"Mark F" wrote in message
...
F. George McDuffee wrote:
While I am not a great fan of Harvard or the graduates of their
MBA program, the university is at least going to hold a
preliminary inquiry into what went wrong, and what possible roll
their MBA program/graduates may have had in the current economic
problems. Now if we can just get Congress, the regulatory agencies, the
ratings companies, the banks, the brokerages, etc. to perform a
similar self-inventory/critique. It would also seem appropriate
for the NIMH to also do an in-depth study to see what happens to
the American public's common sense during a bubble, and what can
be done to "inoculate" against these types of manias such as
mandated special instruction in school.

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Harvard Begins Case Study as Tainted MBAs Reveal Damaged Brand By Oliver
Staley

April 2 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard Business School, stung by
criticism that it hasn’t prepared alumni to cope with the
economic meltdown, will dissect its performance using a practice
it employs to examine corporations in crisis. snip
Harvard’s alumni include Stanley O’Neal and John Thain, the
former chief executive officers of Merrill Lynch & Co. who
presided over the New York company’s decline; Rick Wagoner, the
ousted CEO of General Motors Corp.; and Christopher Cox, former
chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. snip
At the MIT Sloan School of Management, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, students are taught to weigh the effects of their
actions on society, not just on investors, said JoAnne Yates, the
deputy dean.

“We would like our students, when they graduate, to understand
not just quantitative instruments but how they fit into the whole
world around finance,” she said. “We don’t want them all to think
it is games with numbers.” snip
‘Scarlet Letters’

“There’s a certain self-consciousness now that we may be part of
the problem,” Lataif said. “There’s a lot more to education than
learning how to read balance sheets. Maybe a piece of what’s
missing is not another course in ethics but the ability to think
beyond the data and take action based on good instincts.”

Harvard business degrees are now “scarlet letters of shame,”
wrote Philip Delves Broughton, a 2006 graduate of the school, in
a March 1 column in the Sunday Times of London. “Time after time
and scandal after scandal, it seems that a school that graduates
just 900 students a year finds itself in the thick of it.”

Harvard Business School, founded 101 years ago, has more than 200
faculty members and almost 1,800 students seeking master’s
degrees in business administration. snip
Under O’Neal, who graduated in 1978, Merrill Lynch lost more than
$30 billion before its takeover by Charlotte, North
Carolina-based Bank of America Corp. Thain, O’Neal’s successor
who graduated in 1979, was ousted after spending $1.2 million to
renovate his office. General Motors Corp., based in Detroit, has
fallen more than 90 percent in New York trading from its peak
during the tenure of Wagoner, a 1977 Harvard Business School
graduate who was resigned on March 29 under pressure from U.S.
President Barack Obama.

Cox headed the SEC from 2005 until January this year, as the
agency failed under his watch to investigate Bernard Madoff’s
fraud. Cox graduated from Harvard Business School in 1977. snip
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...wwg&refer=home


Unka' George [George McDuffee]
-------------------------------------------
He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is
the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the
worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what
shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman.
Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

Gawd, I was told by a boss 20 or more years ago that the greatest threat
to the world's economy was the Harvard MBA.
But nobody will care, it's addictive, like smoking... /mark

Way back in the mid 70's I watched the work benches getting replaced by
desks in the Michelson Lab at the Naval Weapons Center. This was a very
productive lab for the Navy and gobs of ideas and demonstrated capabilities
were there. This slowly degenerated into the MBA philosophy that "You don't
have to know much about the technical process to manage it". They were
right. However their management ran off a bunch of talent. I can remember
one very sharp guy said that he would rather cook pizza than try to be a
creative scientist in the swiftly changing environment. The Michelson Lab
award for technical achievement became a watered down award and even the
recruiter, who certainly deserved an award, though certainly not the
Michelson was a recepient. The MBAs were apparently unaware that they were
destroying one of their Carrots. In my mind what was required was a
Technical Director who was technical and a assistant Technical Director to
manged the administrative end. However the non-technicals ended up running
the show and the techies were run off. I can remember one of my bosses who
stopped a team of 25 techies who knew what they were doing and why. When
asked just what he wanted done, the boss responded: ( and this was an SES
level manager) "I don't know what I want but I'll recognize it when I see
it." Pretty much all the creative work being done by the 25 techies ceased.
Yeah there is a problem when the MBAs run processes of which they are
ignorant. Examples of this are rampant.

Stu Fields Michelson Lab recepient.