MBA curriculum doesn’t teach you how to effectively run a business, it just teaches you how to maximize shareholder profit and value and that mindset is what leads to more and more businesses becoming enshittified all in the name of stock price. If MBAs focused on building relationships with clients and vendors, i’m so sure that we’d have more quality CEOs and managers but all we have right now is a bunch of egg-heads telling us how the consumer is wrong and other synergy-based bullshit.
Comments
Please remember what subreddit you are in, this is unpopular opinion. We want civil and unpopular takes and discussion. Any uncivil and ToS violating comments will be removed and subject to a ban. Have a nice day!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Depends on who is earning the MBA.
If it’s someone who has been in the working world for a considerable length of time, then it’s valuable. Because those are the ones who know how to differentiate theory from reality. They are basically rounding out their knowledge base.
If it’s someone who hasn’t, it’s the most dangerous thing in the world. I’ve sat in meetings with those types and can generally tell a few minutes in that they know next to nothing.
Yeah I have several friends who have been through programs in the last 10 years and all of them say the same thing: it’s coursework on how to package and sell.
Did you ever go to business school
Every MBA I’ve met has been at minimum a sociopath if not a psychopath.
We’re in this mess because our leader doesn’t understand tariffs and basic economics
“MBA culture” is capitalism. You hate capitalism. As you should.
MBA’s are people who went to college and didn’t know what they wanted to be, and got all the way through college and still don’t know what they want to do with their lives.
True. I remember the moment I checked out mentally – it’s when we were supposed to come up with a business idea, and the professor told some of us we were not “thinking outside the box” by trying to focus on making something consumers need, rather than aiming to capitalize on their insatiable wants.
Apparently, making things people need is “demand limited” and therefore not a good investment for shareholders. Unless it’s medicine, in which case we can just jack up prices infinitely, who cares if some of our customer base dies?
I’ve worked with some very intelligent MBA’s. Great leaders and all the rest.
I’ve also worked with some absolute idiots that have MBA’s.
It’s not the degree, it’s the person. Some people just believe whatever they are told and take it as gospel.
Spoken like someone who has not gone through a quality MBA program.
They do not “teach you how to maximize shareholder profit”. There might be limited accounting classes that go over the fiduciary duty companies have to shareholders but this at most is a passive couple of sentences in a couple classes in your 2 years.
They literally do focus on relationship building with clients lmao. (Top) MBA programs are a glorified 2 year HR incubator for investment banks and consulting firms. Building relationships with clients are key in these fields and that is burnt into you througt many of your classes.
What MBA Programs do is help you take a 2 year break to develop the skills to have a successful career. How do I go about pitching to a VC if I want to start a company? Well here’s how people have done it in the past. Also here is a large network of VCs that are interested in hearing pitches from our students.
They teach you shit about how you can succeed in certain careers. There is no overarching “we need to maximize shareholder value”. It’s – how do I get the skills to pitch to VCs, work in IB/PE, MBB etc etc. this is very different from “maximizing shareholder value” and relationship management is a key part of it.
Also keep in mind people who are in most MBA programs are exiting in to at best middle management positions. They are not going on to be CEOs unless they are the handful that found their own company
That’s not an MBA thing. It’s a life thing.
Think of personal relationships, as they progress people go from building relationships and conceding things to get the other person invested to which then they eventually start profiting off the relationship.
ITT- people who don’t understand what business school is, undergrad or graduate. It all depends on what you do with it and how you approach it.
I’ve also met some edge lords with a hard science degree but approached it as a trivia challenge and advocate for eugenics.
When you start running the company with accountants that’s the kiss of death IMO. Slicing those pennies without regard to what it does to your customer. If the MBA embraces doing things for accounting games then they fail to really understand what’s important for a business. It’s short term, quarter to quarter thinking.
I’m not sure what you really mean by this. If you run a publicly traded company the goal IS to maximize profit and value for shareholders. Publicly traded companies only do nice stuff for customers (whether that be develop cool products or have good customer service) BECAUSE it makes them more money. There is no incentive for them to be better to consumers unless it starts negatively affecting their bottom line.
MBAs are doing EXACTLY what they are trained and intended to do.
Whether or not it should be this way is an entirely different question.
i sort of get what you are getting at but i took a business course and they do talk about relationships with customers and suppliers
The financial mess is caused by tariffs. Meanwhile, tariffs do the opposite of maximizing value…
Gary’s Economics
I agree. And I dont see this as unpopular. But I want to raise this message. I’m so conflicted as to upvote or not.
It really isn’t though. You have MBAs in many countries that don’t have the same problems as the US. Specifying issues to MBAs or MBA culture is a massive simplification of reality.
But did the MBA culture come first or was it the Supreme Court ruling that corporations have a legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value?
I think more to the point, the problem is the financialization of literally everything. The purpose of that is to make money from various financial mechanisms rather than by producing something like goods or services. Since 1960, the financial sector’s share of total GDP has gone from under 4% to about 8%. While there are some benefits to it, of course, we have way too much of a good thing and their priorities have shaped too much of law and policy and our economy.
