

If MBAs are useless, we’re all in big trouble - jszlasa
http://qz.com/79042/if-mbas-are-obsolete-were-all-in-big-trouble/

======
kfk
I am probably never going to do an MBA (probably because life in
unpredictable), but, as a business guy with programming skills, I strongly
advise the "tech guys" not to close doors on anybody. If they come with a suit
and they look like they are going to drop a ton a BS on you, just listen and
then ask them to prove themselves somehow. If they ask you money and they
don't want to prove themselves first, then you should send them the high way.

And, I know HN is strongly skewed on consumer SAAS, but there is a world of
companies with big money working on 10 to 20 years old software that would
love to pay for stuff that works and allows them to save costs. Easiest way to
get to this gold mine is actually sympathizing with the business people, not
"enemyzing" them.

------
ckluis
MBA here.

I agree and I disagree. The MBA itself is pointless without considerable
effort of the student to learn things related to startups.

MBAs teach you to be good middle to upper management in an organization with
some structure. It teaches you how to navigate and mold an existing structure
as needed for the course of business. It doesn't teach you how to build a
company from scratch.

I would argue that a skilled business professional is useless for some
startups and necessary for others. Want to tackle enterprise software? A few
of those MBAs can provide insight and credibility.

Web guys are useless in a native world. Cocoa guys are useless in a Windows
world. XAML guys are worthless in an Cocoa world. Right tool. Right job.

~~~
kfk
I agree, although not 100% on the enterprise software point. I am the first to
say you need a business guy for that, at least to correctly figure out the
needs, but I don't see why an MBA here would be better than a business guy
with experience.

~~~
ckluis
Did you notice I didn't directly say you need an MBA? I said they could be
helpful. An MBA is like a CS degree. Do you need a CS degree to be a good
programmer? Does it help?

------
nnnnni
I've noticed that the radio and TV are full of commercials that say "Get your
MBA at $school today and become a success tomorrow!"

It seems to me that whatever the MBA may have been worth at one point, it's
now worth about the same thing as A+ or Network+ certification. This feels
like a rerun of the early 2000s when the job market was flooded with people
that have bootcamp certificates but no real knowledge/experience/drive.

------
jaibot
Anybody going to do a quantitative analysis on the impact of having an MBA on
startup success? Because I'd hate for something to get in the way of all these
anecdotes.

~~~
Major_Grooves
sounds like something the startup genome guys could do.

------
moomin
TL;DR We're all in big trouble.

------
Skibb
ugh you beat me to it!

Truth is MBAs are inflated hullaballoo whose exorbitant price for offering
semi useful drivel may have worked in the time of all-is-fine-and-dandy but in
today's unstable economic world where lean is mean (in good sense) it's just
anachronistic.

------
wheaties
I hate to say it but what does anything an MBA teaches have to do with being a
good leader? Leadership can't be taught, it has to be learned. Those business
analysis skills are just that, business analysis. I think the largest problems
revolving around the concept of getting an MBA is the sense that with it you
should be in a leadership role.I'd love that knowledge but I would never make
the assumption that having knowledge means I am entitled to having a
management role.

~~~
bsbechtel
"You also need to secure scarce resources, develop cohesive teams, assemble
collaborative networks and build lasting customer relationships."

