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.
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.
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.
> What you really need to be blaming is the concepts of professional management and job hopping.
Then why can't I blame MBAs and MBA-producing business schools? The core theory of the MBA is that professional management can be taught divorced from the actual details of the industry. And the value of a credential is to permit job hopping. People who work their way up in a company don't need a credential to prove their worth.
> Most of the time, they actually do correlate, which is why this system continues to be used and why it makes profits go up.
In the short term, anyhow. They generally encourage long-term destruction, though, because that lets you juice the quarterly KPIs. That in turn fuels job hopping in that a) somebody gets to claim that they improved KPIs drastically, and b) there's a real incentive to get out before the bill comes due.
> And the value of a credential is to permit job hopping. People who work their way up in a company don't need a credential to prove their worth.
Many large companies prefer to promote from within, and require an MBA for promotion above a certain level. Many encourage their employees to get MBAs and help them pay for it, often with a commitment from the employee to remain at the company for some time after finishing the degree.
I suspect that's even worse. Requiring everybody to get 2 years worth of education is a lot, especially when it's same degree fresh-faced 25-year-olds get so they can join the ranks of management. A well-run company could look at an individual and say, "You should really improve your knowledge of X, go take this course." But requiring external validation of something they can evaluate internally is a sign of poor HR processes and poor personnel management.
Well you can blame them, but it won't solve anything. MBAs are filling a business 'need'. Professional management and all that it entails was going very strong before MBAs even came onto the field. If you removed all MBA programmes, I don't think anything would change - you'd still have professional management and revolving doors, you'd still have people chasing these same KPIs to the exclusion of customers.
My point was more that MBA is a symptom, or a result, of the real problem. And someone with an MBA is probably going to be a better manager than someone without. An originally good CEO who built a company is going to become better at his job if he gets an MBA. So the MBA itself does have value, as does all knowledge. It's just misused by many companies. Removing professional management and keeping MBAs would be far more positive than removing MBAs and keeping professional management, provided we had a real and workable alternative to professional management.
I especially disagree with your proposition that people with MBAs are likely to be better at running businesses.
An engineer friend of mine went back for an MBA from a top school. He said the one non-obvious thing he learned in two years was the principle of comparative advantage. The rest was stuff he could figure out from first principles and a modest amount of thought. He said the real value to his career was the the networking with other young up-and-comers.
Moreover, not all knowledge is beneficial. A chunk of MBA training is in effect learning to be glib about business while sounding authoritative. That training might be beneficial to the degree-holder, but it can be harmful to others, including the company.
I also don't think you can separate MBAs and professional management. The MBA is the infection vector for many of the worst ideas in management. It's also self-perpetuating: MBAs extract cash from companies and donate heavily to business schools, perpetuating both the ideas and the caste system.
>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.
"Cutting down politics dramatically" is definitely not the effect I see out of a system that uses an algorithm to quantify each individual's value. These are fundamentally qualitative judgments that have far-reaching organizational and industry impact.
"Never trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself". When you tie success to a single metric (like PageRank, for instance), humans WILL find ways to game it. Important decisions should be computer-assisted, but humans are still needed to make real judgments.
You seem to be justifying the existing system that's been artificially manufactured by accountants, lawyers, and MBAs to keep them in a revolving-door of highly-paid executive and VP-level positions.
That we see nothing unusual about an accountant, lawyer, or academic being brought in to lead something he/she doesn't actually know anything about speaks volumes to how silly things have gotten. I would say that's a strong signal that we need to re-evaluate how we calculate value and qualifications.
I think they still have a place in for example manufacturing where it does make sense. I want to fix problems with things like Yishan-style CEOs though.
(For example) if you're publicly traded, having some sort of measurement of success is useful for your financial filings, so you can talk about progress.
VCs ask about Monthly Active Users all the time, even in business where that doesn't actually translate to anything. But numbers are usually easier to work with than a screed about "well, we saw more stuff happen than last year"
My experience working with 700 startups is the opposite. Founders who lead with an essay will systematically fail because they don't face reality. Founders who lead with numbers are far more likely to actually know what's happening with their business, and thus succeed more often.
> 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.
[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.
“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.
It might be for aircraft construction but not aircraft design. Since programmers aren't typists entering already-complete programs, programming is more asking to the latter, not the former. You want aircraft to be lighter and programs to be shorter, and measuring progress by movement in the opposite direction is foolish.
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.
> “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.
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?
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:
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?
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.
Many fields don't give that same level of reliability and reproducability; climate science, psychology and environmental engineering are all in the same boat. Guess none of them are sciences.
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.
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).
<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>
>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.
>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.
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...
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.
Do you assume to know what the ethics of all MBAs are? It's often misconstrued that the goals of the manager or organization are the goals of the individual employee. Individual employees are at the bottom of the food chain because they have the greatest weaknesses when it comes to management and leadership. If they didn't they could prove themselves through success and level up. An employee is hired to do a job. If an employees goals and ideals are not in alignment with the origanization that needs to be corrected through effective leadership or that employee needs to find another job. That applies to all levels of an organization from individual contributor, to manager, to leadership roles.
A disgruntled employee indicates a problem that is not being addressed and solved by managers and leaders. That doesn't mean the employee is right or wrong or that the manager is right or wrong. Weaknesses are in individuals and occur at all levels of business. A poor employee just lacks self-awareness, knowledge acumen and the correct strategy for solving the problems, whatever they may be, at whatever level they are. This is what effective leaders address.
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.
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.
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.