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The problem lies in business schools and degrees like the MBA. Check out the faculty list at Harvard Business school [link below]. I randomly looked at profile

• digi_owl 10y ago
  Business shcool, as best i can tell, have elevated the operations of a widget factory to a religion. And thus MBAs everywhere attempt to turn every institution they are put to manage, into an assembly line to fit their religion. Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end.
  • anotherhacker 10y ago
    Yep... and it all started in the 1920s with Taylorism - the idea that management could be a scientific process. Taylorism is why, for example, some companies still use lines of code written as a measure of productivity.
    • CalChris 10y ago
      Google seems very Taylor.
    • ScottBurson 10y ago
      You may appreciate my favorite Dijkstra quote: [I]f we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent": the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.
      • Buttons840 10y ago
        My favorite is from Bill Gates: “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” It's appropriate on so many levels. Lines of code can be part of a measure of what has been accomplished, just like a heavy airplane is a great accomplishment so long as it flies. Yet we would never consider adding weight to be our goal.
        • dozzie 10y ago
          > My favorite is from Bill Gates: > “Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” Nice. And then we have Windows that needs dozens of gigabytes disk space and can do nothing useful at all, while debootstrapped Debian chroot can easily serve a dynamic website backed by a database and weigh two orders of magnitude less (minus the data, obviously). The analogy is quite apt, but the context of the author's company makes the sentence hilarious.
          • Clubber 10y ago
            Triggered :)
          • deleted 10y ago
            [deleted]
        • user5994461 10y ago
          The weight actually is a reasonable metrics. It starts at zero and increases as the big pieces are added. It stops at a well defined number that is specified.
          • naasking 10y ago
            But weight relative to a final value is not a reasonable metric for completeness. It's discontinuous with irregular, changes, so it has no utility in predicting how long until completion, for instance.
    • pjc50 10y ago
      The fundamental idea of Taylorism isn't bad, it's just hugely overapplied and oversimplified. Using pure Taylorism in the 21st century is like using pure Freudianism. There have been plenty of more recent innovations. We could at least start with W Edwards Deming.
      • pekk 10y ago
        A difference is that Freud didn't put any particular stock in the scientific method. He said that his theories were proven by his "cures" (many of which have turned out to be bogus).
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
    • specialist 10y ago
      Even more so for contemporary education. Cohorts by age, class scheduling, testing, GPA. Any learning that happens is in spite of Taylorism.
    • yummyfajitas 10y ago
      The fact that people do something stupid and attribute it to a scientific discipline which suggests they shouldn't do it does not discredit that discipline. Similarly, the Ariane 5 disaster doesn't mean that the idea of measuring the physical world with science is wrong. There's nothing wrong with Taylorism. It works very well in a variety of fields (e.g. Uber and Amazon use Taylorism very effectively to manage their line workers). The fields where Taylorism isn't used (e.g. software development) are far less reliable and effective - Amazon can guarantee that your package will arrive in 2 days, can you guarantee that your software team will ship on time?
      • anotherhacker 10y ago
        I wouldn't say that Taylorism is why those workers succeeded. I'd say that those workers were successful in spite of Taylorism. Don't fall into the trap in thinking that just because a methodology was applied, that it contributed to success. The best evidence I can give in support of this is Deming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehMAwIHGN0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehMAwIHGN0Y
      • teyc 10y ago
        Apparently Taylors report was unscientific at best http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/304883/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-mana...
        • yummyfajitas 10y ago
          Lots of early physics was also not done very well, lots of fudges, etc. Does that discredit the idea of applying science to particle movements? Does Freud discredit the entire idea of psychiatry?
          • parenthephobia 10y ago
            Physicists kept doing science, and it got better. Actual proper science has developed to the point where the computer I'm typing this on has a complex network of billions of logic gates which operates correctly billions of times a second. I can reasonably expect the CPU to continue to work for decades. When managerial "scientists" can achieve anything even remotely comparable to that level of reliability and reproducibility, it will be time to take it seriously as a science. Until then, it just isn't one.
  • dbg31415 10y ago
    I agree with all this, but generally speaking the kids who come from name-brand MBA programs are bright. They come in, they know enough, and they have excellent work ethics. I don't put a lot of stock in the training the MBA provides, but I do think on the whole MBA grads tend to be better hires than non-MBA grads. For recent grads, all things being equal, I'd take the MBA-grad. Is it that extra year or two of age? Possibly... Is it the personality type of someone driven to get an MBA in the first place? Possibly... Is it the training and networking and exposure to other like-minded individuals via group projects? Possibly...
