

When will the myth that MBAs can manage everything die? - yuhong

Particularly among board of directors of large companies.
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revorad
I think there's another equally harmful myth gaining a stronghold among non-
MBAs: that all MBAs are obviously stupid and good-for-nothing dopeheads.

It's simply not true. One of the few successful tech people I've seen
admitting that their MBA helped them is Mark Pincus of Zynga. He said he
wished he had paid more attention in his MBA class because he's had to learn
those lessons the hard way.

~~~
_delirium
I don't think Pincus is an example of a tech person who respects MBAs; he's a
business person who's been involved in technology management. As far as I know
he's never had a technical background or job--- before he went into tech
enterpreneurship on the business side, he was a financial analyst.

------
jacques_chester
It never will. It's another example of professional chauvinism. We're guilty
of it[1], so too are lawyers, economists, mathematicians and no doubt many
others.

That said, I think an interesting thought experiment would be to ask a manager
to run a ... something ... without knowing what it is or what it does. Is it a
factory or a retail outlet (which is all most MBA programs teach you how to
run, really)? What is made or sold there? Why did production or sales fall?
What product should be developed or marketed next?

My suspicion is that most MBAs would complain that this is too little
information. And by god they'd be right.

Incidentally, I wonder if any B-schools have studied the performance of
C-suite officers comparing Greeks (coming from elsewhere) and Trojans (long-
termers with domain exertise).

[1] Try this on: "A good programmer can program anything."

~~~
yuhong
And unfortunately this is made worse by stuff that MBA courses used to teach
that is considered horrible nowadays, like cost-cutting.

