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Business schools like to boast about how many of their graduates have become CEOs—Harvard especially, since it has the most. But how do these people do as CEOs: are the skills needed to perform there the same as those that get them there?
MBA students enter the prestigious business schools smart, determined, and often aggressive. There, case studies teach them how to pronounce cleverly on situations they know little about, while analytic techniques give them the impression that they can tackle any problem—no in-depth experience required. With graduation comes the confidence of having been to a proper business school, not to mention the "old boys" network that can boost them to the "top." Then what?
[...] Joseph Lampel and I studied the post-1990 records of all 19. How did they do? In a word, badly. A majority, 10, seemed clearly to have failed, meaning that their company went bankrupt, they were forced out of the CEO chair, a major merger backfired, and so on. The performance of another 4 we found to be questionable. Some of these 14 CEOs built up or turned around businesses, prominently and dramatically, only to see them weaken or collapse just as dramatically.
[...] Both sets of companies declined in performance after those cover stories—Miller commented later that "it's hard to stay on top"—but the ones headed by MBAs declined more quickly. This "performance gap remained significant even 7 years after the cover story appeared." The authors found that "the MBA degree is associated with expedients to achieve growth via acquisitions...[which showed] up in the form of reduced cash flows and inferior return on assets." Yet the compensation of the MBA CEOs increased, indeed about 15% faster than the others! Apparently they had learned how to play the "self-serving" game, which Miller referred to in a later interview as "costly rapid growth."
[...] MBA programs do well in training for the business functions, such as finance and marketing, if not for management. So why do they persist in promoting this education for management, which, according to mounting evidence, produces so much mismanagement?
The answer is unfortunately obvious: with so many of their graduates getting to the "top", why change? But there is another answer that is also becoming obvious: because at this top, too many of their graduates are corrupting the economy.
MBAs are good for you personally, but bad for companies, bad for the economy, and bad for the country.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 02 2017, @06:28PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVgocdvcG0A [youtube.com] At 3:30 the Zuni takes off. The narrator says, "There, somehow a Zuni rocket has been ignited" which is bullshit, because everyone knows how the rocket was ignited. Unfortunately, this is a public release version, and it fails to show the wet start. Let me look some more - I may have to pull up one of the veteran's groups to find those critical few seconds . . .
Sorry, can't find those critical seconds. I've watched that wet start, and then watched the Zuni launch after being washed by the wet start flames. Yet - there are multiple videos on Youtube that suggest that the Zuni was launched by an electrical signal because someone failed to position a safety correctly. Those videos make no mention of the wet start at all. Was there a signal sent to the missile? Maybe, maybe not - but the fact is, that missile was washed in flames from the wet start. Occam's razor says that if you bathe a high performance rocket engine in flames, there is no need to search for some mysterious electrical cause for that rocket to ignite . . . .
Watched another video that really kills me. Some self important person is busy explaining how and why the fire was started, but he places that damned Zuni on the wrong part of the flight deck. More public consumption video, full of disinformation. The Zuni flies from port side amidships, toward starboard side, aft, but this guy places all of the Zuni-armed aircraft starboard and aft. FFS - disinformation out the ass.
This reminds me of the attack on the Liberty, and all of that disinformation. Oh yeah - McCain's daddy was in overall charge of that fiasco, as well. But don't mind me, I'm just another conspiracy nut.