If MBAs are useless, we’re all in big trouble
qz.com
qz.com
And, I know HN is strongly skewed on consumer SAAS, but there is a world of companies with big money working on 10 to 20 years old software that would love to pay for stuff that works and allows them to save costs. Easiest way to get to this gold mine is actually sympathizing with the business people, not "enemyzing" them.
I agree and I disagree. The MBA itself is pointless without considerable effort of the student to learn things related to startups.
MBAs teach you to be good middle to upper management in an organization with some structure. It teaches you how to navigate and mold an existing structure as needed for the course of business. It doesn't teach you how to build a company from scratch.
I would argue that a skilled business professional is useless for some startups and necessary for others. Want to tackle enterprise software? A few of those MBAs can provide insight and credibility.
Web guys are useless in a native world. Cocoa guys are useless in a Windows world. XAML guys are worthless in an Cocoa world. Right tool. Right job.
It seems to me that whatever the MBA may have been worth at one point, it's now worth about the same thing as A+ or Network+ certification. This feels like a rerun of the early 2000s when the job market was flooded with people that have bootcamp certificates but no real knowledge/experience/drive.
Truth is MBAs are inflated hullaballoo whose exorbitant price for offering semi useful drivel may have worked in the time of all-is-fine-and-dandy but in today's unstable economic world where lean is mean (in good sense) it's just anachronistic.
The author assumes if you have an MBA, you are qualified to do these things. That couldn't be further from the truth.
Note that the skills are only present if at all in MBA grads due to filtering on the input side, not some magic pixie dust sprinkled on during classes or as part of the credential ceremony.
========================
First, an aside.
Paul Graham was wrong about something. He wrote "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" (still a great essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html). He was mostly right:
Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
Ok. Reading on...
Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. [...] But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult.
Agree so far...
So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.
If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. [...] Of course I wanted to be popular.
But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.
Holy shit! This is right on. Go nerds!
I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. [...] An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.
[T]eenagers are always on duty as conformists.
Wow. This is some deep insight. Always on-duty as conformists... what does that seem like? (Hint: corporate work.) I'll get hack to that.
Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular. [...] Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.
So far, Paul Graham is batting 1.000.
In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.
Yes, this is true. I was somewhere around the 30th percentile of my HS pecking order and completely fine with that. I wasn't "cool" bit I wasn't unpopular, people respected me, I never got beat up. But if you wanted to be 98th, you really had to put a lot into it.
Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. [...] [T]hat's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen.
Yes. Go on...
Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after.
This is where Paul Graham is wrong. Yes, high school is horrible for the least popular couple percent. For most of us, even the nerds, it was fine. You don't lose your income if you're at the 30th percentile of the pecking order, and you have other things to focus on. You have things (e.g. college) to look forward to.
The Work World is more like high school than college or academia. Actually, it's worse than high school. In corporate Work, the popular kids are actually evil (in HS, most of them weren't; perhaps selfish and immature but not evil) and you lose huge amounts of money when they fuck you over. Also, there is no external definition of merit. In HS, you can work hard and get good grades and that gives you a signal that even though you're not popular, you're doing well in society's eyes. There is nothing like that at Work. Your grades (performance reviews, job titles) are given by the popular kids who have no desire to be fair and who will be as unfair as they can get away with if it helps them get ahead.
Adults don't normally persecute nerds.
Well, this is just not the case. Not in VC-istan, not in 99% of jobs even at "tech companies". The popular kids rule with an iron fist. They dress it up with a pseudo-meritocracy and "performance" rhetoric and credibility metrics and job titles, but it's just high school popularity, this time played for keeps. And yes, if you're one of those nerds who puts his head down and tries to be as good as possible at his job (instead of playing politics) you will be attacked in most environments. Why? Because an actual high-performer scares the shit out of the popular kids.
[Y]ou can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.
This is exactly how corporate Work works.
It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another [...]
Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. [...] Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
Office politics, right there. Managers (like HS teachers) are powerless to prevent it, because the information they get is filtered through the most intimidating/extortive subset of the people below them (who silence everyone else and become the real authority on "performance").
