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Bulldoze the business school

theguardian.com

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Re: Bulldoze the business school

#121

Post by mseebach »

hinkley wrote: post #105
Fomite wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The conceit of the MBA is that you don’t need to have any substance at all. It’s just this management science, and you can apply that equally well in a software company or an oil drilling company or a fashion company or a rocket company." Ironically, this has become, in some ways, the conceit of Silicon Valley. That the techniques and patterns there can apply equally well for social media and fashion, and oil drilli…

I marked myself as passively looking on LinkedIn recently and it’s been depressing. Now I get that only a certain type of recruiter is out there contacting people but it’s a little unsettling how little information people are providing about the companies. Am I interested? Are you being serious? How would I even know? If there’s something wrong with me for wanting to know more than two bits of information about a com…

Have you tried actually asking for that? It is counterproductive (and a bit arrogant) to assume that other people, especially strangers, are able to deduce what aspects of a job you care about.

My observation is that the recruiters cold-emailing me will generally be heavy on emphasising cool new tech, the opportunity to influence the stack at a greenfield project etc etc, which I don't really care about, I want to work on an interesting real world problem and have a chance of having some impact - the tool chain doesn't matter, if COBOL is the right tool for the job, I'll bloody well learn COBOL.

But nothing in my profile says this. So my analysis is that what I'm getting is what a recruiter thinks an average person with roughly my profile cares about, and thinking about it, it's probably not very wrong.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#122

Post by gaius »

briandear wrote: post #118
gaius wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No respectable business school should admit people without substantial existing work experience into any graduate course. All the top US MBA programmes are stuffed with people with 2-3 years investment banking or management consulting as their sole experience. The concept of a management consultant is possibly even more ridiculous to begin with

Management consultants can be extremely valuable. If, for example, a new restaurant hired a good one with domain experience, a lot of money would be saved and fewer restaurants would fail. How many new restaurant owners have extensive experience with HR efficiency or ordering supplies efficiently or marketing effectively given their target market? Hell, many new restaurant owners have no idea about their market — the…

If, for example, a new restaurant hired a good one with domain experience, a lot of money would be saved and fewer restaurants would fail.

But there is a name for that role already: Head Chef

A better analogy is a manager of an already successful restaurant hiring a consultant to help them reduce the staff's wages and make them work longer hours. Such as an expert on zero-hours contracts perhaps.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#123

Post by gaius »

cjalmeida wrote: post #91
gaius wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No respectable business school should admit people without substantial existing work experience into any graduate course. All the top US MBA programmes are stuffed with people with 2-3 years investment banking or management consulting as their sole experience. The concept of a management consultant is possibly even more ridiculous to begin with

If you think management is only common sense, then paying 500 bucks an hour for MBA grads is ridiculously. Using that logic, either the CEO is stupid, or the company employees are utterly incompetent and lacks common sense. Or, more likely, a) there's some science/skills behind management that can be learned at school even by non experienced people; b) those young MBA people worked 60/70 hours per week for 3/4 years…

either the CEO is stupid

He or she might be; plenty get those kinds of jobs on their personal connections rather than their track records.

But a more usual scenario is that the CEO wants to fund their next bonus by slashing jobs, and paying management consultants - with the company's money - to facilitate that is, to that sort of person, a shrewd move.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#125

Post by mlvljr »

pm90 wrote: post #75
duxup wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That line reminds me of the old FedEx MBA advert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcoDV0dhWPA I've certainly had plenty of run ins with young MBA n00bs who have just so little experience in the world that they're not just somewhat a negative, you can't even communicate with them. A company I worked at loved hiring them and putting MBA grads under some managers and giving them tasks. Most seemed to feel there were dec…

This is a common problem with folks who start in management roles right after college. It sounds incredibly trivial, but you have to kinda be on the other side ... "be managed", to better understand the difference b/w good management and bad. I also had some very incorrect paradigms about the world which I was able to correct in the first couple of years of work (and which I continue to do today whenever I find them…

Not uncommon, you mean, I assume?

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#127

Post by mmirate »

purplezooey wrote: post #126
briandear wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many billion dollar companies have you created?

Hey now, what matters is how many newspapers I've put out of business.

Ever since the World Wide Web became practical, all sorts of businesses have faced a choice: evolve or perish.

Those newspapers made theirs.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#128

Post by analog31 »

kurtisc wrote: post #115
analog31 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view, there is a grain of truth to the "signaling" hypothesis, but it also sounds like: 1. A legitimate grievance from people who didn't get an education and are having it arbitrarily held against them. 2. Sour grapes from people who got nothing from their time spent in school. Higher education is whatever you make of it. You're legally an adult, and can make your own choices. No two people will experience it i…

That grain of truth was enough to win a Nobel prize.

Indeed, but like many social science results, "signaling" has taken on a life of its own in the popular consciousness.

In the post above mine, signaling has gone from being an interesting and potentially measurable effect, to being the entire effect of education. Emphasis mine:

>>> An MBA, much like most schooling, is all about signaling. Anyone who frames our educational system in any other way is missing the point.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#129

Post by anu7df »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #106
gaius wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No respectable business school should admit people without substantial existing work experience into any graduate course. All the top US MBA programmes are stuffed with people with 2-3 years investment banking or management consulting as their sole experience. The concept of a management consultant is possibly even more ridiculous to begin with

I'm a management consultant. My work is not ridiculous. What is ridiculous is the level of damage caused by the utter apathy and incompetence that exists in many organisations. Just because someone is technichally skilled and highly intelligent, does not necessarily make them a capable leader, or a good manager, or even a productive employee. I have met managers, engineers and architects and other technical folks cos…

I am sure you believe management consultants provide value and drive changes that shore up flailing organizations. That might even be objectively true for a minority of cases. But having seen a few MBB engagements "deliver value" my take on it is that consulting business survives by delivering one service (only). A backstop for the executive leadership to justify their agenda. MBB said so! Sice they are expensive as hell they must be right. Again this is about strategy consulting. The other flavors like turnaround/ execution consultants do provide tangible value. But the typical management consulting bashing is about the strategy kind. This is just my opinion. I don't expect anyone to agree. Nor am I attacking your worth as a professional. You could very well be the exception.

Re: Bulldoze the business school

#130

Post by dhimes »

flyingcircus3 wrote: post #104
dhimes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there someplace I can learn more about this? Any writeups or articles you know of?

This is all anecdotal. I've found though from simply asking around, that most Engineering schools, as well as other fields, have weed out classes. They aren't technically labelled as such, but there is no better description, given their passing rates. They are curved grading, so by simple distribution of scores, large numbers of people will fail. There are so many students per teacher, the scarcity of resources deman…

My focus is on the student who gets to college and has all of the aptitude but simply doesn't know how to learn. In engineering, they go to class, listen to the theory, work the problems, and hope for the best on the test. They don't understand that there is a way to learn abstract concepts or even what an abstract concept is- what they are good for, and so on. They need to be taught that consistent review is essential- and how to do it.

So the idea that Purdue has a back-channel for students who may not be as academically gifted, meaning they don't learn well in the manner that traditional courses are taught, is interesting.

This happens outside of E-school and the sciences though. A helluvalotta students are showing up not being able to "do" college. High school was so easy they never had to learn how to learn.

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