> I am not a resource. I am not a box of pencils, a copy machine, or a long ton of bituminous coal to be consumed by the company.
In the Harvard MBA school of management which dominates American business and which Wall Street incentivizes, that is precisely what you are: You are a fungible cog in a large machine.
This is certainly not the only viable business management philosophy, but it's the most common one in America. Regardless of what cute name the HR department calls itself, the MBA model should be assumed as the fundamental philosophy of the company until the company's actions (not their words) prove otherwise.
Costco is an example of a successful American company that does not seem to use this model. There are many others, but you have to search carefully to find them.
> Anyone who bothers to think things through can see the huge, obvious flaw: people are not all the same and that these are human beings, not robots or drones.
Part of the problem with accepting this is that it cuts against the MBA ethos: that a good manager is a good manager in any industry, because specialized knowledge is not required.
Which, might be true for extremely high performing managers, who will seek out and rapidly learn any specialized knowledge needed...
... but is very much not true for the bulk of managers, who lack that amount of initiative and capability, and thus need more seasoning time and domain knowledge.
> You can complement your leadership by getting an MBA which rounds out the rough edges of business.
If you're already a leader, an MBA can help.
However, I see a lot of MBAs who come skipping out of a B school (even a good one like Wharton or Kellogg), and their approaches to problem solving are so identical!
I have seen my share of CEOs, but it's staggering how similar they are in their approaches. You could, after interviewing a few of them, come up with a flow chart and you'd capture about 90% of their actions. I have seen many a CEO run the company into the ground, but very, very rarely seen a CEO lift a company up and make a difference.
I think Satya Nadella in MSFT has really turned that ship around (please correct me if I'm wrong). But for every Satya, there are a 1000 mediocre ones, just trying one tool after another that was taught them in B school, and when the board gets tired, it throws them out with a golden parachute, only to be replaced by another cookie-cutter who does the same.
> Big, rich, process-driven companies and institutions are the easiest to do the least work in for the longest time.
You kinda need to weasel in there first. When I worked at Intel (& to a lesser extent, Microsoft and IBM) there were literally hundreds of little 5-10 person b.s. boondoggles that did nothing of value but had management that could spin like Rumpelstiltskin, just took the company for a ride. Get several levels of that management going and no one has to really produce anything, they just need a manager to create paper-thin goals and hit those. Why? Because managers want to retire on the job and with enough nepotism it is entirely possible to scratch each other's backs. Problem is, they are very defensive about bringing in anyone that could upset the applecart. If you find one and burrow in, enjoy it!
>I blame the MBA's - the cultureless hoards of middle management that suck the life out of everything that's not quantifiable and can be entered on a spread sheet.
Oh please. You were doing fine up to that point. There's always been a tension between theory and practice.
> leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people
somehow I think this is what a CEO should be doing, and then letting managers do the people management.
CEO should be strategy, not keeping Karen in accounting dept. happy.
Too many companies just continue doing whatever they have been doing for a long time, without any ability at reconsidering if this still fits the market.
>how they let a bunch of MBAs mismanage the company to the point that they squandered a two-decade long global monopoly on computing
A MBA Story.
Once upon a time, a MBA joined a company, worked his way from Finance Director to C grade. He could probably be described as pure breed MBA. He made friends with other rare MBA in the company and improve their career path along the way. Why? Because that is what you do, MBA always help another MBA. Somewhere along the line, the company's first non-technical / engineer MBA CEO was born.
As the company grow there are more MBAs, but not all MBAs are bad, you just need engineers and product people around these MBA. But some of these engineers or product genius [1] are pain in the ass to manage, and since many of them dont have MBA, they dont understand MBA speak and they get driven out of company decision making forum. So what happened was these product engineers got rotted out over the years even when they are C grade and out very publicly.
With leading edge tech company there is a very long lead time in their product R&D roadmap, so they were fine for the first few years, and continue to make record breaking results. Then MBA move his way up to the board and become chairman just in the time before his MBA CEO friend retired. Which means MBA Chairman gets to pick a new CEO again, guess which CEO would a MBA pick? Another MBA! Since MBA always help another MBA, new MBA CEO promoted more MBA to various rolls within the company. And MBA cult now officially dictate the company decision making.
Everything was great for a few more years, the market was growing, they have a monopoly and most important of all, they are doing great because they are MBA. At least that is what those MBA thought. Until one day cracks started appearing, MBA CEO thought it was all fine, but with time external pressure were piling in and the whole industry moved on. The market looked very differently to what company were 10 years ago. And somehow the MBA CEO already had an on going internal investigation which shows he had an inappropriate relationship and was let go. Which is the MBA speak of CEO being fired. And a recently arrived CFO was named as interim CEO while MBA Chairman and Board continue their CEO search. They could hire other MBA from outside the company, but since the leading edge tech company are a gigantic company with so many different specific domain knowledge and culture. The suitable choice outside the company are virtually nil. MBA Chairman looked at CFO, despite not being his first choice and is fairly new to the tech company, but he has a MBA! And the third MBA CEO was born.
