In general, the mythology surrounding notions of business and commerce is fascinating. Upper management and PR departments seem hell bent on spinning positive messages about their specific businesses, and there seems to be a lot of positive messaging about business in general. But the reality is that companies rise and fall all the time, they have life cycles and life spans. I am sometimes disgusted with my own company’s consistent aggressiveness when it comes to goal setting. When the whole economy is in the shit can (which, combined with several other factors, hit my industry particularly hard), why do we keep setting ridiculous revenue goals?

I read a quote by I believe the creator (?) of Barbie. She said that any old idiot can manage a company when it’s on its way up, but it takes real talent to manage a company that is on its way down. But how often do we hear about a company on its way down? No company will ever admit to be shrinking, they’d much rather start in with the spin. And then there a few whispers about bankruptcy, and then a month later they are filing. They should have known years in advance that they were heading for bankruptcy. With all these highly educated MBAs running things, shouldn’t most companies know they are heading for bankruptcy well in advance? Yes there are accidents and unforeseen circumstances, but often times the technological/cultural changes that affect companies to the point of bankruptcy are like freakin’ giant, slow, inevitable icebergs that should be acknowledged and dealt with rather than freakin’ spun around.

The only one I met that was competent and gave a rat’s arse about the employees had 15yrs experience at the bottom, and only got her MBA after getting into a managerial position.

It is worth reading the whole article (carefully, and maybe less self-defensively). The paragraph right after the excerpt answers many of the complaints above:

“The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.”

I have no problem admitting that many of the details of the “business side” of a business baffle me. To me, a business should be about its end products, not the business itself, which is how MBAs seem to treat things. But then I guess I am a bit of a socialist, and I don’t believe in profits being above all things!

Businessmen in my eyes are like the bad side of Wall Street – leeching middlemen who don’t produce anything.

As a reluctant MBA student (I’d rather be doing an MFA in sculpture or perhaps a MSc in statistics but personal and career circumstances require otherwise) I can say that the explicit aim of the program I am in is to teach people how to build and work in teams. The ‘grotesque over-emphasis on accounting and finance’ you speak of does not exist – the technical bits are by far the most difficult for some and by their nature are ripe for comparison against other disciplines’ ‘weeder’ subjects.

As someone who spent the past ten years swearing that I’d never be ‘like that’ & get an MBA, I’m very pleasantly surprised at the way my program addresses social responsibility & innovation, and I’m genuinely impressed with the character of most of my classmates & teammates.

Also; “most MBA graduates deny the existence of ambiguity”? That’s just ridiculous. It’s one thing to call out ambiguous findings as useless; entirely another to “deny the existence of ambiguity”, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

I will say this for my various stages/levels of higher education. My undergrad was mostly a waste of time. All of the semesters of programming courses could have been boiled down into a single semester of key programming principles. Which would still have left me equally as unprepared for the actual business world as I was. I didn’t even know enough to be dangerous. What I learned in my first job were these two things. I didn’t know jack-squat and I was about as important to my company as the post-it notes in the supply closet. The only thing my undergrad did was get me a pass into an entry-level job (which I’m not actually complaining about), but that’s the reality. Now, my masters was more of an exercise in critical thinking than anything else. Sure, we learned management theory, had discussions about case studies, and practiced project management. However, the actual value was then being able to recognize the jargon and BS in meetings, picking up on little moves the company made and being able to see what’s coming before it happened. And like my undergrad, it gave me a pass to enter into a different level of employment with more responsibility, pay, and risk. I boil higher education down to developing critical thinking skills and opening doors that would otherwise stay shut.

Managers are either great, good, or god-awful regardless of their level and/or type of education. It’s been my experience that great managers are born that way. They know how to take raw data and blend it with soft skills (a.k.a. being able to successfully interact with other humans) to create a realistic and logical road map for their team to follow. They know that changing their mind is not a bad thing if it makes sense and are open to suggestions from their team. The ability to collect raw data and successfully interact with humans has nothing to do with 6 Sigma, Steven Covey, Microsoft certifications, or any other BS program designed to steal your money and waste your time.