The inhabitants of all those worlds [e.g. high school] are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
Great insight. I agree. I disagree that Work is different for the vast majority of people. How do you get promotions? Or venture funding? Or just not fired when a "low-performer" witch hunt happens? Or get real projects where there's actual high-impact work available? Oh, right. Popularity.
Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.
99% of office jobs. High school work isn't "pointless". It just has no impact on the outside world because it's evaluative by design. That's how bottom-rung corporate work is, too. They aren't giving you work because it's important. They give you undesirable and unimportant stuff, for a dues-paying period of a few years, in order to evaluate you for eligibility for real work. Getting out is based on popularity, not merit.
It's worse at Work because, in high school, real effort is made to make the work at least marginally engaging and educating. At Work, no one cares. The Work is supposed to be dogshit. It wouldn't be a test if you were learning something from it.
Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world.
This is where Paul Graham gets it wrong. The high school popularity game is the more "real world"-like game, not the nerd be-smart-and-do-great-work game. Who is going to get the boss job, the well-connected idiot or the hard worker? The former, even in "tech". Your boss gets to tell you what to do because he has more credibility (popularity) with the organization.
========================
Okay. I'm not dissecting this to pick on Paul Graham. His essays are insightful, inspiring, and extremely well-written. He gets a lot more right than he gets wrong. He also wrote this 10 years ago, before the Social Media Douchepocalypse was even on the radar. I just think that he had a very unusual set of experiences that led him to conclusions closer to how the world should be than what it is actually like. Now, I'm just as biased. Remember that I'm the Hacker News anti-Christ. I think of Paul Graham as someone very like me with a radically opposite set of experiences. In his world, brilliant hard-working people are rewarded. In my world, base about 20 years later after "the cool kids" had set up permanent camp in something (Silicon Valley) that was originally by us and for us, such high-quality people are exploited, and often treated very badly by people who see them as a threat. He and I are both right, over what we've seen. We just have small data sets. Unfortunately, and I hate that this is true, I think my conclusions are more representative of what people face today.
What could this have to do with MBAs? It's a euphemism for "the popular kids". I know some great people with MBAs, but when disparage "MBAs" as a class, we're talking about the well-connected talentless smiling idiots who are competing with us for venture capital, managerial position and favor, and visibility. Even on our fucking territory (software and technology) they are fucking demolishing us. It's not even a fight. We're just getting trampled because we don't know how to fight.
When we gripe about MBAs, we're not talking about something that has anything to do with the coursework. It's the attitude of entitlement that comes with having a globally visible and permanent "I'm One of the Cool Kids" credential, and the connections that come with it. You have to be smart to get into a good PhD or JD or MD program. To get into a top MBA program? Family connections or work experience (read: high-status jobs, meaning popularity) will suffice. It's not what people learn in MBA programs that we have a problem with. We just don't like these fucking invaders. And we shouldn't like them. Technology is our fucking turf, fuckers. Get off our territory or I, for one, am ready to attack.
Maybe this kind of phraseology is part of the reason you keep getting passed over for promotion.
Every time a great company (e.g. Google) becomes a closed-allocation nightmare festival with satanic innovations like calibration scores, that's another seaside city lost to the horde.
You may not be interested in war, but it is interested in you. -- Leon Trotsky
I am sick of watching our territory get taken by smiling assholes who have nothing to offer the world, and whom any properly masculine society would have done something about decades ago. I'm fucking disgusted and ready to fight. If that means I occasionally swear a blue streak, who fucking cares? The only thing that matters is defeating these assholes with such force that they never fuck with us again.
Maybe engineer-led companies could establish some kind of guild where they publicly pledge never to implement certain kinds of corrosive management practices. Good hackers could then just refuse to work for firms who aren't signed up, and firms could be ejected if they were seen to be breaking their promises.
The problem with schemes such as this is that the psychopaths will inevitably infiltrate it and use it as another way to exert control. I'm sure many people can suggest examples where this has happened before.
Perhaps this could be guarded against by making some kind of radical transparency part of the conditions?
Sure, but this is several questions. In the very-long term, society will need to implement a basic income due to widespread structural unemployment. There will always be differences in social status and popularity contests, but once we get to a state where low social status means you're on a 3-month waiting list to go to Mars instead of dying of starvation or health insurance, I'll say we've won as a species...
