Question for MBAs: do you need any actual business experience to go to MBA school?

[jmowreader]

I am going to share with you a suspicion I've had for quite some time: the root cause of the whole financial meltdown the United States is going through is not derivatives, liar loans, or any of that. It is Too Many People with Masters of Business Administration degrees.

Follow through to the end.

The MBA is taught two things:

1) The way to the highest profit margin is to minimize expenses in all ways.

and

2) "Strategic planning" means "get through the quarter."

From the Profit Maximization school we get such joys as finite-element analysis, which is designed to produce an item that will last one day longer than the warranty. We got the Least Expensive Country concept--if a Vietnamese factory can make a shirt cheaper than an American one, send the work to Vietnam. Microeconomics--"we can sell this thing cheaper if Americans don't make it"--has eliminated macroeconomics--"if Americans make this thing, they will have money to buy it."

(An aside: Conservatives like to bitch about how the government has become the employer of choice for a lot of American college graduates. Since the private sector has no qualms about firing all their workers and sending the business to the other side of the Pacific Rim and the government is prohibited by law from doing that, can you blame the college grads?)

I don't know what the fix for this is. Maybe there isn't one, and if that's the case we are eternally screwed.

[MattBaggins]

1. We need a Teddy Roosevelt type.

If they want to move overseas they lose their corporate charter in America. Any contracts they had with America become null and void and their products will have a tariff placed on them.

[TheKentuckian]

2. Fuckin' A

[jmowreader]

3. Losing their corporate charters wouldn't bother them

Reincorporating in the Bahamas is the popular thing to do these days.

I like the tariff and contract-loss parts, though.

[MedicalAdmin]

6. Further they should have a retroactive tax imposed on them.

Warrents should be served and tax increases and tariffs should be backtracked to when the traitors first thought of committing treason.


FYI - I am also for firing squads as well as genetic cleansing of the pool by the removal of all genetically connected lines of these theives. Remove the traitors, their wives and both families root and branch.

[blondeatlast]

4. I'm curious as to whether MBAs study Berkshire-Hathaway?

The things that BH runs away from are the things that most corporations fall all over themselves doing--yet who consistently makes LOADS of money (I have BH class B stock, fwiw).

[yurbud]

5. somebody wrote a good article about this a while back. Ever more conglomerates meant

you didn't need executives who knew the product, just bean counters to keep the books--and later cook them.

The people who start companies generally have some psychic investment in their product and the success of the company, and want it to be a going concern.

The MBA who knows only accounting three card monte has no such attachment. If he could maximize profits by making the best possible product locally with highly skilled and highly paid workers, he will. But more often, the shortest route to the most profits is cannibalism. And after they eat all the meat, they leave the guts and carcass and the attendant flies for us to deal with.

[MedicalAdmin]

7. MBA degree was created to start a professional biz class.

Like doctors, lawyers, etc...

It didn't work out that way. I honestly have never met an MBA who even had a passing understanding of ethics or logic. This is just my experience, but the least ethical folks I know are all MBA's.

Fucking canibals every one of them, IME.

[hifiguy]

8. Every "business" school in the country should be shuttered

Move the accounting departments over into math/statistics. Bean counters can perform some useful and necessary functions, but I've never seen or known an MBA worth their weight in cat litter. Business schools teach a useless and destructive skill set - how to invent new and better ways to steal from and/or chump people and profit while not getting caught.

[On the Road]

9. Jeez, I Have an MBA from Maryland

and I can't recall being taught anything remotely like that.

1) Some companies that operate by severe cost-cutting are unfortunately successful, but in my experience they're mostly in the stable old-line industries, not the ones where MBAs are more prevalent.

A lot of the most popular business movements of the last few decades are anything but putting cost-cutting first, notably quality control and preventative maintenance. My own employer had a "Best Cost" effort, which was specifically not the same as "least cost," and which IMO was actually useful in cutting some unecessary expenses.

2) Strategic planning is the opposite of "get through the quarter." A good example is a company like MCI, which was indeed focused on being lowest-cost and thought less about long-term strategy. During the 80s and early 90s, they specifically avoided going into data and wireless on the theory that "MCI means 'Money Coming In.'" And they failed because of their short-sightednes.

This is not to say that MBA grads weren't involved in a lot of shenanigans that went on in, say, the financial industries. But 90% of any jobs skills are learned after graduation. Don't blame the programs for something they're not teaching.

[Change Happens]

10. I have a MBA, nothing you say is even close to the truth:

No, you don't have to have business experience before you study business, just like everything else...You go to school to study business stuff...etc.

For your information, business means profitable business, if a business loses money, it will disappear, close, go away...etc.

So, to have a business, to run a business, it needs to be a profitable business - Yes, as profitable as possible.