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Mike Marlow wrote:

Not really. Marketing and Finance types typically have Business
Degrees.
That is what makes them more likely to become upper level management.

One would like to believe this. Experience and observations are to the
contrary.

I've got over 30 years of corporate experience. Our experiences may differ
in some respects but my observations and experiences bear testimony to what
I've said - at least as much as yours do.

Business skills often (very often) interfere with upper
level management activities and objectives.

That would be what we call... politics. You are right that politics do
often prevail but that's something of a peripheral point.

I have been personally
informed that they are "threatening" with an official reprimand to
reinforce the message.

I've seen this sort of thing as well but that is not an indictment of what I
stated earlier, which was that business degrees are what advance managers
more than the politics and proximity of certain departments like Marketing
and Finance. What you suggest is a personality issue and not really
reflective of who gets where based on the department they work in.

This may not be apparent to someone with a few
years (or less) in the corporate environment. In a small company the
effects of a bad business decision can be absulutely devastating.

Very true. The beauty of starting your own company is that you can learn
from mistakes observed in others and hopefully not step into those same
potholes.

The
same decision might go completely unnoticed in a big company. In fact,
I've seen countless such blunders spun in such a way that they were
praised and rewarded. Such situations are not conducive to the topic
of Business School basics. Bringing them up isn't exactly a good
career move.


Well, I never suggested that everyone with a business degree is above the
human shortcomings of ego and the rest. These things do happen every day,
as do a million other types of bad judgment calls. There are bad designs
created every day. That does not suggest that engineers are a bad trade.
They are equally defended by the author of the design, very commonly in the
face of empirical evidence that the design should change. You know - the
"it's my baby" syndrome or NIH. These are people issues, not issues of
degrees.

The best part of having been part of corporate environments where one has
observed behaviors they consider reprehensible is that one now has a mental
image of the offender in their mind, and they can daily compare their own
actions with that image front and center.

--

-Mike-