The author assumes if you have an MBA, you are qualified to do these things.
That couldn't be further from the truth.

~~~
VLM
LOL that's just the buzzword bingo version of post bachelors degree
"successful" life. Figure out how to pay for B school while getting married
and pop out some kids and keep everyone on track and happy and cooperative and
tolerate the mother-in-law basically continuously and successfully.

Note that the skills are only present if at all in MBA grads due to filtering
on the input side, not some magic pixie dust sprinkled on during classes or as
part of the credential ceremony.

------
michaelochurch
The hatred for "MBAs" has little to do with the degree itself.

========================

First, an aside.

Paul Graham was wrong about something. He wrote "Why Nerds Are Unpopular"
(still a great essay: <http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>). He was mostly
right:

 _Being smart seems to make you unpopular._

Ok. Reading on...

 _Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it
harm you in the real world. [...] But in a typical American secondary school,
being smart is likely to make your life difficult._

Agree so far...

 _So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart
kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really
want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. [...] Of
course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to
be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something,
but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to
program computers. In general, to make great things._

Holy shit! This is right on. Go nerds!

 _I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American
school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem
slackers by comparison. [...] An American teenager may work at being popular
every waking hour, 365 days a year.

[T]eenagers are always on duty as conformists._

Wow. This is some deep insight. Always on-duty as conformists... what does
that seem like? (Hint: corporate work.) I'll get hack to that.

 _Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be
popular. [...] Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't,
but something you make yourself._

So far, Paul Graham is batting 1.000.

 _In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at
least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look
awkward by comparison._

Yes, this is true. I was somewhere around the 30th percentile of my HS pecking
order and completely fine with that. I wasn't "cool" bit I wasn't unpopular,
people respected me, I never got beat up. But if you wanted to be 98th, you
really had to put a lot into it.

 _Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. [...]
[T]hat's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven
and seventeen._

Yes. Go on...

 _Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after._

This is where Paul Graham is wrong. Yes, high school is horrible for the least
popular couple percent. For most of us, even the nerds, it was fine. You don't
lose your income if you're at the 30th percentile of the pecking order, and
you have other things to focus on. You have things (e.g. college) to look
forward to.

The Work World is more like high school than college or academia. Actually,
it's worse than high school. In corporate Work, the popular kids are actually
evil (in HS, most of them weren't; perhaps selfish and immature but not _evil_
) and you lose huge amounts of _money_ when they fuck you over. Also, there is
_no_ external definition of merit. In HS, you can work hard and get good
grades and that gives you a signal that even though you're not popular, you're
doing well in society's eyes. There is _nothing_ like that at Work. Your
grades (performance reviews, job titles) are given by the popular kids who
have no desire to be fair and who will be as _unfair_ as they can get away
with if it helps them get ahead.

 _Adults don't normally persecute nerds._

Well, this is just not the case. Not in VC-istan, not in 99% of jobs even at
"tech companies". The popular kids rule with an iron fist. They dress it up
with a pseudo-meritocracy and "performance" rhetoric and credibility metrics
and job titles, but it's just high school popularity, this time played for
keeps. And yes, if you're one of those nerds who puts his head down and tries
to be as good as possible at his job (instead of playing politics) you will be
attacked in most environments. Why? Because an _actual_ high-performer scares
the shit out of the popular kids.

 _[Y]ou can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and
persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds
between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders._

This is exactly how corporate Work works.

 _It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are
doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously
cruel to one another [...]

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens.
Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. [...] Beyond
that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so
they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what
I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and
pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it._

Office politics, right there. Managers (like HS teachers) are powerless to
prevent it, because the information they get is filtered through the most
intimidating/extortive subset of the people below them (who silence everyone
else and become the real authority on "performance").

 _The inhabitants of all those worlds [e.g. high school] are trapped in little
bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally
these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form
to follow._

Great insight. I agree. I disagree that Work is different for the vast
majority of people. How do you get promotions? Or venture funding? Or just not
fired when a "low-performer" witch hunt happens? Or get real projects where
there's actual high-impact work available? Oh, right. _Popularity_.

 _Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had
anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work
is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the
time._

99% of office jobs. High school work isn't "pointless". It just has no impact
on the outside world because _it's evaluative_ by design. That's how bottom-
rung corporate work is, too. They aren't giving you work because it's
important. They give you undesirable and unimportant stuff, for a dues-paying
period of a few years, in order to evaluate you for eligibility for real work.
Getting out is based on popularity, not merit.

It's worse at Work because, in high school, real effort is made to make the
work at least marginally engaging and _educating_. At Work, no one cares. The
Work is _supposed_ to be dogshit. It wouldn't be a test if you were learning
something from it.

 _Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much
closer to the one played in the real world._

This is where Paul Graham gets it wrong. The high school popularity game is
the more "real world"-like game, not the nerd be-smart-and-do-great-work game.
Who is going to get the boss job, the well-connected idiot or the hard worker?
The former, even in "tech". Your boss gets to tell you what to do because he
has more credibility ( _popularity_ ) with the organization.

========================

Okay. I'm not dissecting this to pick on Paul Graham. His essays are
insightful, inspiring, and extremely well-written. He gets a lot more right
than he gets wrong. He also wrote this 10 years ago, before the Social Media
Douchepocalypse was even on the radar. I just think that he had a very unusual
set of experiences that led him to conclusions closer to how the world should
be than what it is actually like. Now, I'm just as biased. Remember that I'm
the Hacker News anti-Christ. I think of Paul Graham as someone very like me
with a radically _opposite_ set of experiences. In his world, brilliant hard-
working people are rewarded. In my world, base about 20 years later after "the
cool kids" had set up permanent camp in something (Silicon Valley) that was
originally by us and _for_ us, such high-quality people are exploited, and
often treated very badly by people who see them as a threat. He and I are both
right, over what we've seen. We just have small data sets. Unfortunately, and
I hate that this is true, I think my conclusions are more representative of
what people face today.

What could this have to do with MBAs? It's a euphemism for "the popular kids".
I know some great people with MBAs, but when disparage "MBAs" as a class,
we're talking about the well-connected talentless smiling idiots who are
competing with us for venture capital, managerial position and favor, and
visibility. Even on our fucking territory (software and technology) they are
_fucking demolishing us_. It's not even a fight. We're just getting trampled
because we don't know _how_ to fight.

When we gripe about MBAs, we're not talking about something that has anything
to do with the coursework. It's the attitude of entitlement that comes with
having a globally visible and permanent "I'm One of the Cool Kids" credential,
and the connections that come with it. You have to be smart to get into a good
PhD or JD or MD program. To get into a top MBA program? Family connections or
work experience (read: high-status jobs, meaning popularity) will suffice.
It's not what people learn in MBA programs that we have a problem with. We
just don't like these fucking invaders. And we shouldn't like them. Technology
is _our fucking turf_ , fuckers. Get off our territory or I, for one, am ready
to attack.