    • gsylvie 10y ago
      I see the MBA as a rfid badge into a different class of society: - Do you already have an undergrad degree? - Can you afford MBA tuition? - Can you afford the 1-2 years required (not counting the tuition)? Okay, you can be one of us. Of course there's a pecking order within the MBA club based on school and year & model of porsche and professional reputation, and your work will always speak for you. But I really get this sense that it's essentially a membership card into a social club and that the members prefer their own kind.
      • cookiecaper 10y ago
        Yes. So much of what people have been trained to believe are important and necessary qualifications are actually just the result of an ingroup creating a contrived process of hoops to a) limit the number of potential competitors; b) haze newcomers and make them prove they are worthy to be "one of us"; c) inflate the ingroup's reputation and "credibility" by making everyone think they're super smart (and, as always in such exercises, the most important target of positive ego manipulation is one's self); d) thoroughly beat out, primarily by cultural reinforcement, any potentially disruptive ideas before someone is given the authority to practice anything professionally. By the time a licensing body is given legal authority to codify an ingroup's arbitrary ritual as a pre-requisite for gainful employment, the plot has been lost and the industry is a stagnant circlejerk. The truth is that we waste a huge amount of time on so-called "training" so that the upper class can continue to feel wise and lordly, and readily whip out the "proof" of said lordly wisdom whenever someone challenges them. We'd be much better off with apprenticeship-style programs. I have 20x more respect for someone who has been in the trenches creating actual value than I have for someone who believes that their licenses, degrees, or awards entitle them to anything.
  • bplsports92 10y ago
    How are you a product at the end? The person isn't sold and their information isn't sold to anyone. The patient buys the product which is the healthcare. I don't see how thats relevant to business management at all.
  • amorphid 10y ago
    <sarcasm>Us MBA's have stuff figured out. When I run your code through my mean-time-between-failures Excel spreadsheet analyzer, I can predict with 95% confidence how long it will be before programs running your code will crash. I'm also able to manage you as a knowledge worker, because like you, I am a developer; I wrote one of the VB macros in my previously mentioned spreadsheet. Lastly, you'll benefit from my ethics & morality training, as it's not clear to me that you have a strong enough foundation in how to make decisions that impact the lives of others. Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month.</sarcasm>
    • forgetsusername 10y ago
      >Before you return to your station on the digital assembly line, can you help me figure out how to check my voicemail? The red light on my VOIP phone -- do you know what VOIP stands for? -- has been on for a month Your "story" sounds like it has a cliche MBA as well as a cliche IT guy, the latter of whom believes they're oh-so-smart for having technical knowledge that others don't. Both are jerks.
  • auganov 10y ago
    As much as one can criticize formal Business education, that's just not accurate. The operational side is not the main focus or even covered in depth. Pretty much every Business curriculum will start with a firm denunciation of Taylorism. It's very interdisciplinary. Basically an amalgamation of psychology, sociology, anthropology and even philosophy in an organizational context. The soft-science status is very much acknowledged. Personally, I'd even say far too often it strays into self-help territory. There's just a natural bias towards Fortune-500-sized organizations.
    • digi_owl 10y ago
      Then why do i keep seeing orgs run on basic of "units shipped" when it makes zero sense to do so?
      • RyanZAG 10y ago
        Practicality of management (as opposed to actual good management). This isn't really the fault of MBA, but rather the fault of office politics. In a large modern corporation with a constantly revolving door, everyone moving their careers through that organization is looking out mainly for themselves. How does someone who has just moved into an executive level at a business he doesn't understand cope with all of the office politics around him? High performance big name people constantly looking out for promotions, bonuses, threatening to leave if their demands aren't met? In the age when the owner of a business built that business up himself, knew how it worked, and knew the people he worked with, it came down to real experience. But in this new age of modern professional short term management, most of the people up and down the organizational chart don't really know anything about the depths of the business. So the only real solution is to simplify the business into "units shipped". If you can put simple numbers and KPIs on everything, you can tell right away who is valuable. Everyone now knows who is valuable. It cuts down politics dramatically as everyone is now pulling in the same direction. Instead of one employee doing all the work being outshone by another employee who does nothing but brag about himself to new hires, you have real hard numbers. Everyone knows how to succeed - make some number go up. Obviously this only works if the numbers actually align with the business. Most of the time, they actually do correlate, which is why this system continues to be used and why it makes profits go up. Does it correlate particularly well? Usually not. But it doesn't have to - the loss from the lack of correlation between reality and the simplified numbers merely has to be less than the lack of production from uncertainty and misalignment. So "units shipped" wins out. What you really need to be blaming is the concepts of professional management and job hopping. I'm hopeful both of those concepts will be uprooted within a century or two by smaller, more focused, and more efficient companies. I believe the future of companies will be single person businesses with zero employees all linked to other single person businesses through an efficient market. With each business being owned, run and controlled by a single expert individual taking the optimal choices.
