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.
> 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
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-Ec...
[2] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561
I appreciate the comment, but your Amazon example was jarring because it seems that HN does not like Amazon's culture in part due to the dominance of MBAs in the senior management ranks. This anecdata aligns with graduation numbers across some of the top 20 US business schools in 2015, and one would presume this leads to an overwhelmingly US MBA-centric Amazon management style, albeit one that may be different than "other" US MBA dogma.[1]
[1] http://qz.com/636539/amazon-is-hiring-the-most-mbas-in-tech-...
But I agree with the general point that 'conventional' business wisdom might not lead you to Amazon's strategy.
Imagine you need someone to help support a team of compiler writers. The kind of support is mainly protecting the team from too much bullshit above, and also just making sure the team has what it needs (someone's gotta get those chairs for them).
How much compiler experience do you need? It definitely helps to know about the constraints of development (difficulty in measuring project length, need for longer periods of concentration), but apart from "street cred" coming from importing within, there's a good argument that someone who's managed across multiple industries will be good at absorbing the right stuff to manage well.
OTOH, if you promote from within, you might be getting someone with good potential. But they likely won't have management experience, and their job changed from "ship this product" to "make sure the team doesn't implode (also ship the product)". If you have the slack to handle the learning curve, it's good. But hiring experienced people for a job is useful.
100% agree abut absorbing lessons though. When you start off with a certain mindset, it takes a while to absorb a new one. But your job is to make the company run well, not to be an advocate for whatever you learned at school
I think that's much more sensible than taking somebody who doesn't know much of anything, putting them in an MBA program, and then expecting them to have universal management mojo. So we're not talking about somebody who has managed across multiple industries. We're talking about somebody who, often, has managed across none.
I really don't believe managers from other industries can, on average, manage software teams. I thin software is too different from other kinds of labor. So many behaviors that are arguably reasonable in other industries are clearly catastrophic in software.
The issue being that technical ladder is usually much shorter than the related "people ladder".
Let's call it what it is. If you have the look and act like a hyper-politically-conscious MBA, they'll let you in the club of high-level corporate people that make millions of dollars. If you look like some nerd who hasn't had a tan since 1st grade, you're stuck to the top of the technical ladder, where you're lucky to get $135k ($250k for San Francisco/other high COL areas).
It's quite plausible to be making 200k-300k (again, adjust as necessary for high CoL areas) + performance bonuses on a management career path. Normal technical workers cap out around $120k outside the Valley and somewhere in the vicinity of $200k in the Valley.
Things are different if you've gained notoriety by writing the book on AI, designing large chunks of the internet, or creating some of the world's most widely-used programming languages (van Rossum, Thompson, etc.).
The rest of us peons don't get an exception.
Yes, because outside of AppAmaGooBookSoft and the ecosystem of venture-backed startups in the SV bubble (i.e., this is not applicable to venture-backed startups outside of that bubble), very few programmers get RSUs, signing bonuses, etc.
>Google and Facebook pay between $150-200k to new grads, and a senior programmer at either of these companies can get double that.
This is not representative of the career path, and the high dollar comp package is less impressive when you consider that these companies usually require their employees to be located in very high CoL areas like San Francisco or New York. Rent on an apartment in those cities will easily consume 35-40% of that salary. If you have a family and need a house, forget about it.
These companies are also reluctant to hire those without Ivy League pedigrees, which means most employees will have substantial student debt.
I don't think "Become Vint Cerf" or "Become Peter Norvig" is practicable advice for your typical competent programmer to make > $200k outside of SV (or its satellites in Seattle, NY, and Cambridge). The success of Cerf, Norvig, et al has to do with timing, which is not replicable, as much as anything else (and both of these guys work for Google anyway, so they're not even examples of your point).
I've known a small handful of employed programmers who've had >$200k/yr success, normally working in uber-specialized niches for consulting firms that had large contracts with large companies (again, this is mostly the result of good timing more than anything else).
Barring that, in the real world outside the SV bubble, I've never heard of it. Orindary programmers who want to break out of wage slavery must either manage their money and save their salaries very carefully or become successful entrepreneurs (or both).
This seems more like a job for an administrative assistant than a manager.
Which was closed in 2010, and purchased by Tesla.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or look at the extent to which a firm replete with Harvard MBAs totally destroyed a company while profiting handsomely: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmons...
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.
>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.
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"
I think it's just hard to get fired for taking the easy way out.
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.
Taylorism is why, for example, some companies still use lines of code written as a measure of productivity.
[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 starts at zero and increases as the big pieces are added. It stops at a well defined number that is specified.
> “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.
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'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:
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.
Sure. At the company I work for, we almost always deliver on time. You don't need Taylorism to do that.
Any learning that happens is in spite of Taylorism.
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>
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.
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 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...
- 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.
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.
and, btw, as a person who has spent 10 years analyzing the healthcare industry, we need more "medical factory" thinking not less.
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
[2] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/after-law-scho...
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?
This problem will likely get worse as automation and cloud services reduces the actual amount of work available. Besides buzzwords, the other focus of the MBA is on "core competencies".
For example, A healthcare company should focus their resources primarily on the things they do well in healthcare. Outsource as much technology as you can because that's not your core business. As "software eats the world", I find this to be increasingly bad advice for companies as technology should become the core competency for everyone.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reaso...
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.
Why?
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.
Check out the faculty list at Harvard Business school [link below]. I randomly looked at profiles of 14 of them and not a single one had real world business experience. If there are any who do have real world experience, it's often superficial.
To carry on this article's analogy, business schools are the Catholic church of 1500: incestuous, detached, and self-serving.
Harvard Busisness school faculty: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/browse.aspx