABC (activity based accounting)) which was covered weeks later
i sat on mba course later and most 'analysis' are too simplistic, mostly straight lines (remember 'beta' ?). complete waste of time.
i feel that business in general is easy and not much to learn so schools just teach everything for the sake of teaching.
out of the 1000 pages in many business textbooks, maybe only 100 pages are useful.
"Soft skills" -- such as your presentation skills, your communication skills, client management skills, etc, are actually arguably more important. As a former consultant, I think soft skills is much more critical for your business success.
Business classes are easier than engineering classes because the "hard skills" aren't nearly as complex, but keep in mind you pick up a lot of other skills that are even more important in business settings.
MBAs shouldn't be trusted to make important decisions, and neither should the rest of us apparently. Maybe check with Mom first next time.