"The secret of Costco’s success revealed! (hint: no MBAs need apply)", https://washingtonmonthly.com/2013/06/09/the-secret-of-costc...

"... Costco does not hire business school graduates—thanks to another idiosyncrasy meant to preserve its distinct company culture. It cultivates employees who work the floor in its warehouses and sponsors them through graduate school." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-06/costco-ce...

It's perfectly fair. If they had hired all chefs into upper management, one could say "too many chefs and not enough engineers!", regardless of the quality of the chefs.

Only if you think "Master of Business Administration" and "Chef" convey equal amounts of business administration skill. The exective board page linked above is 22 people, even if all of them held MBAs could it really be that 22 expert business administrators is too many for a global company with 350,000 employees?

It's not about skills, it's about priorities.

Their job is to make money; they don't care, and they are not paid to care about anything else.

Now... the question is, does someone with a different background care about the company vs making money in different proportions to the set of 'expert business administrators'?

I posit that yes, someone with a different background will have different priorities to simply 'make as much money as possible right now'.

Maybe even a chef.

As a % top leadership, yeah it totally can be too much.