Business School is a Joke

So much group work I had in college started out with "keep meeting with your team". It was all just an exercise in seeing how much time we could waste in pointless meetings. Of course when I tried to delegate work, so we could actually accomplish things and waste less time in meetings, some silly girl tattle taled on me saying: "Jason doesn't want us to meet enough".

When these sorts of classes are used as admissions criteria for special programs (such as the BBA) you end up with a huge amount of competitiveness even though the material is easy.

The inevitable consequence of this is a lot of busy work, etc., so that some students eventually stand out as having done a better job at learning easy material and can be awarded the prize (admission to the BBA program, etc.).

I was shocked by the phenomenon of students ganging up on the professors to make tests "open note", and other approaches that allow less able students who are willing to use brute force approaches to thrive.

Note: In life, intelligence isn't really all that important, so the students have the right idea and so the rewards they reap for that behavior probably predict future economic rewards.

Business schools are teaching management, which by definition is about reducing risk and optimizing existing operations in a running business, hence the emphasis on accounting, finance, etc. The idea is that looking at the whole picture, an MBA is able to more efficiently manage an existing corporation. The comments made about MBAs seeing people as "tools" is spot on and in recent years the organization behavior subject has made a lot of progress in reversing this damaging trend, started during the industrial revolution.

On the other hand, entrepreneurship is all about taking an invention and turning it into an innovation and a sustainable company, and in the process mitigating various business risks (e.g. is there anyone to buy the product, how to make the product, what product to make, etc.). The two (startups vs. companies) are fundamentally different (I elaborate on this here: http://www.deyanvitanov.com/entrepreneurship-foundations/sta...). Very few business schools make the claim to be catering to the entrepreneurial crowd, and even fewer do it well - I can speak only for Stanford GSB, although I have heard similar for Berkeley and Babson, among others I am sure.

So the comment about talking the talk and walking the walk sounds nice, but the assumptions behind it simply fall flat.

FYI, I have an MBA from Stanford and I am basing my comment on my experience there. At the same time, I came to business school specifically to start a new company, so I am hardly the typical MBA I think.

Several of the better teachers at my university had consulting gigs on the side where they worked on real world projects that interested them. A few had worked many years in industry and now wanted to do something different. Some genuinely preferred the more theoretical and research aspect of the field and felt that a university was the best place to foster that. And yes a few where useless, could probably never cut in industry and just hung around because for some reason no one had fired them yet.

Conversely, having running a business will teach you many things, but there are other things you can only learn by having studied and carefully analysed and compared hundreds of businesses and the people who work there. So just because you have never run a business yourself doesn't mean you have nothing to teach, and just because you happened to be in charge of a business that happened to successful doesn't mean you know all there is about all aspects of running a company.