But let's stay out of society-wide political changes none of us can hope to control.
I like to think that I'm doing my part. I'm exposing The Lie to be a lie, and that's huge. Most people are terrified to speak the truth about ex-employers, as if it would blacklist them forever. (Having done it, it's not so severe that you starve, but yes, you do lose opportunities and I recommend a different road.)
Bringing down The Lie is the first step. Evil credibility systems come down once people stop believing in them, but people still do. If you apply for a job, you often deal with reference checks where "we have to speak to a manager". That's profession of faith in a credibility system that, to be blunt, deserved to die out decades ago.
The thing is, most companies operate on the assumption that 10% of managers are horrible people and therefore if someone drew 3 or 4 duds, the problem is with the employee. But technology draws in psychopaths who want to take advantage of head-down hard-working nerds and it's more like 50% who are evil and 30% more who are decent people but just not competent (and their teams get eaten by young-wolf conflicts as evil asserts itself from non-managerial corners.)
So, it's several orders of magnitude more common for good people to end up with fucked-up career histories than we think. That's also why we have such an age discrimination problem in our industry: by 35, you've had a real career history, not this VC-istan dream where no one fucks you over and ruins your reputation. Almost no one is courageous enough to speak about this, though.
Exposure of truth is key. When I "leaked" Google's calibration scores-- secret performance reviews that enable managers to keep good engineers captive on shitty projects by giving a positive verbal review and a negative (secret) numeric one that makes them immobile-- note that I didn't think I was leaking anything; how can something known by 50,000 people be secret?-- I did a lot of damage to the company's image. That wasn't even my intent. If I had known that a leak of calibration scores could cost Google millions, I wouldn't have done it. I would have threatened to do it unless given certain considerations (transfer within the company to a better manager). Luckily, I can't be sued because calibration scores aren't a product and exposing how a company treats its employees is unambiguously legal. Unfortunately, I've had a number of powerful people come out to fuck up my career.
The first step-- and we can legally do it-- is exposure. Companies and managers that ruin smart peoples' reputations careers, or (much more commonly, because most targets of this extortion cave) threaten to do so to get something, should be exposed with such harsh light that the world loses faith in them outright.
How did I cost Google millions (potentially; I don't think anyone knows the real figure) by leaking calibration scores? The fuckers who run the world now, they need us (talent). They need talented people to have faith in what they are doing. If they didn't, no one would give a shit that I leaked calibration scores and no one would try to fuck up my career years after the fact. If we burn down the facade of this economy of lies and fear down and expose the rot within, then we can right the power relationship.
Also, I don't actually support violence against the rich or well-connected because they are such. (That's just envious malevolence, and as evil as what we need to fight.) However, I am 100% in favor of making violence legal against certain types of social violence-- especially career blacklisting. As far as I'm concerned, if you "pick up a phone" on a private, powerless, employee-level person, or if you ruin someone's career with a bad reference, and the targeted person acquires proof of what happened, it should be legal for that person to use violence, up to killing, in retaliation. It should be obvious that I don't support killing the well-connected just because they are such. If you have social connections, then fine; good for you. If you use them for bad purposes (e.g. you "pick up a phone" and make someone unfundable or unemployable) your skull gets broken, and you might die painfully because examples must be made. That is how it should be.
I support radical honesty and the most honest way to deal with passive-agressive socially violent people is to kill them.
Ok, that's an ugly topic so I'll stop there. In any conflict, I view violence as a last resort. It means that one party failed to be human. Violence is sometimes acceptable and very rarely good but it is always hideous so I generally don't like it.
We are in violent conflict with the upper class. 45,000 Americans die of health insurance (either the lack of it, or horrible coverage) every year. Also, 9/11 wasn't Arabs vs. Americans. It was an upper-class well-connected douchebag from the second-richest family in Saudi Arabia killing 3,000 middle-class office workers (who don't matter to such people, because they're middle-class schmucks) to make a political point. We are at war. It's not a war of countries. It's a war of classes and it's global. Bin Laden and the Bushite neocons are on the same side (upper class). Whether middle-class Americans die or Iraqis is irrelevant to them. They do not all like each other (I'm sure Bush was convinced that bin Laden is a mortal enemy) and Illuminati-style conspiracies do not exist; but when they compete with each other, they do it in a way that makes us lose.