Mmm & yet in one gallant swoop he isn’t aware what he doesn’t know about the MBA program or a whole bunch of stuff. Let’s just face it, the guy wrote a bit of a rant about management when it didn’t work out for him and he went back to being an academic. There really isn’t much more of a story than that.

I’d like to know the backstory on where this occurred (so he’s only able to talk about 1 company not every company in the world – again knowing that he doesn’t know stuff, right?) and that he had a specific set of circumstances that led to his leaving the job and returning to academia? Did his relationship break down? Was there conflict with another team member? Had he found it hard not to criticise other managers in client meetings? How were his performance reviews? Maybe he was about to be fired anyway, we just don’t know. Somehow this guy because he has a phd in something is given the credibility of Moses – it’s all just one spin from his perspective. So I’m just curious. Because nothing in there attests that this guy was ever the best manager in town, beyond his own arrogant blather. And to be honest I was surprised he picked up on crap from a Management 101 text for 1st year undergrads about Taylor’s theories. Seriously?

So my theory is this guy has some sort of chip on his shoulder & this is his vent to the world so he can sleep at night. Great, I’ve read psychology books and I think the same about psychologists and therapists and I even hypothesise all they do at university is read the same cheap psychology books I trolled up 20 years ago. But that just makes me ignorant about psychology as a profession… because I actually do know what I don’t know (to some extent). Unlike the PhD author who believes like many PhDs who bluff the world that they know about everything about everything.

Here’s what a PhD is… you draw a circle, that’s everything about a very specific subject… a question. Then draw a tiny bubble on the outside. That’s their contribution to new knowledge ‘about that question’. End of story. More people draw new little bubbles & so on over and over until their thesis just becomes reference material for new faces to step into PhD hats. A PhD in philosophy does not the omnipotent being bestow all wisdom. Please, keep this guy in context.

Psh. Yeah. Having an MBA was a detriment. It’s not like *that* many new businesses fail..

The buddha said ‘All criticism is based on ignorance’.

Well, philosophy isn’t really innocent of that. In fact, I’d say it’s just as full of meaningless terms and self-reference as the worst corporate doublespeak. Especially nowadays when everyone and their mom is into postmodernism.
Zizek, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Debord all use an embarrassingly huge amount of meaningless vocabulary and philosophical jargon that obscures and broadens their message. Many academics love that stuff because, like any other group-slang, it makes them feel superior and/or different and/or separate from mainstream society.

David Foster Wallace is the only recent author whose philosophy writing is truly free of bullshit.

People are given them for a reason. Usually enough people in a particular group exhibit a similar trait, usually one that is not look favorably upon.

If you are not familiar with the concept, you can always start at the bottom of the barrel – 4chan.

It is pretty silly to demonize MBAs in general – there are about 250k enrolled every year. You really think all 250k are going to turn into little Portarian quipping drones, spreading 5 Forces and 6 Sigma into everyone’s spreadsheets?

Or maybe there are plenty of people that are interested in learning how to do their jobs better, get MBAs and become better managers? Before you start sharpening your pitchforks, you should educate yourself on what coursework this degree actually entails. The “grotesque” overemphasis on finance and accounting = one required class of each, OH NOES!

And then there are a bunch of unethical crooks and idiots that we can read about in the WSJ that ruin business, governments, etc. Would they still be crooks and idiots without MBAs? Yes.

First, to qualify into the MBA program that I entered at the University of Tasmania I needed to prove 7 years business experience if you didn’t already have a business degree. But also, the curriculum isn’t just management subjects – only about 1/3 are management and the rest are statistics, law, economics and a few finance units plus electives. Which makes me realise how little this author understood the MBA. It’s like me saying I’m an engineer and know all about engineering from reading the text books (or computing for that matter). All formal educations are simply about creating a standardised product – doctor, psychologist, whatever – with their own industry jargon and culture.