  • KirinDave 10y ago
    > Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end. Quite the contrary, doctors prefer a personal approach and researchers have been trying to reign them in because the science is very clear: playing "by the book" and not over-personalizing diagnosis or care leads to better medical outcomes for everything but long term pain management and mental health care. This is not MBAs run amok, that's people starting to listen to the science and act on it. Now, if you want to see where things go wrong we'd look to how hospitals bill and suppliers set prices.
    • digi_owl 10y ago
      That is jumping from one extreme to another.
      • KirinDave 10y ago
        It is really immaterial how you or I want to interpret it when the data is quite clear.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
  • bigchewy 10y ago
    you must not have gone to b-school, nor know many graduates. The one thing that b school doesn't do is teach people operations. Many professors consider operations easy / tactical / something vs strategy. I actually think b school would be much better off if it did concentrate on teaching students how to properly operate. and, btw, as a person who has spent 10 years analyzing the healthcare industry, we need more "medical factory" thinking not less.
  • neovive 10y ago
    Whenever I read about widgets and business school, I can't help but remember the scene from "Back to School" [1] when Thornton Melon attends Economics class and the professor introduces "widgets". Thornton, being a successful entrepreneur, challenges everything the professor says based on his real-world experience and gives the class "practical" advice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_School [1]
  • FLUX-YOU 10y ago
    >Observe the insanity in health care, where patients are not people but raw materials to be put through the medical factory and turned into a finished, aka healed, product at the other end. I'm not sure how else it's supposed to function. There are not enough doctors and nurses to spend exorbitant amounts of time answering every medical curiosity. Making you healthy again is pretty much everyone's goal (if it's possible for your case). What are you saying that MBAs are taking away from patient care? Personally I have seen the opposite: non-profits with a large percentage of income from government programs. Project Managers that buy a hundred-thousand dollar contract for a piece of software and then end up not using it. Unwillingness to address basic IT problems that drain time away from caregivers in favor of prestigious projects.
• danielrhodes 10y ago
  You see this same thing happening at law schools as well. If you look at the faculty of Harvard Law [1], many of the professors have not served in a professional capacity as lawyers. In fact, many firms have to train their new associates in the actual practice of law because law school itself has become so detached from the reality of being a lawyer. [2] [1] http://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/index.html?s=15 http://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/index.html?s=15 [2] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/after-law-school-associates-learn-to-be-lawyers.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/after-law-scho...
  • jimnotgym 10y ago
    But what about all the other grads who are doing jobs that are nothing to do with their degrees at all? Entrants into grad training in UK big 4 accounting firms can have a degree in anything, it doesn't have to be relevant. In fact students seem to consciously choose humanities as they seem less daunting than Mathematics or Economics... Makes me wonder why we make people do degrees at all?
  • bradleyjg 10y ago
    Part of the problem is that these instiutions are part of universities in the first place. It is only natural that Harvard Law School is going to be influenced by the rest of Harvard. There's even an increasing trend in law schools of hiring people with Phds in other fields as law professors (the attraction for the Phds is the higher pay, lower teaching requirements, and pro forma tenure review).
• crdoconnor 10y ago
  It runs way deeper than just Harvard. I don't think the ridiculousness of what they preach matters all that much. It's more about linking the network of power brokers than it is about perpetuating the neoliberal religion.
  • hinkley 10y ago
    The tip of the iceberg is evidence of the hazard.
• anotherarray 10y ago
  Putting the blame on MBAs is laughable. MBAs and their professors simply replicate and regurgitate an ideology that is outside their own awareness and control. Lutheranism itself is more to blame than the whole faculty of HBS and SBS combined. It's a problem of universals, not individuals.
  • reitanqild 10y ago
    Lutheranism itself is more to blame than the whole faculty of HBS and SBS combined. Why?
• yuhong 10y ago
  Horrible idea of course, but I wonder if there are companies who pick CEOs randomly from new MBA graduates and pay them an extremely high salary with no stock options or other incentives.