However the good news is that we (at least, you and me, personally) don't necessarily need to be violent. We in the cognitive 10^-k percent for some self-flattering k, we have options. We can escape and outperform them. We don't have to live in high-COL cities and work in VC-istan companies where the founders treat us like garbage because they have connections (read: they went to MBA school with VCs, and know disgusting secrets on powerful people they can use to "call in"/extort favors) and we don't. We can get away from those assholes-- possibly moving to a low-COL city, because we'll probably have to use our own capital-- pool our resources, and start fucking building things that actually solve peoples' problems and make the world better. We (talent in general, not just programmers) are what the world needs. Money is just an accounting trick to keep it going. We have the real stuff and it's time to start acting like it.
Maybe engineer-led companies could establish some kind of guild where they publicly pledge never to implement certain kinds of corrosive management practices. Good hackers could then just refuse to work for firms who aren't signed up, and firms could be ejected if they were seen to be breaking their promises.
The problem with schemes such as this is that the psychopaths will inevitably infiltrate it and use it as another way to exert control. I'm sure many people can suggest examples where this has happened before.
Perhaps this could be guarded against by making some kind of radical transparency part of the conditions?
You ETA'd this after I wrote my original reply and I'm not going to give it the same long-form answer, but... yes, these are very good ideas.
Here's a post I wrote about something that, if I could get the resources (unlikely, but who knows) I would want to build: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/update-on-wha... . What I really think would be a great contribution to the world is to shine some light on which companies and managers help peoples' careers and which ones harm them.
It should be legal to kill someone for giving you a bad reference? OK.
Does that include people like PG?
I'm not sure quite how to put it in a way that will do any good, but the amount of anger you seem to be carrying around does not sound healthy. Finding a constructive way to deal with it - perhaps by finding a better job, moving somewhere better, or whatever else works for you - might be something to consider.
My honest feeling about it is that opposing (much less violently so) people because they are rich or well-connected is just as wrong as what the upper-class is doing. That's just envious malevolence and I can't support it. I don't know enough about PG; he sounds like a stand-up guy.
My ideology about the class war is pretty simple. If you're well-connected and rich, good for you. No, not everyone who's rich deserves to die. By world standards, I'm well into "the 1%". However, the minute a powerful person decides to "pick up a phone" and make someone unfundable or unemployable, the targeted person has the right to destroy that adversary (through exposure, or violently, up to killing) and is doing a heroic and hygienic act if he does.
It's extortionists I want to expose, humiliate, and demolish-- not successful people in general. I want to be successful and I hope I will be some day.
Do you mean that the solution is making your own justice? Moral considerations aside, do you REALLY think that this way the system would be more fair?
I've heard that Israel is an amazing place, and most of the Israelis I've known well I've really liked.
This goes back to what your Dad probably told you about fistfights as a kid. "Never start a fight, but end one." On your terms.
...
I am sick of watching our territory get taken by smiling assholes who have nothing to offer the world, and whom any properly masculine society would have done something about decades ago. I'm fucking disgusted and ready to fight. If that means I occasionally swear a blue streak, who fucking cares? The only thing that matters is defeating these assholes with such force that they never fuck with us again.
These are kind of statements-in-miniature of the Israeli national soul. Our unofficial motto is Al tihiyeh frayyer!, "Don't be a sucker!" (related is the word "chutzpah", colloquially translated as "balls" but really "rudeness"), and it's built into the entire culture on such a deep level that we often prefer to be rude or to fight rather than give up on what we believe or what we think we deserve.
I won't get into details, but I have had way more negative experiences than most people (many having nothing to do with work issues, the main trigger being more than 10 years ago) get and I have a serious, long-standing anger problem. At this point it is a medical fact. I'm not ashamed of it. It's not me, and I do everything I can to manage it. It's the residue of things that have happened in the past.
Anyway, I don't give the square root of a shit about the past. Fuck the past. The past is where losers live, who care about social proof and their imbecilic reputation economies because they're weak human garbage with no vision. I care about the future. The past sucks. It is dead and let it be dead. It's gone because it didn't deserve to live, and because something still-very-flawed-but-just-slightly-better (the present) replaced it.
