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MBAs as CEOs

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Re: MBAs as CEOs

#71

Post by cholantesh »

alphonsegaston wrote: post #32
aaron-lebo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's spot on and incredibly unsettling. I come from a conservative religious background and I'm genuinely creeped out by the mythologies that surround companies. I think there are a ton of parallels between today's business leaders and megachurch pastors. There's similarities in the way they build brands, the way followers reverently speak of them, assume they do no wrong, are willing to defend them, and the cognit…

Look into Amway - that's where a lot of this ideology was first cultivated. They literally took American Christianity, substituted an ambiguous notion of "business" with God, and pyramid schemed their way to immense wealth and political power. They also pioneered selling business sermons (in the form of cassette tape sets) long before this whole social media deluge of similar nonsense.

I was nearly bamboozled by their successor Quixtar while in university. Luckily I was able to smell the scam when I went to one of their sessions. Very vague and very pushy about us buying into a scheme before we could learn how it worked.

Re: MBAs as CEOs

#72

Post by jczhang »

thegoldenchild wrote: post #43
GlennS wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you summarise some of the 40% that was useful? Might be interesting to hear.

Finance I, II, III. Accounting I, II, III. Corporate Strategy. Emerging Markets. Micro/Macro Economics. Business Acting. Marketing Strategy. Ops Research.

Ok so why not just take those classes online or something and save yourself the huge cost of MBA?

Re: MBAs as CEOs

#73

Post by basseq »

Chaebixi wrote: post #30
basseq wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. "I worked with some bad MBAs, so anyone who holds that degree must be bad."

If MBAs often come with a particular ideology and attitude that you want to avoid, then it makes sense to not bother trying to find the good ones. A successful miner wants to focus on the rich ore.

By the way, this is the attitude that causes diversity issues. "The rich ore is Stanford CS grads who worked at Google and Facebook, so why should I recruit anywhere else?"

Re: MBAs as CEOs

#74

Post by acalderaro »

One question I asked that turned me off from pursuing an MBA was "what happens when the MBA pool becomes as saturated as the pool?" What other degree can one get besides an MBA to demonstrate success at business? How can one manage a social network that large at the minimum level required to get referrals to jobs. What will happen to wages?

When I started thinking long term, I realized that people everything an MBA teaches you can be learned online and through a few books. Excel modeling, financial analysis, case studies, it's all readily available.

And I came to the unfortunate conclusion that one doesn't need an education to teach you how to be a good manager. Good managers are competent in both the technical skills required of their subordinates and also in the interpersonal skills required to communicate and understand their subordinates. So the question for me became how do I learn technical skills? And the solution was to study technical fields.

We're at the start of a transition period, where companies no longer outsource their leadership to individuals with alphabet soup after their name. As innovation and expansion occur more rapidly, people left asking "is it better to be the technical or the non-technical co-founder" will lose to technical founders with a desire to lead.

Re: MBAs as CEOs

#75

Post by basseq »

Retric wrote: post #49
basseq wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. "I worked with some bad MBAs, so anyone who holds that degree must be bad."

MBA's add other MBA's so having zero tends to be the better choice than looking for the 'good ones.' Remember, a primary focus of MBA programs is getting to positions of power, so they are great at self marketing. Further, if the market says X is valuable and you think it's useless then you are better off saving money by avoiding the price premium.

  Remember, a primary focus on MBA's is getting to 
  positions of power...
Now you're projecting! For every power-hungry poorly-managing CEO-wannabe MBA, there's someone who just wants to know how to administer a business well. A MBA is a (but certainly not the or the only) path to accomplishing that.

Re: MBAs as CEOs

#76

Post by alphonsegaston »

cholantesh wrote: post #71
alphonsegaston wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look into Amway - that's where a lot of this ideology was first cultivated. They literally took American Christianity, substituted an ambiguous notion of "business" with God, and pyramid schemed their way to immense wealth and political power. They also pioneered selling business sermons (in the form of cassette tape sets) long before this whole social media deluge of similar nonsense.

I was nearly bamboozled by their successor Quixtar while in university. Luckily I was able to smell the scam when I went to one of their sessions. Very vague and very pushy about us buying into a scheme before we could learn how it worked.

Glad you were able to dodge that one. They've ruined a lot of lives and families in the Midwest, where, incredibly, they still are treated as a legitimate business.

Re: MBAs as CEOs

#77

Post by awl130 »

This article requires further data to corroborate it's claim. For example, there needs to be a delineation between companies run by founders and non-founders. MBAs are almost never founders, they are hired. Therefore, their analysis should control for founder-run companies. By the time you hire a MBA as CEO, most of the growth has already occurred, the original management team has left to cash out their equity, etc.

In fact, oftentimes, MBAs are hired to solve a major problem, usually of growth. Why else would the founder leave? What founder leaves in the middle of a growth spurt? Often it's when the founder has reached the limits of their abilities that a MBA is called in.

Re: MBAs as CEOs

#78

Post by basseq »

Chris2048 wrote: post #20
basseq wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. "I worked with some bad MBAs, so anyone who holds that degree must be bad."

Doesn't need to be that "anyone who holds that degree mu[st] be bad" - just that there's so much chaff a lot more time is wasted distinguishing the good ones. Consider that qualifications are themselves means of efficient filtering / signalling competence. What it's saying is, the qualifications doesn't add distinction to a candidate without.

Yes, but not in a binary fashion.

Someone with a MBA doesn't signal incompetence, just the way that a lack of a MBA means I should immediately promote them to CEO. Likewise, a CS degree from Stanford is good, but some scrappy coder from a flyover state with no college education might be just as good when you dig in.

Broad "filters" tend to have a lot of false positives.

Re: MBAs as CEOs

#79

Post by cholantesh »

treebeard901 wrote: post #36
sjg007 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always told that the MBA is about the network. Someone in your cohort has a friend who gets you your next job. And there is also some diversity in the class since everyone worked for a few years prior to taking an MBA. The network effect is very important. It allows you to grow and to attract smart ambitious people to your own adventure.

Oddly enough, I know many people who privately admit this is the main reason they go to church: networking.

Reminds me of Ted Wassanasong from King of the Hill. There's an episode when Khan asks him why he doesn't see him at the Buddhist temple any more and he replies, "We're Episcopalian now. It's just good business."

Re: MBAs as CEOs

#80

Post by tlb »

I'm not a big fan of MBAs as CEOs, but I think the evidence in the article is weak. There's never been a randomized study of installing different kinds of CEOs, so all they can measure is what happens to the kind of companies that hire MBAs fresh out of school as their new CEOs.

What kind of company offers the biggest pay package to an MBA fresh out of school? Large ones where the board believes the company needs a major turnaround. If they didn't have serious management failures, they'd promote from within.

It's the same phenomenon as discovering that the most famous cardiologists have the most patients dying.

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