RIP, MBA - The economic crisis has exposed the myth of business-school expertise

http://tbm.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2009/03/25/rip-mba

by winanga • 17 years ago

57 54 17 years ago

tbm.thebigmoney.com

melvinram• 17 years ago

The MBA is not going to die anytime soon. As a society, we need ways to quickly and efficiently rank people by merit. The MBA today offers this exactly the same way a bachelors degree used to offer it. Most don't really use 90% of what they learn but it helps sort out those who are not willing to do extra.

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.

indiejade• 17 years ago

It's definitely not going to die any time 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.

dtap• 17 years ago

Business schools are very self propagating. People who get them decide they are valuable and then convince others of the same which builds a bubble. There are certainly valuable skills (accounting, finance, marketing) that can be learned with experience. I have found everything could be picked up in a few weeks.

I have moderately fallen into it, getting a BBA along with my engineering degree.

hs• 17 years ago

"I have found everything could be picked up in a few weeks."

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.

Frocer• 17 years ago

What makes "business" so different from "sciences" is that most business skills are not hard skills. There are certainly a few -- such as accounting and finance (btw, corporate finance is not as easy as you think).

"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.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

The author makes the classic mistake of confusing correlation with causation: "Hmmm...banks hire lots of people with MBA degrees, and this crisis started in the banking sector. The MBA degree must be the root cause of financial crisis!"

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.

weiser• 17 years ago

Actually, the author is clearly stating the causal relationship. He is pointing out that free market fundamentalism is the cause of the crises and Business schools are the cheerleaders for free market fundamentalism.

Now, I personally do not agree with that argument, but your criticism of author's argument is unfounded.

ojbyrne3• 17 years ago

Perhaps some B-schools are the cheerleaders, but I never saw it where I was. Economics departments are where that particular meme came from, and they don't actually teach economics in B-school except tangentially.

neovintage• 17 years ago

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a current MBA student during the day and developer by night.

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.

genesoo• 17 years ago

@neovintage I totally agree with you. I am an engineer by training and is currently in the second year of business school. I would have to say this article has too narrow a focus and stereotype MBAs. There is a lot more to MBA than finance and people who sought for big payouts. I have come to business school to understand the business side of things. As an engineer, I just did not understand why this marketing people just kept asking me to make things that I don't see a value in.

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.

chime• 17 years ago

sigh

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.

wheels• 17 years ago

I think it's backlash against the fact that a lot of bad middle managers are MBAs and a lot of programmers have worked for them. They then generalize, "This is what MBAs are." and apply it to the universe as a whole.

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.

ojbyrne3• 17 years ago

As someone with an MBA (though not from a so-called "good" school") I definitely agree with your "know-it-all nobodies" sentiment. In fact this is one of the things I found hardest to stomach about Silicon valley - so many pundits spouting platitudes that would get you laughed out of even the worst B-school get lauded as geniuses.

unalone6• 17 years ago

That's what you get from having a huge vast thing like the Internet and giving people free reign, though.

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.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

Sorry Charlie, but you (MBA's) have lost control of your own branding. Consider dumping the title Master's of Business Administration and go with Organizational Economics or something.

I don't know how to tell you to get your street cred back, but you'd better start excluding the riff-raff somehow.

unalone6• 17 years ago

I'll disagree with this. Don't run! Be at the forefront of the group of MBAs who'll show just what an MBA is worth!

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.

tptacek• 17 years ago

Thanks for commenting, and let me put to you a question that bothered me about this superficial article:

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?

ardit33• 17 years ago

you can argue that an MBA is very shallow on technical skills. There is a large difference between MBA, and getting something like Masters in Finance.

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.

plinkplonk6• 17 years ago

"An MBA from a good university is HARD and enlightening work."

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)

carbon84• 17 years ago

Well, first of all, what's hard for one person can be easy for the next. Plus, people have a lot of misconceptions about many business related fields.

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.

lanceweatherby2• 17 years ago

Here is a real example. Pretend like you are in a finance class. It's a case study. On Microsoft buying Yahoo! Determine how much Microsoft should be willing to pay for Yahoo! and the assumptions and rationale behind your conclusion. Or how much is AOL worth as a spinout of Time Warner. The core of the answer lies in something called the Capital Asset Pricing Model and it is as every bit as complex as the fixed point combinator for which YC was named.

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.

known• 17 years ago

The truth is Engineering colleges are churning out more Entrepreneurs than MBA schools.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

I agree with everything you wrote, but I'd like to emphasize a minor point.

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.

aswanson• 17 years ago

I think what Clayton Christensen has contributed in terms of his theory of disruptive innovation at the Harvard program is valuable. An MBA trained under him would have an visionary adavantage in a startup situation.

ShabbyDoo2• 17 years ago

A friend with a fairly recent MBA from Harvard told me that such professors are highly sought after by students. The school has some sort of lottery/bidding system to allocate slots in those classes.

jhancock• 17 years ago

if Harvard were interested in spreading the good word, they could have taped the lectures and had them online by now. I'm sure you don't need to be in the same physical room to get 90% of the good man's lessons.

fnazeeri• 17 years ago

I have a Harvard MBA and took Christensen's class. The guy has a major outsized ego and frankly I didn't learn much more in his class than I did from his book (other than he's diabetic, Mormon and likes to cold call!).

ShabbyDoo2• 17 years ago

I have an MBA from a school that sometimes makes the Top 50 lists. I had some extra scholarship semesters available as an undergrad and was allowed to partake in the MBA program concurrently.

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).

T_S_• 17 years ago

No, we are all down. It's really a question of who's down more. Go over to wilmott.com and you will see the ex-physicist quants getting all defensive too. Not to mention the finance theorists. Oh, and don't forget the economist-philosophers like Laffer and Greenspan.

MBAs shouldn't be trusted to make important decisions, and neither should the rest of us apparently. Maybe check with Mom first next time.

azgolfer• 17 years ago

I think he's confusing several issues. Markets are self regulating, normally. But when the government intervenes with pressure to loan to people who can't afford the loans, then has Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee the securities (so the lender is not directly at risk), they become much less self regulating. Funny that people think this crisis is a reason for more government intervention. Conservatism has had a lot of bad press for the last 40 years, but maybe those old conservative bankers weren't such a bad thing.

davidw2• 17 years ago

This would be a good place to mention a book I enjoyed reading recently:

"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.

RIP, MBA - The economic crisis has exposed the myth of business-school expertise

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