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American business schools are reinventing the MBA

economist.com

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Re: American business schools are reinventing the MBA

#31

Post by vonmoltke »

madengr wrote: post #9
shrubble wrote: post #3

MBA is functionally a useless degree. (My opinion is based on interactions with MBAs over 25 years). Look at the companies that you admire and that show the ability to innovate... chances are they are run by people with technical backgrounds. Example: AMD is run by Lisa Su, whose background is in EE. HP was run by MBA holder, Carly Fiorina.

Seems Intel is run by an MBA too, with zero engineering experience. Maybe it was he who fired all the senior engineers since their products were mature.

No, that happened on the watch of the prior, technical CEO. The current CEO's layoffs have mostly been about consolidating and outsourcing IT.

Re: American business schools are reinventing the MBA

#32

Post by socalnate1 »

mcgreenbeats wrote: post #29
mcmoose75 wrote: post #23

This is something I wrote for a previous post on Hackernews re MBAs: I went to one of the top-tier (top 3) MBA programs in the US. The way I've described that value of the top MBA programs is in 3 (roughly equally-weighted) categories: 1) The Education: Getting to discuss business concepts with a group of smart, successful folks for 6-9 hours a day is very helpful. Most of the content, I could get from books/ online…

Mcmoose, do you think the University of Michigan has regional appeal that justifies the tuition?

Not Mcmoose; but I would say definitely yes. Top 3 is too high a cutoff in my opinion; I would expand the above sentiments to "top 20"; which would include Ross - especially if you are considering regional appeal and are an industry switcher.

Re: American business schools are reinventing the MBA

#33

Post by leroy_masochist »

mcgreenbeats wrote: post #29
mcmoose75 wrote: post #23

This is something I wrote for a previous post on Hackernews re MBAs: I went to one of the top-tier (top 3) MBA programs in the US. The way I've described that value of the top MBA programs is in 3 (roughly equally-weighted) categories: 1) The Education: Getting to discuss business concepts with a group of smart, successful folks for 6-9 hours a day is very helpful. Most of the content, I could get from books/ online…

Mcmoose, do you think the University of Michigan has regional appeal that justifies the tuition?

Ross is a good school especially if you want to work in marketing, and has a very strong Chicago network.

Re: American business schools are reinventing the MBA

#34

Post by AtlasBarfed »

Are computer systems management classes and knowledge now at par with accounting and finance in MBA?

The fact that there is still the occasional CEO that brags about not even reading his email (granted its been 10 years since I heard something like that publicly) is ridiculous.

The entirety of the smooth management of modern systems is IT systems.

It would be nice if they taught morality, but I can hear the eyerolls from the students from a thousand miles away.

Re: American business schools are reinventing the MBA

#35

Post by mcmoose75 »

mcgreenbeats wrote: post #29
mcmoose75 wrote: post #23

This is something I wrote for a previous post on Hackernews re MBAs: I went to one of the top-tier (top 3) MBA programs in the US. The way I've described that value of the top MBA programs is in 3 (roughly equally-weighted) categories: 1) The Education: Getting to discuss business concepts with a group of smart, successful folks for 6-9 hours a day is very helpful. Most of the content, I could get from books/ online…

Mcmoose, do you think the University of Michigan has regional appeal that justifies the tuition?

I really don't know in that case.

Re: American business schools are reinventing the MBA

#36

Post by magduf »

dangus wrote: post #21
Amygaz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a case study, on CEO with or w/o an MBA, and there was no correlation into the company performance, there was a positive correlation with better compensation. We’ll post the link when I find it. Edit: just use google scholar, there are a load of studies. Scanning through the titles quickly shows that a many people are wondering what is the value of the MBA. It does make the schools a lot of money.

Well, isn't that just like evaluating the difference between whether or not you're a self-taught programmer? If you already have business skills, either from an undergraduate business degree, experience, or self-teaching, you don't need a non-specialized MBA. If you look at the actual MBA curriculum it has courses that seem to be quite obviously useful if you ask me. The only problem here is that there are some place…

>Well, isn't that just like evaluating the difference between whether or not you're a self-taught programmer?

