MBA teachings are useful in the same way that any guru's lessons find a following: they offer a general framework for tackling large, ambiguous problems that would otherwise feel intractable.
You can just as easily be a tent preacher with your business podcast as a Jesuit with your MBA. But the mysticism pervades.
For instance, saying "VC $ is never worth it" is a far more dogmatic position than what most startup people I know believe: namely that it's a major decision with serious pros and cons that can make a huge difference in your potential benefit and control of your business.
WRT to Tim Ferriss, it's even more bizarre to imagine that there is some kind of startup party line in support of his methodology. The guy is a self-help guru with a cool brand. Far be it from me to proclaim what he should or should not do, and I think most startup people would agree that the main relevance he has to startup life is brand-building.
Lean Startup is the only one where I think you are on the mark, but even there, most of that stuff is just common sense table stakes that you pick up a few months into your first startup. If you want to make an argument against it, it's not like I couldn't be swayed in a variety of specific circumstances.
An online MBA degree from the University of Phoenix doesn't quite allow you the same benefits as your Ivy League MBA.
I come from a conservative religious background and I'm genuinely creeped out by the mythologies that surround companies. I think there are a ton of parallels between today's business leaders and megachurch pastors. There's similarities in the way they build brands, the way followers reverently speak of them, assume they do no wrong, are willing to defend them, and the cognitive dissonance used to justify what they are doing.
I assume they must be following a shared playbook, but I don't know who borrowed from what.
The network effect is very important. It allows you to grow and to attract smart ambitious people to your own adventure.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zK-b0INu1k
I did not see the movie but this scene was shared with me while discussing the business religion.
On the contrary, MBAs are designed not to be a "management formula" but teach by experience in two ways: first, exposure to thousands of real life case studies (often, in the better programs, with the CEO who lived it participating in the class discussion), and a class formed of carefully balanced profiles to have a mix of experiences contributing to the class discussion.
Domain experts will of course judge what they know: the accounting classes are weak, the investment classes are outdated, etc. but I'd argue there is no better way to speed-teach a generalist exposure, because the real world is complicated and management is about juggling inadequate resources and conflicting objectives for which there are often no rules. Whatever "rules" are taught (such as accounting standards, or using EBITDA instead of revenue for company valuation) are the product of generations of trial and error and tend to exist for a reason; it's good to question the rule and look up the reason, part of building a better mental model of how the world works.
Look at Enron: today, the black and white story is that they were fraudsters, but if you dig into the history of the company, first there were tons of genuinely interesting and moral people employed there because they believed in the vision and second there was a pattern of "the end justifies the means" from the true believers in management. So when you see a ton of smart people hired by true believers taking ethical shortcuts because "the end justifies the means"...
The generalist part is important. You might think you do not need to know about accounting or legal issues now, but as a manager they will come up. Just being aware of what can go wrong (reducing unknown unknowns) can go a long way in mitigating temptation. I think this is missed by many people who are on a certain career track: for example, I often hear that the CFA is better than an MBA if you want to stay in finance, and this may well be true (disclaimer: bailed out after failing level 2) but the CFA won't teach you, for example, how to deal with a toxic C-level hire, nor will you hear first hand a former infantry officer describe instances of creative leadership under intense pressure. Anecdotally, this kind of experience comes in a handy in private equity whilst being less useful in global macro trading.
Philip Delves Boughton's book [1] in particular captures this quite well.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ahead-Curve-Harvard-Business-School/d...
I'd say there is no way to speed-teach a generalist exposure - so MBA's are off on the wrong foot to start with.
The common thread through all of these, as I see them, is that the underlying domain is complex, with an irreducible informational complexity, as well as rich and frequently highly significant interactions: the wrong clothes, accent, or music can get you laughed at, shunned, or killed, depending on the circumstances.
In the field of management, there's the need to communicate over a short order (hours, days, quarters) with a set of audiences (investors, stockholders, policymakers, employees), over dynamics which may not play out fully for years or even decades.
A significant problem is that at the levels of complexity being considered, there are systems of systems of systems -- if you're looking at a world-model view of cognition, understanding, and communications, then the problem is one of building up models of models of models, though to depths far more than three in many instances, and then communicating these effectively.
Quite frequently it's far easier to just follow the topical contours without a deep understanding. At the extreme case, you end up with cargo-culting, both figuratively and literally: aping the forms, structures, and actions of some system viewed as "successful", but with absolutely no understanding or attainment of the true dyanamics involved.
MBA culture is a part of that, and there have been a number of fads that have come along, typically with runs of ~5 - 20 years by my rough sense. I'm still planning on looking into this in more depth.
But the thought that the whole concept of a fad -- a temporary deviation from some base norm -- being a fundamental sociological dynamic with an information-theoretic underpinning strikes me as fundamentally sound.
This is where I stopped listening.
Others (you, perhaps?) think that Capitalism is the final form of our resource management ecology. To them, it just represents acceptance of fundamental laws of resources: property, policing, valuation, and money are inevitable constructs in any sane, functioning society where resources move semi-freely.
I respect people who believe the latter. But I am in the former category, and I (obviously) think that's a reasonable position as well.
What about capitalism-as-a-phase is so absurd to you that its suggestion immediately and completely discredits the speaker?
markets aren't going away, unless you threaten humans to stop such actions with violence.
How do you define dominant organizing principle? If all profit was taxed >50% would you have won that battle?
Many of these books are complete garbage. But there are a lot of them.
The fascinating thing is how much this explosion of exciting rhetoric coincides with a sad and darkening reality, as described in sources such as these:
"The Surprising Slowdown in Startups"
http://fortune.com/2016/03/18/startup-growth-stagnation/
What if the conventional view of startups and entrepreneurship in the U.S. turns out, like so many conventional views, to be wrong? Substantial recent research suggests that it is. So brace yourself for decidedly counterintuitive findings that may help explain some of our era’s economic puzzles. First surprise: Startups aren’t increasing in the U.S. On the contrary, entrepreneurship has been declining for decades. The startup rate has fallen sharply over the past 30 or so years, from 14% of total companies in a given year to about 8%, say multiple papers by researchers Ryan Decker of the Federal Reserve Board, John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland, and Ron S. Jarmin and Javier Miranda of the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s bad news because the rise of new companies is an important way in which capital and labor get reallocated from low-productivity uses to high-productivity uses. But this bad news gets worse.
And also:
http://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-businesses-economic...
Startup rates, or the share of all companies formed within the past year, had exceeded closure rates every year since at least the 1970s — even during recessions. That all came to a halt in 2008 with the economic downturn. While it’s normal for growth to diminish somewhat during economic recoveries, it has been slower than usual: There were still 182,000 fewer businesses in 2014 than in 2007, according to the report.
Falling startup rates aren’t just confined to a few industries. All major sectors of the economy experienced gradual declines.
The slowdown in the formation of new businesses has led to what the report calls a “golden age of incumbency,” with a larger share of Americans working for well-established companies than ever before.
Late Capitalism in the US has evolved in such an obviously unequal and environmentally dangerous way that the only recourse we have is to a kind of "mystical" rhetoric. In this kind of system, being some kind of guru is just as important, if not more, than one's actual business acumen. Hence all the TED talks, CEO aphorisms, and hollow simulations of benevolence.
In this context, an MBA takes the form of acceptance into this quasi-religious order. It's either a readymade set of sacraments and oaths one can apply to any business to achieve magical effects. Or it's a kind of born-again incorporation, where people who have achieved something outside this system can be integrated back inside (why you see already successful business people going back to pursue these credentials).