If I have "attitude", it's because we as technologists have a very weak tribal integrity, which allows these "popular kids" who have credibility (read, the ability to fuck up our lives through bad references and professional extortion) to divide and conquer and ultimately abuse us. If I am errant, it is because I am over-correcting for generations of cowardice and submission.
I have a serious, long-standing anger problem
I am not sure how many people here have the same problem, anger appears to be less prevalent than depression, but in case there are more people suffering from the condition, or people who do not realize they have it, perhaps you could do a writeup of your experience with it? It could be helpful.
People might not like the nerd, but they do appreciate he or she knows his or her shit. And, the less dysfunctional the organization, the more likely this is to be reflected in salaries, etc.
So, fun read, and a good counterpoint to pg's essay.
> they are more valuable in keeping large, mature organizations up and running than Joe Nerd and his series of weekend projects
this is the same premise as the article. who says an organization has to be large to be successful?
The people who invested in it.
i believe the technical term would be ROI otherwise known as rate of return not the rate increase of the rate of return or ROI.
an investor who demands constant growth in their rate of return on an investment is either irrationally optimistic or stupid.
The most important measure is arguably NPV (Net Present Value) because it takes in to consideration the size of the amount of money you get back after adjusting for the required rate of return.
As an extreme example, imagine if I gave you the option to get a 1000% on a $1 investment. But, the entire investment could only be $1, in otherwords, you couldn't make a $1,000 investment and get $10,000. The most you could make is $9.
Now, imagine if I told you there was a 3% chance that you would loose 50% of your money, and a 12% chance that you would get just your money back and an 85% chance you would make 1,000%!
On the face of it, it sounds like a good deal, you have a really strong possibility of making a 1,000% return and a really small possibility of losing some money.
But, what if I told you that it would take you 10 hours to figure out whether my return estimate (1,000%) and probabilities, 3%, 12%, 85% were accurate? Would it be worth 10 hours to make $9?
Obviously it wouldn't unless your current hourly wage were less than $1 an hour.
That is one of the reasons VCs do not invest in businesses that don't have the possibility of becoming huge. There is really no reason for them to spend the time on figuring it out. It is also the reason that in order for a business to be "successful" the people who invest in it, must end up owning a part of a very large business.
Small businesses can be successful for the individual entrepreneur, but they are not investable.
Also, you don't become a CPA from just doing an accounting undergrad, you also have to have work experience in public accounting in most states. But, I do agree that you don't need an MBA to read a balance sheet. A few months of self study should allow you to understand the basics of financial statements. A few years of working with them will get you pretty good at analyzing them and may even give you the experience to construct them.
^ ---- by VC's
well that's a good way of explaining the VC's perspective on what to invest in. whether that is a wise and sustainable strategy or good use of resources or not is a different matter. But in present company you will win that argument. Doesn't make it true though.
On CPA's I wasn't implying that all you needed was an undergrad to get it you have to take the state exam at least. I was attempting to prove an mba is not required to make some sense of financial statements because it seemed that is what MisterBastahrd was implying.
An MBA is really an introduction to a lot of different business topics rather than helping an individual master them (bad name IDK?). In business/life etc. it is as important to know what you don't know, i.e. that you are shitty at accounting, or that investing is a very deep knowledge business etc. than almost anything else.
An MBA really helps you learn what you don't know so you can study it later. Accounting is complex and to be really good at it, it takes years to master. Reading a balance sheet is straight forward until you realize that you don't know exactly how everything on there got there and you don't know how the statements link together, nor do you know what a healthy balance sheet looks like over a non-healthy balance sheet etc.
Technologists on HN wildly misunderstand the world of finance and business just like we misunderstand the world of programming.
I comment on business topics and read without commenting on technical topics. I can't imagine hiring someone without an MBA for a business position unless it was really basic or unless they had deep experience in the same field. An MBA can seriously jump start business knowledge. Getting one in your mid to late 20s is a huge help at that point in your life if you are interested in business.
