"""The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration."""

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-man...

There's something on that phrase that really hits me very hard, so that every time I hear it, by reflex I'll start looking for the exit and what paths I may take to run there.

So, yes the language changes as you go up. But, so does what it means to fail.

This is basically more like how Amazon operates (and oddly enough some very stressful work-cooperative companies). It puts the ability to act closer to people that can see the opportunity... and lack of that rapid see-act cycle is hurt by the canonical hierarchy, and why large corporations (who should be the best resourced entities) seem to be the worst at starting & pursuing new ventures.

Toyota's lean builds on decentralization of expertise and decision making, and that is what American and Western European companies miss and why their lean implementation efforts fail.

Another success story is Handelsbanken, the only (?) European bank to not need govt bail outs in 2008.

A third would be 3M and probably also Semco.

He might if you are a smart engineer and demonstrate that that 5% reduction in latency results in $100 million additional revenue per year by way of more users and more ads.

I just made up that number, but still. My point is, at the end of the day one doesn't need an MBA to draw the connection between their technical endeavors and the business effects of those endeavors.

If an engineer can articulate his companies business cases better than him, MS board would better put that engineer as CEO.

1 - Even if "by himself" here means just taking the initiative to ask somebody

You're describing a competent product manager.

Those CEOs you mention are really thinking about geopolitical strategies like how do we deal with this new anti-privacy legislation, or changes in the rare earth metals market, or diversity, or what should we do about VR or cloud etc...

In contrast, if your organization is full of business-oriented people, it becomes a self-reinforcing downwards spiral, because:

- business oriented developers are biased towards competition. development is a collaborative effort.

- many business oriented developers downplay the role of engineering, wanting to be closer to management. because of this they might not be technically competent. When hiring, they will hire more people like them.

- since business oriented developers think programming is just means towards an end, they will focus on features and disregard maintainability and other important non-functional requirements. they force other people to take care of those issues for them, creating a toxic team dynamic ("want it fixed? then you fix it") and impacting their performance metrics.

If you have your MBA and you don't really like engineering because you consider it as being a lower form of work, then don't be an engineer. Do something else.

I did online classes. Read books. Still signed up for an MBA after I realized I didn't have the confidence and needed time to develop in an environment that encourages immersion and discussion of these topics.

Not everyone needs to do this. But those who do, like me, should do an MBA.

At any top educational program, you'll get better competition and coaching from professors, peers, and alumni access than self-teaching. At most MBA programs, you can take accelerated courses or skip re-learning skills.

> "you'll get better ... coaching from professors, peers, and alumni access than self-teaching."

Not all of the academic knowledge is in the textbook.

If I want to learn anything, I know the best way to learn is to get great coaching and a great curriculum. The unbundled (self-teaching) route is harder to navigate successfully, though, everyone thinks they're the exception!

Many business topics are the same way - you will learn much more by actually applying the knowledge to real-world problems than by working through textbooks and case studies. When hiring people, I and my peers vastly prefer demonstrated hands-on experience to any equivalent amount of academic knowledge.

I completed an MBT (Masters of Business and Technology) at UNSW, Australia.

The course programme was certainly slanted towards technical managers, perhaps aspiring CTOs (which I'm not). There were fairly basic courses, for someone with a technical product management background, but there was also some very useful business focused topics. The one module I really learned the most from was Fundamentals of Corporate Finance.

I do not aspire to know more than a professional accountant, but I can now understand what the professional accountant is telling me. I don't just know what the numbers in the budget mean, but also a pretty good idea of how they were derived. For example, I understand, in context, asset depreciation and what it means for my business.

I probably could have picked up these skills elsewhere too, but that module alone made the entire MBT degree programme worthwhile.