> MBA's are generally better communicators and much easier to get along with.
This is exactly the problem. The MBA skill set is climbing corporate hierarchies. Not product design, customer service, empathy, or long-term thinking; only promotions. That's the whole reason anyone gets an MBA.
MBAs often lack domain knowledge, but even when they have it, the MBA problem remains because their priorities are unrelated to product improvement. They spend their time ingratiating themselves and taking over the top layers of management, hiring more MBAs all the while, until a formerly functional company ends up like Boeing or Sculley's Apple.
Too many MBAs will inevitably degrade product quality.
"You can tell the witches by their propensity to gather with one another - which is proof indeed they are witches, and must be burned, lest they infect the rest of us good people!"
My. God. Man.
The amount of misunderstanding, arbitrarily 'made up stuff' and naive speculation on this thread ... it's just ridiculous.
It's kind of general professional designation, and valuable education for those with no business background (though likely not useful unless from one of the better schools). I'll gather that more than 1/2 of them come from hard professional backgrounds (i.e. CFA, Finance, Eng, Science, Econ) and that they may not be directly oriented towards a specific 'role or trade' frankly is not that important.
Almost everything that has been specifically said in this thread is a bit ridiculous (almost comical), and a lot of it kind of petty as well.
"Those sneaky manipulators!"
"Their priorities are this or that!"
And really, really weird the amount of hyperbole here.
I'm going to guess that maybe you don't really know MBA is (that's ok, it's not an insult, most people don't), and because you don't speak the language of finance, macro/micro economics, marketing, you may be inclined to assume that those things 'are not irrelevant', which is and oddly peculiar form of ironic glibness.
It's a generalist designation.
Some of them are good, some are not.
It's not that big of a deal, and it's not at all like what some people are implying here.
This is a website for a startup accelerator, not a pure tech site. Almost everyone here, including myself, has plenty of contact with MBAs. You might consider that when reading all the negative feedback you've received.
> the language of finance, macro/micro economics, marketing
This is like saying people get computer science degrees to learn about programming. Is it important for the job? Yes. Will you learn it in the program? Yes. Is it why people pursue the degree? Absolutely not. An MBA is an expensive, time-consuming certification. Nobody gets a graduate degree in business administration because they enjoy the classes. People pursue them because they provide opportunities for career advancement at the higher levels.
> Some of them are good, some are not.
This is the core of the problem. For a company, it doesn't matter whether the MBAs are good, because they're almost definitionally climbers and as climbers their incentives are fundamentally misaligned with long term success.
I'll use Boeing as an example again, because it's such a textbook case. Management (composed primarily of MBAs) discovered senior engineers were expensive and laid them all off. Twenty years later, their planes crash, their capsules leak, and their rockets don't work well enough to launch at all. Did they make the wrong decision? Well it looked very good on a lot of quarterly revenue reports, EBITDA was up, and the CEO responsible for most of those layoffs (James McNerney, MBA) retired well before the disasters to accolades, trusteeships, and not tens but hundreds of millions of dollars. From his perspective, he achieved the goal behind getting an MBA in the first place.
There's nothing wrong with ambition, but being wary of people with too much of it has been a tenet of humanity since before the refinement of bronze.
The best communicators I've worked with have generally been scientists, especially physicists. Many MBAs seem to communicate in platitudes and vague business jargon that makes simple concepts sound complicated. This is obvious when you start probing for specifics after terms like "value add" or "synergy" are thrown around.
> "obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction; in particular, prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group"
This is just the fallacy of definition. Technically being anti-racist or anti-terrorism is "bigotry" on a fallaciously "strict" interpretation of some short definition of the word if one refuses to acknowledge its social and historical context (and how the word is used in the real world.)