~~~
JonnieCache
_> Technology is our fucking turf, fuckers. Get off our territory or we will
rape your shit for breakfast._

Maybe this kind of phraseology is part of the reason you keep getting passed
over for promotion.

~~~
michaelochurch
I am using such "phraseology" because we are at war with the upper class
whether we want to be or not. What we call the "technology industry" is one of
the hottest battlefields out there. The well-connected/zero-sum evil (the
current social elite) are taking on the hard-working-and-talented/positive-sum
good and while we had no choice in starting the fight, it is in our territory
and we must end it. This goes back to what your Dad probably told you about
fistfights as a kid. "Never start a fight, but end one." On your terms.

Every time a great company (e.g. Google) becomes a closed-allocation nightmare
festival with satanic innovations like calibration scores, that's another
seaside city lost to the horde.

 _You may not be interested in war, but it is interested in you._ \-- Leon
Trotsky

I am sick of watching our territory get taken by smiling assholes who have
nothing to offer the world, and whom any properly masculine society would have
done something about decades ago. I'm fucking disgusted and ready to fight. If
that means I occasionally swear a blue streak, who fucking cares? The only
thing that matters is defeating these assholes with such force that they
_never_ fuck with us again.

~~~
JonnieCache
I honestly agree with you, at least with a lot of it. Can you think of any
constructive ways forward, short of developing a striking new range of organic
lamppost ornaments?

Maybe engineer-led companies could establish some kind of guild where they
publicly pledge never to implement certain kinds of corrosive management
practices. Good hackers could then just refuse to work for firms who aren't
signed up, and firms could be ejected if they were seen to be breaking their
promises.

The problem with schemes such as this is that the psychopaths will inevitably
infiltrate it and use it as another way to exert control. I'm sure many people
can suggest examples where this has happened before.