This sounds like it is written by someone that failed out of an NBA program and is just bitter.
Any degree program is only as good as the mindset of the student.
Most of the things listed are objectively false. Not sure where you got your MBA….
I got mine at McGill and we absolutely did have a focus on building relationships and then managing them.
Also, maximizing shareholder value with a very short term mentality is typically American.
Yeah, business schools indoctrinate reckless capitalism, shareholder value and stock prices above all else.
This is literally not true. This conveniently fits your premise to blame someone.
I have an MBA, and I’ve never in my life worked at a company that even has shareholders. I’m an executive at a health care agency that provides free or almost-free health care to the homeless.
Most of these programs for at least a couple decades now, are just theater posing as education. Write a bunch of papers with pointlessly tight deadlines, participate in group “case studies” to see why Microsoft was so successful, etc. It’s supposed to make you feel like you’re in an “intense” program (like an extended boot camp).
It’s a like a 2nd bachelor’s degree where you’re continually told how not everyone makes it into, nor out of, the program, you’re lucky you’re here, your life is going to change post-grad, etc.
I’ve worked at multiple big name companies alongside people with MBAs, and they were no more capable than myself or others without the MBA.
I think maybe decades ago (when colleges actually failed low performers) the MBA designation actually meant something. But it’s been so greatly diluted that it’s just a generic checkbook for run of the mill office jobs now.
MBAs ruin everything. I have been saying this for years.
You work somewhere, they hire an MBA, and all of a sudden there’s no free coffee and everyone is miserable.
They squeeze all the extra juice out of everything and then there is no joy.
An MBA is a 2 year networking event. It’s why unless you’re checking a box for a promotion, you’re supposed to go full time in person.
Most people with MBAs are those that couldn’t make money off their bachelor’s degree so got their MBA in hopes they would actually make money.
Business degrees aren’t real degrees. You can read it from library. You don’t can hard skills unless it’s for accounting CPA or MIS, maybe finance if done correctly.
I’ve thought for a long time now that straight MBAs with no world experience who just want to run shit are actually sociopaths. A lot of
MBA programs are turning out bean counters whose
Only perceivable talent is propping up stock prices with layoffs and wage depression or outsourcing to other countries that could give a shit about human rights. You train them to be sociopaths, we shouldn’t be surprised when they act like one
Somewhere along the way investing in the company to generate stable, long-term returns has become taboo and it’s all hyper-focused on the short-term stock price. It’s probably a function of the tethering of executive compensation to stock price in tandem with the ability of boards to remove CEOs so they take all the short-term gains they can while they can so they can survive.
Do you have an mba? I do. And my MBA made me infinitely more qualified to run a company than someone else.
The reality is that there are a lot of intricate concepts that are hard to put together. You need to be well versed in finance, accounting, economics, and ethics and all of those things need to be able to be applied to strategy.
There are a lot of things that you don’t understand that go on. I think that this is more of you don’t really understand the nuances of a lot of these decisions
It used to. Got mine 20 years ago and it didn’t teach me anything about shareholders. It was all about running a business and giving you tools to do so.
I recently earned my MBA. Yep, I totally agree. Have an upvote, regardless.
Downvote because it’s (mostly) fact, not an unpopulairopinion.
I got my MBA so I could get the credits necessary to sit for the CPA exams and I can’t think of a single thing in the program that was difficult tbh. And now I pretty much wasted my time getting it because states are getting rid of the credit requirements to sit for the exams
False. I was reliably informed that college is the most important thing on earth as a child in the 90’s. The boomers wouldn’t have lied to us…right?!
Anyway, how is freshman year going? You look so big and adult!
This is a complete over generalization.
I don’t have an MBA so I can’t speak out of experience
But most people I know who do have one said that it’s pretty much for the networking, and that they didn’t really learn much
This Is Capitalism manifest. This is just how flawed of a system it is. It took over democracy and this is the results. I really don’t understand why people can’t make the connection
I learned nothing about maximizing shareholder profit during my MBA
Usually, this subreddit is a place for people to spout really head-scratching takes just for karma points.
This is not one of them. This might be the most popular take on reddit. So popular it probably doesn’t belong in this subreddit.
I don’t think this is a super unpopular view tbh. A lot of us complain about the culture of business and making sure the line keeps going up without a second thought to actual long term planning.
Sure that depends on where you do the MBA. There’s no globally accepted curriculum.
Building relationships with clients and vendors alone does not make for a successful or viable enterprise. If you want to focus on that, go into sales or procurement. MBAs are absolutely taught about these things, by the way.
Yes, executives focus on value for shareholders but your post ignores why they do this. They’re not doing it for fun or because that’s just what they were taught to do. Shareholder value is directly correlated to a business’s profitability and security.
Nah, we are in this mess because we vote in clowns.