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.