Not quite. Self-taught programmers can get high salaries too. Notice what the OP said about how having a MBA did not correlate with company performance, however it DID correlate with increased compensation. Basically, if you want to get paid extremely well, you need the MBA, even if it has nothing to do with how the company performs.

Re: American business schools are reinventing the MBA

#37

Post by magduf »

shrubble wrote: post #3

MBA is functionally a useless degree. (My opinion is based on interactions with MBAs over 25 years). Look at the companies that you admire and that show the ability to innovate... chances are they are run by people with technical backgrounds. Example: AMD is run by Lisa Su, whose background is in EE. HP was run by MBA holder, Carly Fiorina.

>Look at the companies that you admire and that show the ability to innovate... chances are they are run by people with technical backgrounds.

>Example: AMD is run by Lisa Su, whose background is in EE. HP was run by MBA holder, Carly Fiorina.

You're looking at the wrong thing. You're looking at the companies, their products, etc., and how much you admire those companies and what they produce.

What you're not looking at is executive compensation. You obviously don't think much of HP when Carly was running it, but how much money did she make in that position? That's what's really important, not how the company did, what products it made, or what you personally think of any of that. For Carly, the only thing that matters is how much money she got, so that's the only metric that matters when discussing whether her MBA has any value. Did Carly make more money than Lisa Su? If so, then Carly's background was more valuable to her.

Re: American business schools are reinventing the MBA

#38

Post by magduf »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #34

Are computer systems management classes and knowledge now at par with accounting and finance in MBA? The fact that there is still the occasional CEO that brags about not even reading his email (granted its been 10 years since I heard something like that publicly) is ridiculous. The entirety of the smooth management of modern systems is IT systems. It would be nice if they taught morality, but I can hear the eyerolls…

>The fact that there is still the occasional CEO that brags about not even reading his email (granted its been 10 years since I heard something like that publicly) is ridiculous.

Actually, these days, that might not be such a ridiculous thing. One of my engineer coworkers brags about how he never reads his (work) email either. And he has good reason for it: it's just full of spam and junk, even from the company. If there's something truly important he needs to know about or do, his manager or a coworker will tell him. Of course, part of that is because the rest of us who do read our email are basically acting as his filter, and informing him of the important things he's missing. But serious, email is such a cesspool now that I can see why someone would avoid using it, especially at work where they typically use Microsoft Outlook instead of GMail. At least GMail does a pretty decent job of filtering things, showing you the important stuff, putting spam in the spam folder, etc. Outlook is pretty useless by comparison.

Re: American business schools are reinventing the MBA

#39

Post by zhobbs »

chongli wrote: post #10

It never made sense to me that one could specialize in business. Every business is radically different from one another, even from competitors. Seems like it would be better to combine a few basic business courses with an advanced degree in a technical subject. Going deep into “business” seems to divorce a person from the reality of any particular company. It gets to the point where they’re in danger of disrupting a…

Could the same be said about computer science or most engineering degrees? You walk out of your CS program ready to be a frontend web developer or a device driver developer? I think all degrees are pretty general and then you specialize in the job.

Re: American business schools are reinventing the MBA

#40

Post by lotsofpulp »

tpurves wrote: post #26
tiffanyh wrote: post #20

People seem to forget that the MBA (originally Master of Science in Commerce) was meant for technical undergraduate majors (like Engineers ) to learn business concepts (and not meant for individuals who have a business undergrad degree). That’s also why the graduate degree was called a Master of Science . When you hear people claim that an “MBA is useless”, it’s typically spoken by people who took business as an unde…

Indeed, perhaps the better claim would be that undergraduate in business degress are the ones that are fairly useless.

Bachelors degree are usually pretty good indicators of learning capacity in my opinion. The more rigorous a bachelors degree, the likelier the candidate will be able to learn whatever is thrown at them.
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