Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fede_V | Hacker News Reader

This is my own biased impression, but with rare exceptions, almost every article I've read in mainstream business publications (like Harvard Business Review, etc) has had a ratio of content to bullshit that was astonishing.

Articles about 'enterprise communication' or 'bold leadership' or 'delighting customers' might have a simple message that takes about up about a paragraph and are then dressed up in a huge amount of un-necessary business speak or 'folksy' stories that illustrate the concept.

I'm sure this is just observer bias, but from someone in a technical field, it's astonishing how shallow the concepts are.

View on HN

The concepts are shallow primarily because business nous is often a raw sort of intelligence, where you're responding in real time to an exact specific situation rather than planning and developing a concept which will cover all your needs in advance.

That's my take on it, at any rate. I've never got much from mainstream business publications either (although, hang on a moment, Hacker News is at least a very popular business curation...)

HBR is notoriously full of bullshit (just like many guys from Harvard). The thing to understand about business schools is that they're still academia: most of the professors have no clue how the world really works outside a university. About the only ones with real-world experience are the finance professors, and big banking is its own special world. It's fine though, because their job is to teach.

At the end of the day though, business schools teach you all sorts of things you'll never use again: they tend to be heavy on statistics and calculus. The key is that you don't necessarily have to know how to do them yourself, just that there is a good methodology for solving these problems and what skills to look for in people you hire to actually do the grunt work for you. I don't remember how to do a linear regression myself, but I know how to read the output of one and the right questions to ask to make sure I understand exactly what it's telling me.

Again, my impression is that the main 'value added' that things like a business school gives you is the credentials and the network of alumni.

In terms of tangible things that you learn, if you want to study calculus and statistics, you can pick those up from 1st year classes at any decent technical university.

I'd also argue against your example of 'professors outside of the real world'. At any top tier University, professors will be world experts on their particular area of expertise, and will be able to apply it to real world problems, and I'd be happy to provide as many examples as you'd like in technical fields that I'm familiar with.

I totally agree; most of what you get out of a top business school is the fact that it's a feeder program into high-paying jobs in corporate America. Your classmates will also have these jobs, so you become a group of rich, powerful people who all know each other. You do learn some content that is useful (i.e. you may learn statistics in community college but not necessarily how to apply it to a manufacturing operation) but yeah, the network is the biggest benefit. It's why I don't feel that an MBA is worth your time unless you go to a top 10 school -- you can get the education anywhere, it's about the people.

Professors can and do apply their research to real world problems, but their "solutions" are often idealized and make a lot of assumptions that don't always pan out. They're not dumb by any means, but coming up with a solution and implementing a solution are two very different things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com