Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Harvard MBAs

Whoa. Some nasty stuff here...

If Robespierre were to ascend from hell and seek out today’s guillotine fodder, he might start with a list of those with three incriminating initials beside their names: MBA. The Masters of Business Administration, that swollen class of jargon-spewing, value-destroying financiers and consultants have done more than any other group of people to create the economic misery we find ourselves in.

And it gets better:

I write as the holder of an MBA from Harvard Business School – once regarded as a golden ticket to riches, but these days more like scarlet letters of shame. We MBAs are haunted by the thought that the tag really stands for Mediocre But Arrogant, Mighty Big Attitude, Me Before Anyone and Management By Accident. For today’s purposes, perhaps it should be Masters of the Business Apocalypse.

Harvard Business School alumni include Stan O’Neal and John Thain, the last two heads of Merrill Lynch, plus Andy Hornby, former chief executive of HBOS, who graduated top of his class. And then of course, there’s George W Bush, Hank Paulson, the former US Treasury secretary, and Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a remarkable trinity who more than fulfilled the mission of their alma mater: “To educate leaders who make a difference in the world.”


It just wasn’t the difference the school had hoped for.

The really significant stuff, though, is here:

During my time at the school, 50 students were chosen to participate in a detailed survey of their development. Scott Snook, the professor who ran it, reported that about a third of students were inclined to define right and wrong simply in terms of what everyone else was doing.

“They can’t really step back and take a critical view,” he said. “They’re totally defined by others and by the outcomes of what they’re doing.”


A group of people unable to see their actions in the broader context of the society they inhabit have no business being self-regulating
.

For most of us, discerning right from wrong is far more important than being able to run a multivariable regression analysis in one's head.

It should be so at Harvard, too, ain'a?

HT: AmSpecBlog

4 comments:

Shoebox said...

This comes as no surprise to anyone who has worked with any of these folks. They are the most ammoral, self absorbed and separated from the real world group of folks that have ever existed!

Anonymous said...

Don't forget...Herb "No one's Senator" Kohl is a Harvard MBA.

'nuff said.

Anonymous said...

So when do the people with a smidge of common sense ditch their inferiority complexes and figure out that having an Ivy League Law Degree or MBA should automatically disqualify someone from public office? They really ARE NOT that much smarter than everyone - no matter how much they tell you that they are.

JJ

Dad29 said...

I don't know that it's an automatic disqualification. That might be unfair to the 1 or 2 who actually have common sense.