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Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America
221–230 of 259 posts
Re: Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America
#222Finally, 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.
I mean, Doordash just IPOed this week, and that come out of Stanford GSB. If you want something with an arguably more innovative product, Stitch Fix also came out of Stanford GSB, and it was a pretty unique business model at the time. Some MBAs are pretty good, although I suspect it’s mostly selection bias (the people would’ve been great even without attending b school).
Door dash is wildly unprofitable.
Re: Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tesla isn't about performance, that's just a by-product of making EV suitable for everyday use. Teslas are about adequate range (400+ Km, 250+ miles), fast charging and a charging network that enables long-distance journeys, as well as getting as close to self-driving as possible. That's why 1 million or so people chose a Tesla over other EV and gasoline cars.
How do you know the reasons why someone chose a Tesla?
I own one myself and talk to other owners occasionally. People get chatty during those Supercharger breaks.
Re: Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America
#224While I'm not certain, I have a feeling the new GSuite logos and the release of Web Stories were decisions made by MBA's and not engineers.
Looks more like design-by-committee to me e.g. committee decided "we need more uniformity across our logos" and then some poor designer gets landed with the task of making that happen.
From what I can pick, Javier Soltero, ex-Microsoft, arrived at Google's G Suite in last year's October. [0] Then the pandemic hits and it gives reason to Google's Creative Director Margaret Cypher to "reinvigorate the design [...] that's remained mostly untouched since its arrival". [1]
>“The individual apps serve as expressions of Workspace capabilities... but they also need to be individually awesome,” Soltero says.
Which to me looks like a failed endeavour, because it obviously lost individuality and just seem to enforce the idea of the umbrella that Google Workspace encompasses, and he now leads.
>“This is the moment in which we break free from defining the structure and the role of our offerings in terms that were invented by somebody else in a very different era,” says Javier Soltero, Google’s vice president and general manager of G Suite and now Workspace
And that's how you say that it "changed because I arrived and yes, I'm asserting dominance."
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/22/google-picks-up-microsoft-... [1] https://fastcompany.com/90560175/gmail-new-logo-g-suite-goog...
Re: Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
The book "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" discusses this. There seems to be a group of people that think that "grow by 8.2 percent" is a strategy. It is not, it is a goal. Companies with a good strategy will eat the lunch of a company who doesn't know what a strategy is.
Great distinction. The anti-MBA movement is really trying to redefine what an MBA means. Bad business decisions are "M.B.A.-ization". Good business decisions are... something else. Therefore, MBAs are bad. There are plenty of bad MBAs running around, but it's no different than how we also have plenty of bad software developers out there despite having C.S. degrees. In both cases, the worst offenders are over-represen…
Can you try to tally the list of actually innovative companies (let's say in tech or bio) headed by MBAs vs. non-MBAs? The only notable MBA ceo of a massive tech company from history was Steve Ballmer and let's at least agree there's no consensus if he was any good for Microsoft. Tim Cook is arguably good, but that's just 1/5 if we are looking at top 5 tech. Even the "business" CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, is not an MBA.
Re: Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America
#226Somebody had to tell them. What a bunch of cry babies. These bean counters are ruinous to companies. And no, I don’t buy this simple narrative that MBAs are good for mature companies. Not at all. Look at companies like Boeing, ULA, Intel and others. Ruined by MBA guys. Why is AMD outperforming Intel today? Because they didn’t make an MBA person their CEO. You need somebody in charge who understands the technology, pr…
The CEOs of both ULA and Boeing are former engineers
Re: Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a society we sure would be better off if had more Elon Musk type company leaders Maybe, but good ol' Elon would be dead and gone if the US Federal Government hadn't come through with a contract that bailed him out. He was literally begging people like Bezos to lend him money because he couldn't make payroll. Survivor bias is a thing.
You sure about Bezos here? or was he Larry Page? I know Musk is friends with Page. Source - Musk's biography
It's been a while. However, he was begging from anybody and everybody--it could very well have been both.
Re: Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America
#228There is a middle ground to be found here. Musk is managing his companies as pure hype-machines. This can only successfully work for a couple companies that operates as cult. If there is one thing that made Tesla successful, is the charismatic leader personality of Musk. Tesla is only a success on the stock market. They are not profitable, and the coming years will be the turning point for EVs. I don't see them comin…
Have you seen the recent launch? A ship the size of the Soyuz rocket, built literally in a shed in the desert, which flies to 25km, turns off the engines, glides to the landing site -- then performs a 90-degree turn, in the air, in a second.
How is that a 'hype machine'?
Re: Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
The book "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy" discusses this. There seems to be a group of people that think that "grow by 8.2 percent" is a strategy. It is not, it is a goal. Companies with a good strategy will eat the lunch of a company who doesn't know what a strategy is.
Great distinction. The anti-MBA movement is really trying to redefine what an MBA means. Bad business decisions are "M.B.A.-ization". Good business decisions are... something else. Therefore, MBAs are bad. There are plenty of bad MBAs running around, but it's no different than how we also have plenty of bad software developers out there despite having C.S. degrees. In both cases, the worst offenders are over-represen…
Quoting Joel Spolsky: "The cult of MBA makes you think you can manage the businesses that do things you don't understand"
The problem is in thinking of MBA cult itself. If I was an MBA without software engineering experience I would also not understand intricacies but would think I can manage it anyway.
Re: Elon Musk Decries ‘M.B.A.-ization’ of America
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great distinction. The anti-MBA movement is really trying to redefine what an MBA means. Bad business decisions are "M.B.A.-ization". Good business decisions are... something else. Therefore, MBAs are bad. There are plenty of bad MBAs running around, but it's no different than how we also have plenty of bad software developers out there despite having C.S. degrees. In both cases, the worst offenders are over-represen…
Quoting Joel Spolsky: "The cult of MBA makes you think you can manage the businesses that do things you don't understand" The problem is in thinking of MBA cult itself. If I was an MBA without software engineering experience I would also not understand intricacies but would think I can manage it anyway.
This isn't limited to MBA's. There's plenty of (non-cs) engineers out there that are in high ranking positions, making decisions over areas of the business that they know absolutely nothing about.
It's not an MBA cult problem, but it is a management-academia problem. Universities provide classes about management and business without focussing on the actual business part of businesses. If you want to succeed, domain knowledge will almost always be the most important thing, and business and management schools basically brush this to the side as an afterthought.