The market is moving at a much faster pace than before. To give credit to the new MBA CEO he was trying very hard to steer the ship to a new path and direction. The tech company are already behind. These new direction and requirement are completely new, MBA middle management have no idea what they are doing and cant turn the ship fast enough. And while they are still turning, the industry has moved further along. I guess this is an example of MBA being killed by MBA.
Finally shareholder were so fed up, some of them asked the same question;
>how they mismanage the company to the point that they squandered a two-decade long global monopoly on computing, in an era where computing absolutely dominated global economic development.
There are very little choice of what shareholder could do. They need those product engineers back. And a new CEO. But the perfect candidate had a fallout with MBA Chairman a decade ago, the only option was to rally enough support to get rid of him. In the end, MBA Charimand retired, a new Board Chairman was named, and those product engineers are back to save the company.
As far as the MBA story goes, this is the end. We dont know what happen to the leading edge company, I guess that part is To be continued.
> Most business in the United States is done despite of management, not because of it.
I would not consider that so Geographically constrained. to me the most obvious textbook example [1] would be Nokia. I mean, there was no way the top management could have failed in the golden era of the dumb phones given the engineering talent (both for the electronics and the operations) within th ecompany. The single time when top management should/could have shown their value was the time when smartphones came. And they practically managed to destroy the company. I wonder if they themselves understand how literally clueless they were/are?
[1] Admittably with zero actual inside information
> MBA types are trained in planning and management, which, I dunno, have their uses
I'm assuming you didn't mean it this way (I guess it was an ironic comment), but planning and management are incredibly important.
The most important part to our scaling is how we organize ourselves. A top notch organizer allows a group of people to scale seamlessly. That's worth everything in the modern world.
Imagine thousands of brilliant minds, organized elegantly and efficiently to work together at maximum efficiency. It's rare because it's incredibly hard to achieve. But when it does happen, we get so much output, both creative and physical, that it's almost unbelievable. Think Bell Labs & co.
> When you first get into management, you immediately realize that your job is to serve an entire team in ways that will some times not make individuals happy
> For anyone reading this who thinks all companies are like the one that parent described, I want to share that it is not true. There are plenty of companies who based their collaboration with their workers on other mental models than cogs-in-the-machine.
It's even more complex. While top management might give a rough direction, even within a single company different managers may create way different environments.
>The "managing class" of MBAs reminds me of the way a communist state like East Germany was run. Centralized decision making, information withholding, the desire to plan out everything for years, saying one thing while meaning the opposite, hanging up motivational posters "we are innovative" while squashing innovation, ignoring of inconvenient facts and so on.
Huh? What's wrong with centralized decision making and planning out everything for years? The rest I can agree with, but 1) in any company, you need centralized decision making or you won't get anything done; the point of a company is not to be a democracy, it's to be a machine that generates profit, and centralized decision making accomplishes that. And 2) what can possibly be wrong with planning things out far ahead? I worked at Intel for years and they did this, and it worked, for the most part. (Obviously, circumstances forced plans to be altered or even abandoned at times.) If you don't have a plan several years out of what you want to be doing, you're not going to accomplish anything big. How do you think the Moon missions could have worked if they didn't plan that out years in advance?
It sounds to me like you're comparing whatever little podunk 20-person company you used to work at with the big corporation you find yourself in now, and you're trying to assume that everything the little company did was somehow correct. It wasn't; the big company got to be a big company by doing something right.
Many of the other things you complain about just sound like typical bad management, and things you'll find in any organization that isn't perfect. Information withholding and saying one thing and meaning the opposite and ignoring inconvenient facts: aren't those common with the US government? I saw these in several small companies I've worked in (and big companies too). It's not unique to big companies. There's definitely more of it in poorly-run companies, which should be no surprise. There's no shortage of poorly-run companies out there, big and small.
As for the motivational posters, that's a fad (though admittedly it's been around a good 15-20 years now). I recommend getting your own motivational posters and hanging them in your cubicle (if you even have a cubicle; working at big companies was a lot nicer 10-20 years ago before this idiotic "open plan office" craze). You can get some excellent posters [here](https://www.despair.com/collections/demotivators).
(What kind of site calling itself "Hacker News" doesn't even support some kind of basic markup for embedding links? Come on guys.)
> There seems to be a trend among Fortune 100 management that belief = reality.
That makes total sense to me. The larger a top-down organization is, the more the people on top exist in a reality that is socially mediated. That's especially true given that the theory of the MBA is that it's a universal management degree, meaning that knowledge of the domain is at best secondary. In a social context, confidence is very appealing. Strong belief becomes executives' reality.
> I don’t know which business school teaches people to say “ah can you smell that fresh mountain air” while they have their hands wrapped tightly around your neck …
It’s all of them and the higher you get into management the more apparent it is. They sell a system of meritocracy where those who work the hardest get the rewards. Then you get into management and working side by side with people whose first job out of college was as a VP, who explain to you how they are forcing the newly hired manager to fire someone at random to “make sure they have a backbone”
Software engineers have been tricked into thinking they are part of the in club because they are paid well enough to have the lifestyle that the middle class had between ww2 and the 80s, but we are being systematically stripped of the value we bring.