Perhaps this could be guarded against by making some kind of radical
transparency part of the conditions?

~~~
michaelochurch
_Can you think of any constructive ways forward, short of developing a
striking new range of organic lamppost ornaments?_

Sure, but this is several questions. In the very-long term, society will need
to implement a basic income due to widespread structural unemployment. There
will always be differences in social status and popularity contests, but once
we get to a state where low social status means you're on a 3-month waiting
list to go to Mars instead of dying of starvation or health insurance, I'll
say we've won as a species...

But let's stay out of society-wide political changes none of us can hope to
control.

I like to _think_ that I'm doing my part. I'm exposing The Lie to be a lie,
and that's huge. Most people are terrified to speak the truth about ex-
employers, as if it would blacklist them forever. (Having done it, it's not
_so_ severe that you starve, but yes, you do lose opportunities and I
recommend a different road.)

Bringing down The Lie is the first step. Evil credibility systems come down
once people stop believing in them, but people still do. If you apply for a
job, you often deal with reference checks where "we have to speak to a
manager". That's profession of faith in a credibility system that, to be
blunt, deserved to die out decades ago.

The thing is, most companies operate on the assumption that 10% of managers
are horrible people and therefore if someone drew 3 or 4 duds, the problem is
with the employee. But technology draws in psychopaths who want to take
advantage of head-down hard-working nerds and it's more like 50% who are evil
and 30% more who are decent people but just not competent (and their teams get
eaten by young-wolf conflicts as evil asserts itself from non-managerial
corners.)

So, it's several orders of magnitude more common for good people to end up
with fucked-up career histories than we think. That's _also_ why we have such
an age discrimination problem in our industry: by 35, you've had a real career
history, not this VC-istan dream where no one fucks you over and ruins your
reputation. Almost no one is courageous enough to speak about this, though.

Exposure of truth is key. When I "leaked" Google's calibration scores-- secret
performance reviews that enable managers to keep good engineers captive on
shitty projects by giving a positive verbal review and a negative (secret)
numeric one that makes them immobile-- note that I didn't think I was leaking
_anything_ ; how can something known by 50,000 people be secret?-- I did a lot
of damage to the company's image. That wasn't even my intent. If I had known
that a leak of calibration scores could cost Google millions, I wouldn't have
done it. I would have threatened to do it unless given certain considerations
(transfer within the company to a better manager). Luckily, I can't be sued
because calibration scores aren't a product and exposing how a company treats
its employees is unambiguously legal. Unfortunately, I've had a number of
powerful people come out to fuck up my career.

The first step-- and we can legally do it-- is exposure. Companies and
managers that ruin smart peoples' reputations careers, or (much more commonly,
because most targets of this extortion cave) threaten to do so to get
something, should be exposed with such harsh light that the world loses faith
in them outright.

How did I cost Google millions (potentially; I don't think anyone knows the
real figure) by leaking calibration scores? The fuckers who run the world now,
they _need_ us (talent). They need talented people to have faith in what they
are doing. If they didn't, no one would give a shit that I leaked calibration
scores and no one would try to fuck up my career years after the fact. If we
burn down the facade of this economy of lies and fear down and expose the rot
within, then we can right the power relationship.

Also, I don't actually support violence against the rich or well-connected
_because_ they are such. (That's just envious malevolence, and as evil as what
we need to fight.) However, I am 100% in favor of making violence legal
against certain types of social violence-- especially career blacklisting. As
far as I'm concerned, if you "pick up a phone" on a private, powerless,
employee-level person, or if you ruin someone's career with a bad reference,
and the targeted person acquires proof of what happened, it should be legal
for that person to use violence, up to killing, in retaliation. It should be
obvious that I don't support killing the well-connected just because they are
such. If you have social connections, then fine; good for you. If you use them
for bad purposes (e.g. you "pick up a phone" and make someone unfundable or
unemployable) your skull gets broken, and you might die painfully because
examples must be made. That is how it should be.

I support radical honesty and the most honest way to deal with passive-
agressive socially violent people is to kill them.

Ok, that's an ugly topic so I'll stop there. In any conflict, I view violence
as a last resort. It means that one party failed to be human. Violence is
sometimes acceptable and very rarely _good_ but it is always hideous so I
generally don't like it.

We _are_ in violent conflict with the upper class. 45,000 Americans die of
health insurance (either the lack of it, or horrible coverage) every year.
Also, 9/11 wasn't Arabs vs. Americans. It was an upper-class well-connected
douchebag from the second-richest family in Saudi Arabia killing 3,000 middle-
class office workers (who don't matter to such people, because they're middle-
class schmucks) to make a political point. We are at war. It's not a war of
countries. It's a war of classes and it's global. Bin Laden and the Bushite
neocons are on the same side (upper class). Whether middle-class Americans die
or Iraqis is irrelevant to them. They do not all like each other (I'm sure
Bush was convinced that bin Laden is a mortal enemy) and Illuminati-style
conspiracies do not exist; but when they compete with each other, they do it
in a way that makes _us_ lose.

 _However_ the good news is that we (at least, you and me, personally) don't
necessarily need to be violent. We in the cognitive 10^-k percent for some
self-flattering k, we have options. We _can_ escape and _outperform_ them. We
don't have to live in high-COL cities and work in VC-istan companies where the
founders treat us like garbage because they have connections (read: they went
to MBA school with VCs, and know disgusting secrets on powerful people they
can use to "call in"/extort favors) and we don't. We can get away from those
assholes-- possibly moving to a low-COL city, because we'll probably have to
use our own capital-- pool our resources, and start fucking building things
that actually solve peoples' problems and make the world better. _We_ (talent
in general, not just programmers) are what the world needs. Money is just an
accounting trick to keep it going. We have the real stuff and it's time to
start acting like it.

 _Maybe engineer-led companies could establish some kind of guild where they
publicly pledge never to implement certain kinds of corrosive management
practices. Good hackers could then just refuse to work for firms who aren't
signed up, and firms could be ejected if they were seen to be breaking their
promises.

The problem with schemes such as this is that the psychopaths will inevitably
infiltrate it and use it as another way to exert control. I'm sure many people
can suggest examples where this has happened before.

Perhaps this could be guarded against by making some kind of radical
transparency part of the conditions?_

You ETA'd this after I wrote my original reply and I'm not going to give it
the same long-form answer, but... yes, these are very good ideas.

Here's a post I wrote about something that, if I could get the resources
(unlikely, but who knows) I would want to build:
[http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/update-on-
wha...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/update-on-what-id-like-
to-build-april-28-2013/) . What I really think would be a great contribution
to the world is to shine some light on which companies and managers help
peoples' careers and which ones harm them.

