Valleywag has a story on how Harvard MBAs are to blame for the current state of affairs on Wall Street. Henry Mintzberg must be feeling some satisfaction, not that I’d want to accuse of him of schadenfreude. After all, he wrote THE book (Managers not MBAs) on this very subject. In it he excoriated the Harvard MBA before going on to set out his views of how management education ought to work. His indictment was brutal and brilliant. Until I read Mintzberg’s book I didn’t know that Robert S. McNamara was a Harvard alumnus and that his HBS training (followed by some graduate statistics work) was the background to the whole “body count” fiasco in Vietnam. In seeking to manage by numbers he was responsible for a larger equivalent of the
We had to destroy the village to save it.
policy. McNamara carried his preoccupations with measurement to the World Bank and his legacy is still being undone. George Bush, responsible for the war in Iraq, is another Harvard Business School alumnus. However, this is something I find baffling. He applied to Harvard AFTER he was refused admission to law school in Texas and he really doesn’t seem very bright. (Interesting NYT story here: Bush, Harvard Business School and the Makings of a President). And what did he learn? Mintzberg is scatching about the practice of taking young people with no experience of management and puffing them up with inflated ideas of their own powers and letting them loose, with, all too often, sorry consequences.
…or as a Harvard MBA graduate told Time magazine some years ago, in case discussions “you get into the habit of thinking you can deal with any problem quickly. In real life you don’t have the luxury of skipping over the details.” Mintzberg p.114
Details, such as the one George Bush enquired about shortly before invading Iraq,
You mean, there’s like a difference?
between Sunni and Shia muslims (source; one of many). Details. Details. There is no substitute for judgement and situational knowledge. Measurement didn’t do it for McNamara and gut instinct and righteous religious convictions didn’t do it for Bush.
MBA graduates who believe that they can manage anything are quite simply a menace to society. Mintzberg p.160
They are overconfident in their ability to analyze (the MBA has been derided as Management By Analysis). Of course, not every HBS alumnus has turned out badly, but a very large proportion are allegedly practitioners the kind of the kind of short term, selfish thinking that all too often leads to fat profits for a few and misery for employees. In short, they are believers in shareholder value; subscribers to the Chicago School of Economics view of the world summed up by Milton Friedman’s glib line
The business of business is business.
Meaning: government and society must take care of everything else.
To date most people in the UK have no idea wide the transatlantic gap on this issue has become. The UK, for all the anti-European rhetoric and bluster in the tabloid press, has quietly adopted the EU approach: it’s now the law that company directors must consider the effects of their actions on the welfare of employees and on the environment. Shareholders are no longer paramount.
“Enlightened shareholder value” is the new shorthand for the broader view.
In America it might be mocked as “socialized shareholder value”.
Is it possible that the cumulative bill for Bush’s recklessness might persuade America of the benefits of a little more socialization? There’s at least one modern precedent for feckless government being followed a dramatic turnaround after a cathartic near death experience: Ireland.
It’s unthinkable that America will not reinvent itself. And maybe Harvard too.
Harvard postgraduate Andrew Sullivan’s blog posts on The Atlantic make the unthinkable entertaining in the meantime. But it’s not a daily dish. It’s a constantly restocked snack machine for which an RSS reader is essential.
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We have a similar problem in France, with Enarques parachuted into industries they know nowt about. They tend to get promoted out of trouble fairly quickly, only to be replaced by a fresh batch. Had one inform hubby he wasn’t qualified to do his job, only to eat humble pie a week later when praising a methodology and realising it was written by you’ve guessed who!
Aye. I’ve heard enarque described as French for pointy headed intellectual.
However, I have to say I’m happy to see Britain’s nuclear industry being taken over by the French and Banco Santander buying up UK banks. I find all the huffing and puffing about foreign ownership a lot of cod. The sooner the better the Dutch run the trains, the French the electricity, etc. the better. What, I wonder, will the rest of Europe prefer the British to run? Television? Italy?
BTW a glitch with WP caused a draft of that post to be published (excuse for bad punctuation).
TV and customer service, PLEASE!