• canadian_voter 10y ago
  John Ralston Saul does a great job explicating this in his book Voltaire's Bastards[1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reason-West/dp/1476718962/ https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reaso...
• spangry 10y ago
  I suspect this is part of a bigger problem, one that I continually see in the public service: people undervalue expertise. There's this strange belief that 'generalists' can do just about any task well. But I've never found that to be the case. In more than a few cases I've seen 'generalists' make a complete hash of something, but because they don't have sufficient domain-specific knowledge they don't actually realise how bad a job they've done. I wonder if this is why people are sometimes dismissive of MBAs. These people are essentially training to be future leaders and senior executives of large organisations. But how can they possibly make any sort of rational decisions, or build functional systems of work, if they have no specific understanding of the work being done? I've been thinking about this kind of thing a lot, and I've realised why these types of managers love using buzzwords: it's a way of sounding knowledgeable without actually knowing anything, and it minimises the risk of being dragged in to a discussion on specifics. Then again, who doesn't love synergy?
  • kochthesecond 10y ago
    I might link your answer to my manager.. Ok I won't. But I completely agree that expertise is undervalued, and generalists that don't even realise how bad their work is, is a real problem that I see every day especially in the public sector.
  • jimnotgym 10y ago
    I think 'business theory' can come across badly to engineers in particular. On the other hand I have worked in a manufacturing company where engineers and scientists had spent whole careers in almost complete isolation from the needs of the business. I remember a particular conversation with the head of a major operation (with an illustrious career in R&D) who couldn't understand the forces applied from head office. "What is their problem with us having too much stock?" he said. Nobody in his long career had ever mentioned the concept of cash. There was a great need in this company for a few generalists, but mainly in mentoring and coaching. Personally I had no time for other generalists there who would not take the time to learn at least what it was that the factory made....so my point if there is one seems to be 'don't generalise about generalists'
  • treebeard901 10y ago
• lordnacho 10y ago
  I went to business school (top European) as part of my engineering degree. They actually do make a point of mentioning that there's more than one philosophy of management. For instance, in the Germanic world, it's common to promote managers from the ranks of whatever business is being managed, whereas it's a bit of an anglo thing to have a "manager" who is somewhat business agnostic. But of course there's a problem. If you tell people they need specific experience in the car industry to be a car industry manager, or as a software dev to manage devs, then WTF are you doing in a business school? Especially as an undergrad? You gonna manage the student bar? So then when it comes to all the case studies, you have to kid yourself that what happened to Betamax in the 1980s is going to be relevant to you in 2016. It's interesting to read all this historical "strategy" stuff, but the students I hung out with (being engineers, technically competent and skeptical of BS) tended to see them as something akin to a history class. Sure there are lessons, but a lot of it is just interpretation and conjecture. Nothing in it with the rigour of an engineering course. As to why MBAs are useful, it seems it's really a question of signalling. If you pay a few hundred grand in fees, rent, and opportunity cost to do an MBA, you probably have some motivation. And there is some value in generic management; not every line of business requires deep technical knowledge, and those are fine for hiring some guy who's happy to work long hours and fly around a lot. It's a problem for something like software dev though.
  • icebraining 10y ago
    Most people I know with an MBA (which, granted, it's less than 10) got it after working for a few years in some industry (including software). The concept of a business school, and of gaining more general business/management knowledge that you can evaluate under your experience as a professional, seems reasonable.
  • wpietri 10y ago
    Excellent points. > whereas it's a bit of an anglo thing to have a "manager" who is somewhat business agnostic I now see this as a piece of a self-justifying ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism A while back I read an eye-opening book called "Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance". [1] They see US-style management as a primarily a caste system. One of the odd things about business in the US is that most people can't even conceive that there are other approaches to business beyond the standard US MBA dogmas. Even when those other approaches clearly are successful, and even when one's ass is getting kicked by somebody using them. E.g, Amazon, which has been crushing competitors for nearly 20 years by ignoring short-term numbers and focusing on creating long-term customer value. Or Toyota, which went from a nearly-bankrupt company in war-ravaged Japan to the world's dominant car maker using a totally different philosophy of business. Toyota even took one of GM's worst plants as part of a joint venture and made it one of the best ones, but GM couldn't absorb the lessons. This American Life did a very moving piece about that plant. [2] [1] https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Economic-Controversies/dp/178032071X https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Managerialism-Business-Ec... [2] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561