Finally, he says something I can agree with.
MBAs are for optimizing stable firms. They're walking death for startups, I personally have seen it happen.
MBAs are for optimizing stable firms. They're walking death for startups, I personally have seen it happen.
It's like they want to turn every business into an automotive business completely missing the point that car design is practically unchanged in the last 50 years. You can see just how terrible these companies are at adopting change by their pathetic attempts at getting EVs up and running.
Tech requires constant change and innovation to be successful. Companies who primarily deal in tech NEED R&D to survive. They can't just establish dominance and stick around for 100 years. (Generally. There are obvious exceptions).
This is why you see these major old tech companies struggling. IBM, HP, Cray. They all got taken over by MBAs who tried to "toyota" the companies into further success.
Organizational management is important, hard, and has decades of study behind it.
Finance is also important. My former employer has never made a profit in the seven years since IPO, and clever financing means that it is still a going concern.
This is what happens when highly credentialed operators are brought in as decision makers, but they were not there from the beginning and have no idea how irreplaceable the specific furniture and its arrangement over the years actually is.
They didn't go through the building process. They might not even be builders at all, even if given more than enough resources.
And it doesn't matter to them fundamentally since their personal best oportunities will be with a different future organization anyway. Even if they stay, the organization will be different before they are done. More like the average company you could read about in business school, and more understandable for students, with much less focus on the unique things that brought that particular company as far as it had beforehand.
If a company has reached a lofty place and the decision making changes that significantly for some reason, it is most likely that there will be some sinking to a significantly less lofty position. And in some unfamiliar direction downward.
The best possible person to run a particular company will be using company-specific approaches and drawing on talents that very few MBAs possess.
For those MBAs who do have such rare natural talent, it has been a characteristic since before university anyway so the degree is definitely not necessary.
Some MBAs are pretty good, although I suspect it’s mostly selection bias (the people would’ve been great even without attending b school).
Contrast that to AMD which has an engineer with a PHD in engineering from MIT as there CEO.
Look whos eating whos lunch now.