I recently finished an executive MBA at a top European B-school. To echo some of the comments, it was overall way easier than my initial studies (eng school), with some exceptions such as a brutal strategy assignment. There was also a sense of entitlement from some of the participants, especially those who were financed by their company. “Entertain me and give me my diploma” so to speak.
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.
> This was in 2017 and I assume they had at least heard of the subprime crisis
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.
"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."
Ironically, this has become, in some ways, the conceit of Silicon Valley. That the techniques and patterns there can apply equally well for social media and fashion, and oil drilling and healthcare.
I marked myself as passively looking on LinkedIn recently and it’s been depressing.
Now I get that only a certain type of recruiter is out there contacting people but it’s a little unsettling how little information people are providing about the companies. Am I interested? Are you being serious? How would I even know?
If there’s something wrong with me for wanting to know more than two bits of information about a company before I start a conversation, then I don’t wanna be right.
Have you tried actually asking for that? It is counterproductive (and a bit arrogant) to assume that other people, especially strangers, are able to deduce what aspects of a job you care about.
My observation is that the recruiters cold-emailing me will generally be heavy on emphasising cool new tech, the opportunity to influence the stack at a greenfield project etc etc, which I don't really care about, I want to work on an interesting real world problem and have a chance of having some impact - the tool chain doesn't matter, if COBOL is the right tool for the job, I'll bloody well learn COBOL.
But nothing in my profile says this. So my analysis is that what I'm getting is what a recruiter thinks an average person with roughly my profile cares about, and thinking about it, it's probably not very wrong.
Your experience is pretty similar to mine I think.
Doesn’t it bother you that the pitch is so... amoral? As first impressions go it makes me pretty uncomfortable.
Hey we use ML and are growing quickly, come work with us. I’ve gotten that one three times. One of them was an ad network. Another was ‘disrupting’ some large industry that we all use every day but wouldn’t say what. The third I still have no idea.
No, doesn't bother me. I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that when I want to look for a new job, the onus is on me to articulate what I want to do, and in the meantime, the cold emails give me a bit of intelligence into what's stirring out there. As for morality, different people feel differently about different things. I have nothing against adtech or hedge funds (that's what they try to recruit me for) per se, but that's not to say I'd be excited about working on it. Again, a recruiter can't tell from a sparse LinkedIn profile what I may or may not care about.
I am definitely not a Thiel fan, but I strongly agree with him here. The best managers I've had were always ones who deeply understood something besides management. The supposed universality of management theory, plus the training toward slick presentation and glib self-promotion, makes it very easy for people to not only not know what's going on, but have a strong personal interest in not knowing what's going on.
This definitely leads to short-term gains as people work the obvious levers to make the profit graph go up and to the right. But I think it's antithetical to the sort of deeper investment that builds real businesses and provides sustaining innovation.
Toyota, for example, was run by engineers, who came up with a deeply different theory of business. It was so fundamentally strange to American MBA thinking that US car companies were unable to comprehend it despite many attempts to learn it in the 70s and 80s. Toyota went from Japan's post-war decimation to become the world's leading car company, while US carmakers have needed government bailouts just to stay afloat.
This stands in deep contrast to the way MBA-style approaches kills established companies by over-extracting short-term profits in ways that destroy long-term value. Toys R Us is a recent example, and Simmons is a good historical one: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmon...
You need to learn to separate the message from the messenger. If you didn’t know who said it, does it make sense in and of itself? What if instead of Thiel the quote was attributed to Obama or Taylor Swift? Who actually says lots of insightful things, she is very smart.
I agree with Thiel here: management is not a generic skill that can equally be applied in any field without any domain knowledge. Obviously very few things are! But few claim to be either, and MBAs do.
I am wondering about the same. Peter Thiel does not seem to be someone the world should listen to. His politics are anti-human I would say. And yes, by being as influentual as he is I think we can and should talk about his politics here.
I am still trying to figure out how two such different world-views like thiel and musk were able to work together.
Just because someone has bad ideas (or ideas you disagree with) in one area, why would that mean all their ideas are bad?
To take an extreme example, Bobby Fischer is easily in the running for best chess player of all time. He was also an anti-semite. Does that somehow make his chess less good? Should we ignore that he was an anti-Semite? No! But should we cut all his games from chess books because of it?
Indeed, if you read many biographies one might quickly reach the conclusion that many of the world’s most accomplished men and women are also among its most flawed. Science, literature, and art would be set make many centuries if we had to discard all the work of those not meeting modern standards of decency.
To be clear, I don’t think Thiel is anywhere near as extreme a case as Fischer. I disagree with his politics (just the ordinary libertarian Baloney), but I think he is right on this point.
My advice to you would be to learn to separate ideas from the people that originate them, or you’ll miss out on so much great thought.
There are ideas I "disagree with", for example whether superhero movies are good. And then there is "disagreement" euphemism for "being actively harmful" and for "being unethical" and so one. Because people don't want to talk too badly, or sound impolite, so they hide behind euphemism.
I can say that we disagree about scrum and we disagree about slavery, and the word "disagreement" does not work the same in both cases.
There is also difference between listening to Fischer on chess and listening to someone like him on how things should be managed or organized. In the latter case his morality and opinions we "disagree with" matter much more.
> most accomplished men and women are also among its most flawed.
That is because their flaws were their competitive advantage. They did became presidents and powerful, because they were willing to be unethical and cruel. Those who were not willing to act in immoral way were less likely to rise to power and success.
That is why it makes sense to point it out. Because otherwise your morality boils down to "but it makes you rich/powerful/successful then it is ok". And meanwhile you ignore opinions of competitors who were not willing to go there. Because apparently opinions of people who are less willing to do anything to get their way matter less.
There are many chess players. There are many chess players playing very good. You don't need to promote the anti-semite chess player. You can also promote the one who does not propagate fascist world views.
Let' use the analogy for the sentence from Peter Thiel:
The statement that managers should know something besides management is not original at all. There are hundreds of people telling you that. It is common wisdom. I heard that 20 years ago and I am still hearing it.
So why promote Peter Thiel for saying that? There is no need at all to quote him. The quote is not original, nothing new, nothing special.
Nevertheless, the commenter decided to quote Peter Thiel on that and give him praise.
No moreso than Galileo or Copernicus could have been called "anti-Earth", for "refusing to properly grant the Earth its sacred superiority to all other celestial objects".
At the end of the day, we humans are all just squishy machines, that happen to have one sole component between-the-ears that can't yet be duplicated (let alone bested like any other aspect of us) by artificial means. Like any other machine, humans are all means not ends (barring the silliest sentimentality).
I know somebody who studied aerospace engineering and then went to business school later. He also thought it surprisingly easy, saying that he only learned one thing that he couldn't have easily figured out on his own: the principle of comparative advantage. [1] He said for him the main benefit was building a good set of connections.
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.