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The Simple MBA Manifesto: Do We Really Need MBAs?
- Do We Need The MBAs? Rethinking Business Education
- How do you teach obsession? Because often it is obsession that drives an entrepreneur's vision. How do you learn to be an outsider if you are not one already? - Dame Anita Roddick, founder of Body Shop
- MBAs Cheat. 56% of all MBA students cheat at Exams. Source: study by the Academy of Management Learning and Education of 5,300 students in the U.S. and Canada
- What’s wrong with MBAs? Business Education is not about Business. It is about Money. Source: http://sprizouse.blogspot.com/2008/11/amoral-mba-students.html
- Can you name any successful, path-breaking, innovative company started by an MBA?
- MBA Salaries Are Insane
- What do MBAs Actually Do? MBAs ran Enron (2001) and these superstars of the subprime crisis 2008-9
- MBAs Often Make Bad Bosses. Their education does not always make them nice people. Pictured alongside is Alec Baldwin in “Glengerry Glen Ross”
- Create Boring Companies
- Where People Don’t Love Working Pictured alongside is a scene from Mike Judge’s “Office Space”
- <ul><li>MBA Teaching </li></ul><ul><li>Is Overrated </li></ul><ul><li>A. Fanciful, fictional case studies </li></ul><ul><li>B. High on theory, low on practical. </li></ul><ul><li>C. Formulae for everything. </li></ul><ul><li>D. Students learn not to talk or write like </li></ul><ul><li>humans do. </li></ul><ul><li>D. Professors who have rarely worked as an </li></ul><ul><li>entrepreneur or senior manager. </li></ul><ul><li>F. Schools create a mystique of excellence by </li></ul><ul><li>Choosing only the high scorers. </li></ul><ul><li>G. Group work is over-hyped - B-Schools </li></ul><ul><li>reduce every problem to meetings and group </li></ul><ul><li>discussion. </li></ul><ul><li>Source: Michigandaily.com </li></ul>
- MBAs themselves are over-rated. Add $500,000 for every engineer in the company. Subtract $ 250,000 for every (overpaid) MBA onboard. - Guy Kawasaki’s formula for valuing new companies
- Some of the best successes on the internet are single or two person stories.
- MBA degrees don’t guarantee a job. Three main issues facing the workforce: A. Self- Employment B. Re-skilling C. Staying ahead of the competition. Source: Michigandaily.com Wall Street Journal
- Let us reform our schools and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons. - John Ruskin
- Education is very expensive.
- Let’s Start With Using Common Sense
- And A Will To Teach Ourselves
- B-Schools Do Not Teach Everything
- Books Do
- We Can learn Business in 1 Day
- Or, in 10 Days
- How about 30 Days?
- Or, Read The Best Business Books AKA The Personal MBA Manifesto
- Read The Success Manual Your Ultimate Compilation of Business and Self-Help Advice: - Essential compilation of great advice on 130 Most Important Business & Self-Development Topics - Concise summaries from 200+ Greatest Business and Self Development Books of all time - Advice from the greatest minds: 3000+ very useful quotes Special Price: $14.95 615 Large, Magazine-Size Pages $14.95 only http://thesuccessmanual.bighow.com Copyright © 2012 Pramit Singh
All my arguments below are assuming that the facts you have quoted are true. But i have a problem with you extrapolating those facts to the conclusion you are trying to arrive which seems to be logically inconsistent.
I m pointing here only the glaring inconsistencies that I observed
1) How can a test that suggests that 56% of the students pursuing MBA cheat have the slightest possible relevance here. It defines the moral compass of the people in the sample set and unfortunately they seem to be pursuing an MBA. Maybe if you could have quoted a test that studies the same sample set, before enrolling in an MBA program and after that, your argument would have been agreeable. So stop quoting half baked tests with utmost irrelevance.
2) When you talk about MBA's not starting a 'path breaking company'- assuming that your argument is true- the role of an MBA graduate per se, is not to start a new company. It is to manage the responsibilities given to him/her effectively. So next time, when someone finds a permanent cure to AIDS, please dont start clamoring that an MBA did not do it and so we dont need MBA's.
3) US CEO's were paid 113 times more than an average worker. ROFL, you seriously got to be kidding me. I agree they are being overpaid, but what does this even have to do with MBAs? Did you even think to check how many of them had an MBA. So considering that people without MBA are also there in the list, it must be easy to conclude that it is not for the MBA that they are being overpaid but for the role they are taking up .
4) Talking of scandals, please do check this link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporate_scandals) and see for yourself how many MBA's have been singularly responsible for the scandals and those without MBA's being responsible. You would find that MBA graduates form a small minority of them. So, if I have to follow your logic (if there was something like that in the first place), we need to have more MBA's leading the organizations and not the other way round.
5) Funny that you should quote an MBA himself (Guy Kawasaki), after saying that MBA's to be cheats and liars and he talks about the overpaid ones only and all MBA's which you conveniently chose to ignore.
The above arguments pertain only to the facts above and not your opinions (as you are entitled to yours).
If your goal was actually to engage in the question of MBA value, you would have put more effort into defending your views and not simply dismissed dissenting views as 'mean.' I thought the comments here were quite respectful.
One thing you could do to improve the accuracy of your presentation is to include links to sources, so that we could understand which of your statements had sources, and which were your original statements (not necessarily wrong, just that they were yours). I think you are conflating 'business people' with MBAs in many of your assertions. For example, on slide 7 where you indirectly accuse MBAs of the sub-prime mess:
- Citigroup was run by Chuck Prince, a lawyer
- Bank of America was run by Ken Lewis, a career BofA employee who had a bachelors in finance and took executive courses at Standford, but did not have an MBA
- AIG was run by Hank Greenberg, a lawyer, from 1968-2005. Since then he has been succeeded by Martin Sullivan (2005-2008), Robert Willumstad (mid 2008), Edward M. Liddy (2008-2009), and Robert Benmosche since. Only Liddy had an MBA, and he was brought in by the government after AIG had already required the bailout.
I could go on, but the point is clear. I hope you won't think that I've been mean to disagree with you or request that you do fact checking.
http://bighow.com/news/the-bible-of-business-writing-how-to-write-memos-letters-emails-press-releases-business-reports-newsletters-articles-and-tip-sheets
The Bible to Analysing Things: Stakeholder analysis, SWOT, 5 Cs Analysis, PEST Analysis, PERT and Action Analysis
http://bighow.com/news/the-bible-to-analysing-things-stakeholder-analysis-swot-5-cs-analysis-pest-analysis-pert-and-action-analysis