~~~
jamesaguilar
> if you ruin someone's career with a bad reference . . . it should be legal
> for that person to use violence, up to killing

It should be legal to kill someone for giving you a bad reference? OK.

------
reledi
Says the guy with an MBA.

~~~
tbatterii
my thoughts exactly. the only folks who seem to value mbas are other mbas. i
don't even think i can accept the defined success criteria outlined in the
article (un-sustained long term growth) much less the premise that only mbas
know how to achieve it.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
Didn't some guy just kill himself a while back because he didn't have the
training to so much as read a balance sheet and ran his company into the
ground? While MBAs may not be the best entrepreneurs, they are more valuable
in keeping large, mature organizations up and running than Joe Nerd and his
series of weekend projects. Hell, that's the very purpose of an MBA.

~~~
tbatterii
it doesn't take an mba to read a balance sheet. a bachelors in accounting is
enough to be a cpa. and you don't have to be a cpa to read a balance sheet.
perhaps it takes an mba to manufacture a fake balance sheet that will pass
wall street muster though.

> they are more valuable in keeping large, mature organizations up and running
> than Joe Nerd and his series of weekend projects

this is the same premise as the article. who says an organization has to be
large to be successful?

~~~
wtvanhest
> this is the same premise as the article. who says an organization has to be
> large to be successful?

The people who invested in it.

~~~
tbatterii
investors want a return on their investment.

i believe the technical term would be ROI otherwise known as rate of return
not the rate increase of the rate of return or ROI.

