Having been the guy whose job it was to collect, analyze, and present data to these MBAs, I can honestly say that 99% of them are dead weight for their analytic capabilities.

MBAs do much better at managing people. And by that, I mean only 70% of them are dead weight. The other 30% were pretty great and are probably the reason I'm not in jail for arson right now.

here is one instance. This is not a hard claim to back up by any means.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237326

http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-amazons-data-driven-approa...

Here they are being called out for being too data driven

http://splinternews.com/the-amazon-way-why-the-data-driven-w...

https://hbr.org/2015/08/data-driven-management-can-also-be-c...

And I hope your day gets better:) We've all been there!!

But the MBAs are not the reason for being data-driven. It's more like the real data analysis goes on behind the scenes (levels 5-7, and more likely on the engineering or research scientist side), eventually bubbling its way up to the MBAs who use the mountains of data and analysis to stroke their egos.

in this thread the person who (claim to have) worked there said otherwise. and in your second link Bezos also said otherwise.

amazon is as data driven as any other fortune 500.

quit fetichising it.

Lawyer with an MBA get you off? :-)

HN's negative criticism is that MBAs don't know how to start things, not necessarily that they can't run things.

Amazon is the perfect example of where MBAs can be extremely effective. The way Tim Cook helped Apple optimize and improve its operations a great example.

Not exactly their fault for failing to live up to some of the most impressive founders in history. At least Tim Cook is humble and wise enough to know his limits.

I have a parent who taught at a top-10 business school. A number of years ago, she had the opportunity to act as the faculty chaperone for the student trip to meet with the leaders of various Japanese businesses and I got to come along. One of the businesses we visited was a Sake brewer that had been family owned since the 1600s. The Q&A period was particularly enlightening to me and it had more to do with the questions that the MBA students asked than it did with the answers they were given. They peppered him with questions about growth, international expansions, taking on debt for advertising campaigns, new product lines that would appeal to a younger demographic. It went on for over an hour. And, to his credit, he patiently answered them all with a variant of the same answer. He wanted to run his company like his ancestors have run it for centuries. He wanted to make the best sake he could possibly make, just as his ancestors had done. He wanted to provide a comfortable life for his family and pass the business on to his children. And he wanted to supply good jobs for his employees since he viewed them as his extended family. None of the stuff the MBAs were interested in interested him. He was happy running a stable, self-sustaining business that didn't need to grow. Life, mastery of his craft and being happy were more important to him. If it had ended with that, I might not have taken such a dim view of MBAs. But on the bus ride home, all I heard from these early-20-something-self-proclaimed-future-leaders-of-America was how stupid the guy was and how he was ruining his business. I couldn't help but think that they'd entirely missed the point of his answers.

A few years later, I worked at a company that served small businesses building a product that handled reputation management and lead sourcing. We tried a number of iterations that ended up failing. It wasn't until we made the realization that small businesses didn't want growth as much as they wanted stability. Too much business could overwhelm them. Too little could starve them. They needed a product that kept them as close to full utilization as possible without ever going over. Even after we made that leap, it took a ton of effort for us to convince our own management to allow us to take the product in that direction. There was something about their own MBA training that made it difficult to accept that this view could be correct.

My own view of MBAs, considering I have a parent that has helped produce multiple generations of them, is that they're very valuable when applied to a somewhat narrow band of situations but that, as a society, we've applied them to many circumstances where they're counterproductive. I think we produce too many of them and the ones that are misapplied end up giving the rest a bad reputation.