In case some people need context, this is referring to John Scully (previously president of Pepsi-Cola) then CEO of Apple during Steve Jobs' ousting in 1985.

Edit: updated to clarify that John Scully was previously president of Pepsi.

Lou had 1993 until 2002. Scully had 1983–1993. I think Lou had the .com boom on his side. Scully not so much. There's definitely a deflection point around 1994 where everyone did a lot better. I guess the question is how did IBM and Apple perform relative to some benchmark under those leaders and even that could be just luck. Microsoft certainly outperformed both thees companies by a huge amount of this time period: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

So compared to MSFT both were huge failures.

[EDIT: it's interesting that at least during some Scully's tenure APPL tracks MSFT fairly closely... So at least during those years he was as good as Bill Gates? :) ]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Who-Says-Elephants-Cant-Dance/dp/0060...

Jobs is said to have lured Sculley to Apple by asking, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

I would say that an MBA prepares one to be a CFO, or maybe even a COO, but by itself it probably only prepares one to be a CEO in the financial industry.

You basically argue that managers have their strength in certain areas (e.g., financials) but not in others. So what? That's the same with any other profession :-)

Consider, for example, AirBNB - not exactly experts in the hospitality industry: https://www.airbnb.com/about/founders. A hotel chain, with all their issues of real estate, zoning, construction, maintenance, room service, reservations, and so on is very complicated. Just running a bed-and-breakfast is a full-time job. AirBNB founders didn't think that they were better at hotels or B&Bs than existing veterans, they said "Why not use the Internet to connect people with living space at destinations with people who want to go there?" and wrote a website for that. In practice, they had some trouble with zoning regulations, subletting agreements, and destructive tenants - "Who could possibly have known it was so complicated?" - but in the end the appeal of just renting out personal space has proven to be a powerful idea.

The problem with HBS is that they seem to claim that applying generic business skills like financials and cost-cutting to an existing industry have a similar effect. The problem is that they don't.

I think you just helped me to make a connection. I think what we are seeing is that technology skills with some business acumen out-competes pure business skill in generating efficiency.

This lines up with a book I just read[0], which recommends that developers become independent "efficiency consultants". [0]https://leanpub.com/developerhegemony

I wouldn't say "out-competes" globally, but rather "in the context of disruption." (Which the tech industry has largely been in for the past 80 years)

The problem with MBAs is that they're not (generally) suited for the CEO role in an innovative company. A CEO is making strategic, long-term decisions, and those are vastly improved by deep, subject matter expertise.

Some MBA CEOs manage to cultivate that (I'd say in spite of HBS-alike), but generally they focus on the things they already know and were taught in school. Which are exactly the wrong things to chase when you're trying to disruptively innovate.

Plus HBS and the like have 100% incentive to sell their expertise as applying to as broad and high a market as possible. Rather than saying "Your MBA qualifies you for upper middle management, not leadership."

It really wasn't that complicated, until they got to a few million users. Before that they just spread through friends and word-of-mouth, so the user population was relatively nice and very similar to the couch-surfing community.

Maybe nobody actually knew what specific complications would arise, but at least the VC's should have known that generic complications would arise when they tried to scale the company...

Sometimes they're right; often they aren't.

I think the point is that managers/executives whose only strength is business/financials tend to make poor leaders.

If a startup fails, then the effects are primarily only negative for a very small number of people, most, if not all, of which were more than prepared for the prospect that the startup would fail.

It turns out that to manage things effectively you need to understand them. Who knew?

I used to live in Boston and a friend (who went to Harvard) once related to me his view that the point of this was to ensure high earning employment for the otherwise inexperienced and overly sheltered children of the wealthy.

The other contribution of HBS was to deeply entrench the cult of "presence," extroversion, and alpha signaling as the single most important quality for leadership. There's an excellent book whose title is escaping me that gives a great history of the "extrovert ideal" in the West.

The honorable People of the Corporation would never dream of altering their annual reports to the Market by overstating production in order to recieve the Good Capitalist award and gain foreign travel privileges from the Corporation Planning Committee - you sir are certainly an imperialist spy for suggesting otherwise and should be sent for Reeducation!

I've lived on the East and now the West coasts, and the manager caste ideology of the East is clearly why the West has completely dominated in innovative business sectors. Boston and Cambridge should be Silicon Valley and almost was, but the mentality killed it. Being a maker and a doer actually pegs you as a lower class, or at least that's the mentality I ran into.

I actually had people there tell me I should not "do." "Executives don't do anything." Direct quote.

https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking-...

Huh. I never heard it summed up so succinctly. I think you've hit the nail on the head - ignoring technical expertise in the field.