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A comment on Would the economy be better off without MBA students?. Parent comment

Re:Would the economy be better off without MBA students? by stephengillie on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @03:50PM (#4844653)
Please note the past 100 years barely includes WWI.

Professionalization of management is not a phrase I've read before, but I'm assuming it means management as a profession. The benefit here is that managers are supposed to be interchangeable gears driving a company forward. The drawback is that the "interchangeable gears" idea really doesn't work in practice.

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Re:Would the economy be better off without MBA students? by yuhong on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @04:22PM (#4844830)
It reminds me of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2011013
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Re:Would the economy be better off without MBA students? by mseebach on Thursday November 29, 2012 @02:45AM (#4846690)
> The drawback is that the "interchangeable gears" idea really doesn't work in practice.

No, it's not just a part you can replace overnight, but interchangeability works like it does for software engineers. If a software engineer's career takes him from a bank to Google to an airline, nobody lift an eyebrow. A professional manager can take the same journey.

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Re:Would the economy be better off without MBA students? by TeMPOraL on Thursday November 29, 2012 @08:11AM (#4847473)
> but interchangeability works like it does for software engineers.

By which you mean, it does not? A lot of harm was done in the industry by trying to make programmers interchangable.

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Re:Would the economy be better off without MBA students? by mseebach on Thursday November 29, 2012 @12:16PM (#4848822)
No, by which I mean exactly what I wrote. I even gave an example.
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Re:Would the economy be better off without MBA students? by stephengillie on Thursday November 29, 2012 @12:23PM (#4848882)
I believe you are working with a different concept than I meant. The concept of these "interchangeable gears" is that a person can walk out of one dev/manager/retail/teaching job and walk into another in a different industry, and be completely effective on day one.

This is a concept I learned from several professors across many classes in 2 separate colleges. I've read it in management blogs too -- it's a widely held incorrect concept.

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