Its pretty scary that a little gaming decades ago puts me ahead of at least the absolute bottom of the CEO barrel. It would be like discovering that a couple hours playing Doom and Quake put me ahead in tactical skills of at least one SEAL team member. The amazing part NOT being my minimal skills, but the amazing part is the bottom of the barrel of "famous major real world players" is so incredibly deep that my minimal skills none the less easily beat theirs.
The other weirdness is I spent about $50 and a couple hours (well, maybe dozens... it was fun) playing a game and that boosted me into the low percentile of CEO skills. Apparently I would be well qualified to run an absolutely bottom of the barrel startup as CEO into the ground, and instead of spending $150K and thousands of hours to learn that, I just played a game for awhile. The financials and time investment must depress the guys who graduate at the bottom of their MBA classes knowing less than I know. That weirdness is an interesting aspect of tech/gaming/computers in that most people pay attention to the highest achievements but the effect on low end is also important and not discussed enough.
The only one founded in this decade is zynga, which is widely considered to be poorly managed.
I'll give you sun though, and even electronic arts.. founded by trip hawkins. Although EA only hit it's hay days well after trip left the company, and he was responsible for some really spectacular fuck ups afterwards (see: 3do).
I just listed high profile ones. Does Kiva not count as recent? I know loads of fledgling companies started by other MBAs. Here's one for starters: http://www.tradechase.com
I think folks often make the assumption that MBA program quality follows a similar distribution to undergraduate education, but unfortunately there's a much steeper falloff from the top few schools.
It's tough, because right now I know you're thinking that all of that can be done at a startup - and you're right. But I think that startups needs to look in the mirror too. The xxxx-hacker model has created a relatively disconnected culture. Sure, 'disrupting -whatever' sounds neat, but for the most part you're just polluting cyberspace with another worthless app.
Anyways, I feel everyone needs to stay humble and hard working. There is no right path, and both sides (and all sides) will undoubtedly need each other in the future.
(1) Students. The students were good, both when they entered and when they left.
(2) Courses.
Accounting. Except for students who already knew accounting, the accounting courses likely helped all the students who wanted to be in business. But the undergraduate accounting courses did, also.
Likely if wanted to sit for the CPA exam, then would need more study. My undergraduate school had nothing on business, but if a student wanted a CPA then there was a nice woman in town who gave tutoring, had the study materials, etc. One student worked with this woman in the summer after her Bachelor's, took the CPA exam, and made the highest score in the state. So, if want to sit for the CPA exam, then just do the studying and take the exam, whether have had a business school course in accounting or not. Qualification: That CPA example was from over 10 years ago; the CPA exams may have changed a lot since then. If want a CPA, then should look carefully into the CPA exam process.
Statistics. There was a course in statistics, but I was not impressed with it. The students didn't learn enough about statistics to be anything but dangerous if they tried to use the material on anything important. And the course didn't do much for the student's 'skills' at using statistics software packages. Statistics is taught better, of course, in a department of statistics but commonly also in good departments of sociology, psychology, economics, and agriculture.
There is a lot that can be done with statistics, and to some extent now with 'big data' and more in statistical software, more is being done. But the MBA statistics course was only a weak start for powerful uses of statistics in the future.
Optimization. There was a course in optimization, mostly linear programming. Occasionally in a real business that is powerful, valuable material.
The intention of the accreditation system to ask for such a course was to jump start more 'quantitative' management, i.e., 'management science', via linear programming and optimization more generally. And there are some applications, e.g., there is a chemical engineering professor at Princeton who has apparently some good uses for optimization in the petroleum refining in Houston. And optimization for airline plane and crew scheduling is a solid application.
Linear programing and other parts of optimization long were the basis of a major fraction of the Nobel prizes in economics; the connection with any real economy or business was mostly in the eye of the beholder.
Mostly mathematical optimization still has yet to catch on strongly more generally. Maybe in the future with more data, software, and computer automation optimization will have a new day. So the teaching of optimization was something of a long shot bet on the distant future.
Having a fast algorithm that shows that P = NP might get optimization going again in business. For problems where would want such an algorithm, commonly can do well now, but the work is mostly one problem at a time, slow, expensive, and risky, and a fast algorithm that shows that P = NP might do wonders for 'ease of use'.
