Bulldoze the business school

> There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits

That is the basis for the argument your professor made. However, the passage in its entirety is:

> There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

Which is a pretty major caveat.

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 decisions to make and they were going to make them (hey they have an MBA) and that was that. Some simply didn't show any curiosity about anything, they didn't ask questions so they just never knew and thus their decisions were almost always flawed.

One wonderful fellow was given the task of making the schedule for a call center type environment of about 20 or so people. People would email him schedule preferences and he would make the schedule. This was a fairly straightforward task that had been done for many many years. Except that he never responded to emails and as far as anyone could tell the end product didn't reflect anyone's preferences. It was actually hard to get him to understand that other than responding to his boss's emails... he needed to respond to those who were not his boss. In addition we had to teach him that scheduling someone an overnight shift and then a day shift, and then a night shift and so on was a bad idea.

These guys were so stuck in their MBA world that it really was difficult just to COMMUNICATE with them as there was no shared experience. I don't think he ever had an actual job of any consequence, and his internships were with other MBA type folks doing MBA things with other MBA people.

I've no doubt there are young folks graduating with MBAs who would and will do great, but if you're talking about professional management and such roles IMO most people need a hell of a lot of life experience before they know what they are doing.

On the other hand, due to the executive nature of the program (average age was something like 38-39) the classes were much more nuanced, especially on topics such as HR, management and so forth - when everyone in the room has some degree of managerial experience and a few war stories to share there’s much less room for indoctrination. This was also due to European culture, which is a big part of the school’s DNA and reinforced by the mostly European cohort.

I did learn a lot of stuff; what will stay with me the most is what I learned about myself, through introspective assignments and interacting with other students, most of whom had very different backgrounds. But I would never have been able to do this had I taken the program as an undergrad or right after eng school. It’s true that you can’t teach common sense, you must learn it through practice. However having the opportunity to reflect on that practice, formalizing it and sharing it with likeminded persons was tremendously helpful.

EDIT: to constrast my experience with the content of TFA, I crossed a few MBA students in NY during a seminar. The discussion went something like this:

Me: so what business do you guys want to work in after graduating?

One of them: real estate!

Me: cool, any particular reason why?

Him: to make lots of money and retire early! (Rest of the group nod in agremeent)

Me: ...

This was in 2017 and I assume they had at least heard of the subprime crisis.

I'm not committed to anything, would you have preferred I chose a woman to be put into the role of (from your perspective) "the villain"? What about a transgender person of color, would that not completely change the power dynamics of the situation? How about literally a red herring that somehow made it through business school?

The point is, if you want to just push an ideology into the heads of students in order to "fix capitalism", without any regard to the actual socio-economic environment, you're doing them a disservice and you will fail at your goal. These people will not survive in the market based on what you teach them.

"Self-interest at any cost" is a naive caricature of capitalism. You're probably indoctrinated too much for me to make an impact here, but just keep in mind that if you only ever fight a straw man, you're never winning an actual battle.

> Self-interest is fine and dandy, but the example you're citing -- dispense with a hundred people in order to obtain a half a million dollars -- is not an overly productive practice for most societies.

Unfortunately, you weren't even able to perceive the scenario as the dilemma that it is: In this scenario, either 90 or 100 workers will be fired for economic reasons. The question is, does the manager give up on his bonus to save 10 people for one year, voluntarily. If he does, it may have an impact on morale, boosting productivity, possibly leading to even higher long-term gain. If he doesn't, he immediately gets to be more wealthy. There's no obviously right or wrong answer even from the point of self-interest.

Contrary to what one might like to believe, productivity is not the same as production output. If there's a surplus, production must be decreased to the point where it meets demand, not well above. Laying off workers then can improve productivity, because revenue relative to cost increases. These are basic economic principles that exist even outside of capitalist systems, especially socialist systems (used to) struggle with this issue. As far as society as a whole is concerned, widespread misallocation of labor makes everyone poorer, because it creates a discrepancy between what is produced and what is necessary.

Brings to mind this from Peter Thiel (exclude the length):

Q. You’ve written that you doubt the efficacy of MBA programs to prepare future business leaders. What would an effective MBA program look like?

A. The question is, what substance of business are you focused on? 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. That’s the bias I’d want us to cut against. So for the degree, people would learn substantive things and then on the side you’d pick up some business skills. But you wouldn’t treat the business degree as the central thing.

I think one challenge a lot of the business schools have is they end up attracting students who are very extroverted and have very low conviction, and they put them in this hot house environment for a few years — at the end of which, a large number of people go into whatever was the last trendy thing to do. They’ve done studies at Harvard Business School where they’ve found that the largest cohort always went into the wrong field. So in 1989, they all went to work for Michael Milken, a year or two before he went to jail. They were never interested in Silicon Valley except for 1999, 2000. The last decade their interest was housing and private equity.

So there is something about the way in which business school is decoupled from anything really substantive that I’d want to rethink.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2014/10...