an investor who demands constant growth in their rate of return on an
investment is either irrationally optimistic or stupid.

~~~
wtvanhest
There are a variety of terms describing how to measure the success of an
investment. Return On Investment (ROI) is one of those.

The most important measure is arguably NPV (Net Present Value) because it
takes in to consideration the size of the amount of money you get back after
adjusting for the required rate of return.

As an extreme example, imagine if I gave you the option to get a 1000% on a $1
investment. But, the entire investment could only be $1, in otherwords, you
couldn't make a $1,000 investment and get $10,000. The most you could make is
$9.

Now, imagine if I told you there was a 3% chance that you would loose 50% of
your money, and a 12% chance that you would get just your money back and an
85% chance you would make 1,000%!

On the face of it, it sounds like a good deal, you have a really strong
possibility of making a 1,000% return and a really small possibility of losing
some money.

But, what if I told you that it would take you 10 hours to figure out whether
my return estimate (1,000%) and probabilities, 3%, 12%, 85% were accurate?
Would it be worth 10 hours to make $9?

Obviously it wouldn't unless your current hourly wage were less than $1 an
hour.

That is one of the reasons VCs do not invest in businesses that don't have the
possibility of becoming huge. There is really no reason for them to spend the
time on figuring it out. It is also the reason that in order for a business to
be "successful" the people who invest in it, must end up owning a part of a
very large business.

Small businesses can be successful for the individual entrepreneur, but they
are not investable.

Also, you don't become a CPA from just doing an accounting undergrad, you also
have to have work experience in public accounting in most states. But, I do
agree that you don't need an MBA to read a balance sheet. A few months of self
study should allow you to understand the basics of financial statements. A few
years of working with them will get you pretty good at analyzing them and may
even give you the experience to construct them.

~~~
tbatterii
> Small businesses can be successful for the individual entrepreneur, but they
> are not investable.

^ ---- by VC's

well that's a good way of explaining the VC's perspective on what to invest
in. whether that is a wise and sustainable strategy or good use of resources
or not is a different matter. But in present company you will win that
argument. Doesn't make it true though.

On CPA's I wasn't implying that all you needed was an undergrad to get it you
have to take the state exam at least. I was attempting to prove an mba is not
required to make some sense of financial statements because it seemed that is
what MisterBastahrd was implying.

~~~
wtvanhest
Yeah, MisterBastahrd is wrong about an MBA helping that much with accounting
anyway.

An MBA is really an introduction to a lot of different business topics rather
than helping an individual master them (bad name IDK?). In business/life etc.
it is as important to know what you don't know, i.e. that you are shitty at
accounting, or that investing is a very deep knowledge business etc. than
almost anything else.

An MBA really helps you learn what you don't know so you can study it later.
Accounting is complex and to be really good at it, it takes years to master.
Reading a balance sheet is straight forward until you realize that you don't
know exactly how everything on there got there and you don't know how the
statements link together, nor do you know what a healthy balance sheet looks
like over a non-healthy balance sheet etc.

Technologists on HN wildly misunderstand the world of finance and business
just like we misunderstand the world of programming.

I comment on business topics and read without commenting on technical topics.
I can't imagine hiring someone without an MBA for a business position unless
it was really basic or unless they had deep experience in the same field. An
MBA can seriously jump start business knowledge. Getting one in your mid to
late 20s is a huge help at that point in your life if you are interested in
business.

------
Major_Grooves
I wrote a related post a while ago to answer to anyone who says MBAs can't
start companies: <http://wannabevc.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/mba-startups/>

~~~
AdrianRossouw
It really felt like you were scraping the bottom of the barrel to list
companies founded by MBA's. It only illustrates the point that MBA's don't do
startups.

The only one founded in this decade is zynga, which is widely considered to be
poorly managed.

I'll give you sun though, and even electronic arts.. founded by trip hawkins.
Although EA only hit it's hay days well after trip left the company, and he
was responsible for some really spectacular fuck ups afterwards (see: 3do).

~~~
davidw
I would surmise that MBA's are more or less capable of doing startups, but
don't have the incentives: with a huge debt load, they're better off with
something that's guaranteed to pay a lot, like, say, a job in finance.

~~~
Major_Grooves
Tell me about it. Large amount of MBA debt, just about to leave job to do
startup full-time. Not easy with that debt millstone around my neck.

------
FelixP
I think non-business people frequently make the error of lumping all MBAs
together; practically speaking, there's a decent gap between the top three
programs (HBS, Stanford GSB, & Wharton), the rest of the top 10-15 (Kellogg,
Berkeley, Sloan, Booth, UCLA, etc.), and there's a pretty massive gap from
there to everyone else.

I think folks often make the assumption that MBA program quality follows a
similar distribution to undergraduate education, but unfortunately there's a
much steeper falloff from the top few schools.