Also if optimization becomes more important, then the work will likely be done by specialists from departments of applied math, civil engineering, etc. in specialized groups or outside companies. So, for an MBA, optimization would be mostly only to make them an 'educated consumer' rather than an actual practitioner.
Finance. The finance course would be good for someone who was still struggling with compound interest but would not help much in serious work at, say, the CFO's office of a major company, Goldman Sachs, or a hedge fund. The course did mention the Sharpe capital asset pricing model. Of course the linear algebra and statistics needed for the Markowitz model would be a struggle! For stochastic differential equations for 'continuous time finance', that is not very popular in the US, in business schools or anywhere. There are a few professors -- Karatzas at Columbia, Avellaneda at Courant, Cinlar at Princeton, Shreve at CMU, Merton at MIT, a few more.
Labor Law. The course in labor law might be good for someone who never heard anything about such issues, but the professor teaching the course had never negotiated an actual labor agreement. One of my students had negotiated labor agreements for his family's business and had bad things to say about the labor law course.
Organizational Behavior. Some guys with backgrounds in psychology and sociology were teaching the organizational behavior course. My brother, Ph.D. in political science, also taught such a course in a program of public administration. One of the ideas is 'goal subordination' where a middle manager is motivated to act in ways that give him a short term advantage at a long term cost to the business. Not very deep material but maybe worthwhile.
Generally college and university courses can be good if they are intellectually challenging and, thus, help the student learn how to work hard and think, work, and write carefully, but the business school courses were not very challenging in that sense.
The business school was respected in a radius of 200 miles or so: Significant businesses, some nationally known, would come and recruit.
Likely some of the students met other students who would likely be useful to them in the future.
The business school full professors, chairs, and deans really didn't have any very clear idea just what the business school should teach, especially at the MBA level. The most important influence was to try, although not very seriously, to do 'research' as in physics envy. Contact with actual businesses was discouraged. E.g., there were plenty of talks by graduate students and professors with solutions looking for problems but essentially no talks by business people with problems looking for solutions. E.g., the idea of having the business school be a 'research-teaching' hospital for real business problems was not attempted. The school didn't want to be clinical as in medicine or even practical as in engineering but, instead, pure white as driven snow theoretical as in mathematical physics.
Generally the 'research' was too far from business to be at all promising for any practical impact in the foreseeable future. The best research I saw there was by a professor taking a novel approach to attacking essentially the question of P versus NP, but that work really belonged in, say, a theoretical computer science department or a math department.
Business schools struggle: If they just go for physics envy, then they are mostly watered down versions of social science. Indeed, long the 'great leader' architects of business education believed that business school should be 'applied social science'. That's asking a bit much of social science!
If business school gets really close to business, then it becomes much like learning, say, the grocery business by starting as an apprentice in the produce department -- students shouldn't have to pay tuition for that.
In effect some of what is needed is for some professors to look at the world of business, get a good 'organization' or 'taxonomy' of its parts and pieces, study those to identify where might find some powerful, fundamental principles, and then do research on those principles. That is, the effort would be to look at business and 'formulate' characterizations and useful, powerful theories. So, that would be trying to make something clear and precise out of business that rarely looks either clear or precise.
In biology, such work was long just 'descriptive' but eventually some very interesting science. In physics, too: The motions of the planets were fairly easy for apparently nearly any civilization to observe, and there were efforts to explain the motions for hundreds of years before (dates from Wikipedia) Copernicus (1473 - 1543), Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601), Galileo (1564 - 1642), Kepler (1571 - 1630), and finally Newton (1642 - 1727) got a good, really profound, solution. Such work is not easy to do.
For students, the business schools at Harvard and Stanford seem to be highly respected in some areas, e.g., investment banking, parts of management consulting, venture capital, and private equity. It may be that an MBA from one of those schools would do enough to 'open doors' and 'make connections' that the effort would be worthwhile for the student. Still I question if much solid material was learned in the courses.
One way to look at business school is as an 'effort' to make progress against the apparently messy world of business. Yes, it might be nice if business school taught enough to really understand business quite comprehensively and make getting wealthy routine. But it turns out that nearly any advantage, even one that is seemingly small, could, at some point in a business career, result in some large gains.