MBA
From eg
The MBA or Master's of Business Administration degree is the most common training for management in North America and the UK. Equivalent designations exist in Europe. However, the usefulness of this training has been sharply questioned, including by major business media such as Forbes magazine [1] which in 2011 listed "ten biggest lies of B-school"...
Aside from teaching doctrine:rent, Forbes identified the following psychopathological beliefs of many MBAs:
"1. You will be rich." This also, according to Henry Mintzberg, attracts the wrong people to such schooling. See greed.
"2. You are smarter than people without an MBA." Possibly a sign of believing that financial capital is so perfect as an arbiter of character and value that no more fundamental capital asset should ever be assessed. See also economism.
"3. There’s always a right answer." The "very analytical and achievement-oriented" seek best not good-enough answers, and assume the information they get from formal systems is perfect or at least good enough to rely on. Possibly a sign of numerism, systematically believing that quantitative data is better than any qualitative.
"4. If you’ve made it this far (to B-School), you’re destined to succeed. In my B-School, there were always amazingly talented executives coming in to give talks on business and life. They’d always compliment us on what a great school we attended and why we had our future by the tail. It made us all feel invincible..." but unfairly.
"5. You know how to “fix” the first few companies you join after school. You’ve probably worked at companies were people who’ve been there for 2 decades roll their eyes telling you about the new hotshot MBA who just started and is now telling everyone how to do their jobs. It’s so clear to him, yet others find it deeply offensive that he would think he knows how the company works when they’ve spent countless years there and are still trying to figure it out. All hotshot MBAs should wear tape over their mouths for the first 3 months on the job and not be allowed to “fix” anything." It takes at least that long just to acquire the vocabulary and ontological distinctions of that particular business. It's like living in a foreign country and barely knowing how to ask for a glass of water.
"6. Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) will always tell you what a company is worth. MBAs love DCF. They think the true answer to what a company is worth is always a DCF away. Just crank it out on a spreadsheet or whiteboard, show the boss, and move on to the next problem. Unless you’re going to be a sell-side analyst, you’ll never do a DCF after B-School. And even the sell-side analysts get their underlings to do them. And no one reading your reports will read them anyway." Again a symptom that cashflow is the only important value in any company or project.
"7. The “soft” courses (leadership and people management) are least important.... MBAs never paid attention to them in class. Yet, the Executive MBAs (usually in their 40s or 50s) always told them that these courses were the most important of all the B-School classes they took. You learn after B-School that the perfect answer or strategy means nothing if you can’t get people around you to buy in to it and help you achieve it. To do that, you need to motivate them, listen to them, connect with them, and support them when they need it." See human capital.
"8. You are going to be more creative and entrepreneurial after Business School than before. ...They teach courses on entrepreneurship but it’s kind of an oxymoron the idea of the analysis paralysis B-School Students being entrepreneurial. You will learn a lot of tools and frameworks in B-School, but you won’t learn how to start a company. You just need to start a company." See five ins at startup for an operational view of what capital assets are most essential at this phase.
"9. Your peers will give you lots of tips and insights that will help you succeed in your career. In my experience, the majority of B-School students are lemmings. They don’t know what they want to do afterwards, so they just do what their peers say they should do (maybe that’s why they applied to B-School in the first place). Ten years ago, everyone at my school wanted to be a dot com entrepreneur. That didn’t work out so well and most students later went back to being investment bankers or management consultants. Your peers don’t know what you want to do with your career. You need to start listening to that voice inside your head."
"10. The Ivy League MBAs will be even more successful. An Ivy League credential will be a big plus for you on your resume – no question. However, you have to realize that if you’re getting an Ivy League MBA, you’re probably 10x more susceptible to the previous 9 lies than other MBAs. Don’t let yourself be the next Jeff Skilling, the smart Harvard MBA, who worked at McKinsey and then went to Enron and drove the company off a cliff." The ugly downside of social capital being a tendency to actually believe in one's relationships over all other feedback.