------
ArekDymalski
What I don't like about this article is that it suggests that you are forced
to choose: either MBA or "new methods of innovation, like the lean startup,
accelerators, hackathons and growth hacking". First it seems that the author
doesn't fully understand the quoted buzzwords. But that's not the point. The
important thing is that Lean Startup is a methodology that can be supplemented
by knowledge nad (hopefully) skills that you get during MBA studies. Who said
that these things are mutually exclusive?

------
forgotAgain
The article is a very good demonstration of why MBA's are generally considered
useless. Lots of buzzwords with little seasoning.

------
16s
In my experience, it all depends on the individual. It doesn't matter what
degree they have. If they have work ethic and ambition and they love what they
do, you absolutely want them on your team.

~~~
olso4052
Agree. Much (if not all) of the stigma that MBA's face is due to the people
who traditionally get MBA's, not what the program 'turns you into.' And for
the most part, that's what the article says. To be honest, I'm an engineer
with a technical degree, but I'm probably planning on getting an MBA to help
foster business skills and gain insight into a lot of different areas of
business.

It's tough, because right now I know you're thinking that all of that can be
done at a startup - and you're right. But I think that startups needs to look
in the mirror too. The xxxx-hacker model has created a relatively disconnected
culture. Sure, 'disrupting -whatever' sounds neat, but for the most part
you're just polluting cyberspace with another worthless app.

Anyways, I feel everyone needs to stay humble and hard working. There is no
right path, and both sides (and all sides) will undoubtedly need each other in
the future.

------
graycat
I was a professor in one of the better MBA programs.

(1) Students. The students were good, both when they entered and when they
left.

(2) Courses.

Accounting. Except for students who already knew accounting, the accounting
courses likely helped all the students who wanted to be in business. But the
undergraduate accounting courses did, also.

Likely if wanted to sit for the CPA exam, then would need more study. My
undergraduate school had nothing on business, but if a student wanted a CPA
then there was a nice woman in town who gave tutoring, had the study
materials, etc. One student worked with this woman in the summer after her
Bachelor's, took the CPA exam, and made the highest score in the state. So, if
want to sit for the CPA exam, then just do the studying and take the exam,
whether have had a business school course in accounting or not. Qualification:
That CPA example was from over 10 years ago; the CPA exams may have changed a
lot since then. If want a CPA, then should look carefully into the CPA exam
process.

Statistics. There was a course in statistics, but I was not impressed with it.
The students didn't learn enough about statistics to be anything but dangerous
if they tried to use the material on anything important. And the course didn't
do much for the student's 'skills' at using statistics software packages.
Statistics is taught better, of course, in a department of statistics but
commonly also in good departments of sociology, psychology, economics, and
agriculture.

There is a lot that can be done with statistics, and to some extent now with
'big data' and more in statistical software, more is being done. But the MBA
statistics course was only a weak start for powerful uses of statistics in the
future.

Optimization. There was a course in optimization, mostly linear programming.
Occasionally in a real business that is powerful, valuable material.

The intention of the accreditation system to ask for such a course was to jump
start more 'quantitative' management, i.e., 'management science', via linear
programming and optimization more generally. And there are some applications,
e.g., there is a chemical engineering professor at Princeton who has
apparently some good uses for optimization in the petroleum refining in
Houston. And optimization for airline plane and crew scheduling is a solid
application.

Linear programing and other parts of optimization long were the basis of a
major fraction of the Nobel prizes in economics; the connection with any real
economy or business was mostly in the eye of the beholder.

Mostly mathematical optimization still has yet to catch on strongly more
generally. Maybe in the future with more data, software, and computer
automation optimization will have a new day. So the teaching of optimization
was something of a long shot bet on the distant future.

Having a fast algorithm that shows that P = NP might get optimization going
again in business. For problems where would want such an algorithm, commonly
can do well now, but the work is mostly one problem at a time, slow,
expensive, and risky, and a fast algorithm that shows that P = NP might do
wonders for 'ease of use'.

Also if optimization becomes more important, then the work will likely be done
by specialists from departments of applied math, civil engineering, etc. in
specialized groups or outside companies. So, for an MBA, optimization would be
mostly only to make them an 'educated consumer' rather than an actual
practitioner.

Finance. The finance course would be good for someone who was still struggling