If this wasn’t true then we wouldn’t be able to point towards recent events like jobs setting up a hiring cartel to depress our wages
> And they very consciously divorce the idea of employee compensation from the value of the work an employee does.
And that right there is my problem with management people. Most see people are "resources", and that too equal resources. What they fail to understand is that everyone is different and some people will be better than others.
I'm still in college but the mindset here seems like any company. All students are treated similarly and have same rules. These rules are designed to get an average output. People who are lower than average get a bit of benefit because of this but people who are above average get dragged down in the process!
This is what happens when highly credentialed operators are brought in as decision makers, but they were not there from the beginning and have no idea how irreplaceable the specific furniture and its arrangement over the years actually is.
They didn't go through the building process. They might not even be builders at all, even if given more than enough resources.
And it doesn't matter to them fundamentally since their personal best oportunities will be with a different future organization anyway. Even if they stay, the organization will be different before they are done. More like the average company you could read about in business school, and more understandable for students, with much less focus on the unique things that brought that particular company as far as it had beforehand.
If a company has reached a lofty place and the decision making changes that significantly for some reason, it is most likely that there will be some sinking to a significantly less lofty position. And in some unfamiliar direction downward.
The best possible person to run a particular company will be using company-specific approaches and drawing on talents that very few MBAs possess.
For those MBAs who do have such rare natural talent, it has been a characteristic since before university anyway so the degree is definitely not necessary.
> it's important to push smart people toward management to be able to keep scaling the company
nonsense.
Apple is a perfect counterexample of your assertion. (disclaimer: worked there for years with an excellent role and what you said was then countercultural, in our engineering world at least).
> The function of management exists for a reason, but the question is who should do it. Many knowledge workers are self-managing and the "oversight" provided by the managerial class is superfluous at best.
I know it feels like you can be self-managing, but you can't (outside of a tiny startup). For a long time I felt that way. After all, I know the product code inside out better than anyone. I can see what needs to be done both short and long term. I can lay out the road to get there and execute on it very well. What else is needed?
What's needed is alignment with all the other parts of the company. Marketing, sales, infosec, project management, executive wishes, etc. Who is doing that? Oh, I can do it. And I can. But by the time I'm done, I'm left with like 30 minutes a week to write code. So I can't actually do both full-time.
> Most of these people (not all of whom are MBAs) just want to be bosses, not entrepreneurs. Their goal is to be executives ("big picture guys") shouting orders, not worker bees, but they don't have the social resources to make it happen in an existing company so they drum up some seed funding and hire some engineers (usually, scraping the bottom) and try to kick something together.
That seems like a very mean way to say they don't want to be a cog in a machine.
> "I want to be an executive" is a pretty fucking lame vision, as it were.
By "I want to be an executive" do you mean "I'd rather not work for a boss"? Is there a difference in those two desires? How is that fucking [sic] lame?
> What they're really saying is, "I think that, based on some linear combination of pre-existing socioeconomic resources and inflated self-image, I have the right to a job where I tell other people what to do."
Actually, "I have the right" is your words, not theirs.
> I don't think that all MBAs are douchebags.
Whoa, whoa. Nobody said they were douchebags.
> I know plenty whom I like a lot.
And I have a lot of gay friends (but I wouldn't say I like them "a lot").
> Unfortunately, the culture of business school and especially the elite business schools is one of entitlement and position-seeking.
What is a culture of entitlement? People just go to business school and... sit there and be entitled? What is a culture of position-seeking? Do they seek positions in companies? Does engineering school also have a culture of position-seeking, or is that different somehow?
> When that type of person founds a startup, you get a lot of the same toxic big-company behaviors and formalities and political structures, but in a small company that can't afford the inefficiencies.
So some MBA's aren't that good. I think we all already know that some startup founders suck. But others must be good, or turn out to run successful companies, or investors would just unilaterally cease funding any MBA's. The phenomenom of bad founders is not limited in any special way to people that got MBA's, either. So in what way is the problem with business schools, or the people that go to them? (Aside from the usual complaint you hear from a lot of people, that you're repeating, about MBA's that don't really know what they're doing because they don't have experience, which we get when people make stereotypical complaints about management consultants too.)
> In most educational divisions, the correlation between prestige and douchebaggery is nonexistent, i.e. Yale law students aren't noticeably douchier, or less douchey, than students at middling schools; in MBA school, it's clearly a positive correlation (although Stanford is probably worse than Harvard, though less prestigious, for obvious reasons).
It would be helpful if you could point us to an academic study that makes these measurements of douchiness. I don't hang out with enough law school graduates and business school graduates from these respective schools to be able to tell if what you are saying is true, but I guess you hang out with enough of them from each major business school and law school to have figured this all out.
In the Harvard MBA school of management which dominates American business and which Wall Street incentivizes, that is precisely what you are: You are a fungible cog in a large machine.
This is certainly not the only viable business management philosophy, but it's the most common one in America. Regardless of what cute name the HR department calls itself, the MBA model should be assumed as the fundamental philosophy of the company until the company's actions (not their words) prove otherwise.
Costco is an example of a successful American company that does not seem to use this model. There are many others, but you have to search carefully to find them.
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