The good PhD in Philosophy, a branch of academia with waffle coming out it’s backside (I might add), has pushed what we called in the old days ‘corporate speak’ into the MBA graduate’s repertoire of skills. No, don’t forget that’s a facet of all large (particularly public) organisations and not just the MBAs. Also, there are people who do the MBA and just pass and there are those who get it.

Here’s a question… as a standardised product to train middle managers in a globalised world the good PhD doesn’t think they need ethics training, mocking the ‘categorical imperative’? Now that is a scary thing. Unfortunately ethics training is proven to have an impact regardless of which organisation this guy worked in.

And that’s the crux. It’s really an exit rant from a PhD who thought he was beyond the position that he left to return to the PhD… because a man only needs to understand and read the classics of literature to run globalised companies. I’m calling bullshit on that one.

Porters 5 Forces may be lame but if you aren’t forcing yourself to look laterally when you are steering a multi-billion dollar company’s entry into a foreign market then WTF? He doesn’t believe in strategic management? Phone Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, or whatever and ask them what they think of that one? Because what the doctor proposes ‘on top of a small seed of populist driven truth’ is that strategy isn’t important. He would run businesses like a household, on a wing and a prayer.

The article itself showed this guy went to meetings where he intentionally and proudly undermined other business consultants when they showed their ideas to the client, siding in a mocking position with the client. Does that give anyone a signal? Now why isn’t he a management consultant anymore?

Sorry, but this article has had a little too much traction not to have a close pick at the weak points. Apologies for the lack of waffle that you were obviously expecting from an MBA graduate with a Bachelor of Computing and a bunch of industry IT certification in web technologies.

Regards

Steven Clark

The take-home lesson for me was that the primary goal of enrolling in EMBA programs is to meet and make business contacts other people with enough money to blow on an otherwise pointless exercise. The 2nd order point of EMBA is to get the name of a fancy school on your CV.

As students of philosophy know, Descartes dismantled the edifice of medieval thought by writing clearly and showing that knowledge, by its nature, is intelligible, not obscure.

Um, like Heidegger?

It’s not the MBA program that you should be concerned about but what ‘some people’ do with it.

I say if you want to find obfuscation, look at anyone in marketing or advertising. As someone with a B.Comm, I’m ashamed that they lump marketing in with us.

There’s nothing wrong with the skills associated with marketing, but it’s quite clear to me that ethics has no place in the advertising world. I find it surprising that people have such disdain for subjects that are, in effect, auditable (finance & accounting) while they let the ‘soft’ subjects walk right in and take a dump on their rug.

I will graduate business school in May with a degree in nonprofit management & spend plenty of time with “normal” MBAs. It is borderline absurd to claim that you don’t learn anything in business school. I was a philosophy undergrad, and we never covered finance, accounting or marketing!

As he mentions, a biz school is a lot about skill building. The majority of the people I go to school with want to advance their careers, and be able to lead a team. They teach you how to do this through practice, review and case studies. Good luck getting honest feedback in the real world.

And, we don’t read bullshit airport newsstand business books in class. We read a lot of case studies that force us to discuss as a class our opinions and solutions. Lots of times people are wrong and we talk about that. We don’t read “10 Tips to Be a Great Manager”

Finally, I don’t want to sound like a support everything about business school, there are plenty of insufferable assholes. But if you follow the classes and do your homework, you emerge understanding much more about yourself and how to be a good manager. Are you going to apply it? That’s up to you!

In conclusion: boo hoo, I am sorry this guy chased the easy money, sold out, made bank and now has to throw someone under the bus to feel better about himself.

I think there is a lot of common sense taught in an MBA but in certain aspects there is a little too much faith rather than critical thinking. Matthew Stewerts piece is interesting as it shows right from the birth of the discipline it made a grasp for authority, that continues to this day, when it adopted scientific language or mathematical models for attempts at, basically, fortune telling.