with compound interest but would not help much in serious work at, say, the
CFO's office of a major company, Goldman Sachs, or a hedge fund. The course
did mention the Sharpe capital asset pricing model. Of course the linear
algebra and statistics needed for the Markowitz model would be a struggle! For
stochastic differential equations for 'continuous time finance', that is not
very popular in the US, in business schools or anywhere. There are a few
professors -- Karatzas at Columbia, Avellaneda at Courant, Cinlar at
Princeton, Shreve at CMU, Merton at MIT, a few more.

Labor Law. The course in labor law might be good for someone who never heard
anything about such issues, but the professor teaching the course had never
negotiated an actual labor agreement. One of my students had negotiated labor
agreements for his family's business and had bad things to say about the labor
law course.

Organizational Behavior. Some guys with backgrounds in psychology and
sociology were teaching the organizational behavior course. My brother, Ph.D.
in political science, also taught such a course in a program of public
administration. One of the ideas is 'goal subordination' where a middle
manager is motivated to act in ways that give him a short term advantage at a
long term cost to the business. Not very deep material but maybe worthwhile.

Generally college and university courses can be good if they are
intellectually challenging and, thus, help the student learn how to work hard
and think, work, and write carefully, but the business school courses were not
very challenging in that sense.

The business school was respected in a radius of 200 miles or so: Significant
businesses, some nationally known, would come and recruit.

Likely some of the students met other students who would likely be useful to
them in the future.

The business school full professors, chairs, and deans really didn't have any
very clear idea just what the business school should teach, especially at the
MBA level. The most important influence was to try, although not very
seriously, to do 'research' as in physics envy. Contact with actual businesses
was discouraged. E.g., there were plenty of talks by graduate students and
professors with solutions looking for problems but essentially no talks by
business people with problems looking for solutions. E.g., the idea of having
the business school be a 'research-teaching' hospital for real business
problems was not attempted. The school didn't want to be clinical as in
medicine or even practical as in engineering but, instead, pure white as
driven snow theoretical as in mathematical physics.

Generally the 'research' was too far from business to be at all promising for
any practical impact in the foreseeable future. The best research I saw there
was by a professor taking a novel approach to attacking essentially the
question of P versus NP, but that work really belonged in, say, a theoretical
computer science department or a math department.

Business schools struggle: If they just go for physics envy, then they are
mostly watered down versions of social science. Indeed, long the 'great
leader' architects of business education believed that business school should
be 'applied social science'. That's asking a bit much of social science!

If business school gets really close to business, then it becomes much like
learning, say, the grocery business by starting as an apprentice in the
produce department -- students shouldn't have to pay tuition for that.

In effect some of what is needed is for some professors to look at the world
of business, get a good 'organization' or 'taxonomy' of its parts and pieces,
study those to identify where might find some powerful, fundamental
principles, and then do research on those principles. That is, the effort
would be to look at business and 'formulate' characterizations and useful,
powerful theories. So, that would be trying to make something clear and
precise out of business that rarely looks either clear or precise.

In biology, such work was long just 'descriptive' but eventually some very
interesting science. In physics, too: The motions of the planets were fairly
easy for apparently nearly any civilization to observe, and there were efforts
to explain the motions for hundreds of years before (dates from Wikipedia)
Copernicus (1473 - 1543), Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601), Galileo (1564 - 1642),
Kepler (1571 - 1630), and finally Newton (1642 - 1727) got a good, really
profound, solution. Such work is not easy to do.

For students, the business schools at Harvard and Stanford seem to be highly
respected in some areas, e.g., investment banking, parts of management
consulting, venture capital, and private equity. It may be that an MBA from
one of those schools would do enough to 'open doors' and 'make connections'
that the effort would be worthwhile for the student. Still I question if much
solid material was learned in the courses.

One way to look at business school is as an 'effort' to make progress against
the apparently messy world of business. Yes, it might be nice if business
school taught enough to really understand business quite comprehensively and
make getting wealthy routine. But it turns out that nearly any advantage, even
one that is seemingly small, could, at some point in a business career, result
in some large gains.

