Posted by Sherman in Idaho [72.47.153.105] on Thursday, January 02, 2014 at 12:07:10 :
In Reply to: Re: thank a hippie posted by Kevin in Ohio [50.102.42.144] on Thursday, January 02, 2014 at 10:59:49 :
"Harvard Business School". It used to be that everybody in a company worked their way up through the ranks, from a shop foreman to the CEO. Then about 40 years ago, they started bringing in these Harvard Business School types who were all about "enhancing shareholder value" this quarter. Those people have a visceral dislike of anyone who has every gotten their hands dirty and of anyone who knows how to actually make anything. They hate manufacturing, so they contract it out. They have no clue who their customers are, so they hire marketeers who have focus groups to try to figure it out. Engineers are an alien species to them, so they avoid them as much as possible. All the Harvard Business School guys want to do is sit as close as possible to the income stream and skim as much as they can out of it as it goes past them.
Of course not all the modern MBAs went to Harvard. Some of them went to Stanford, and most of them went to all the other lesser schools that copied the Harvard program. The result is still the same -- the idea that business can somehow be separated from knowing one's customers, knowing how to design new and better products, and having the skills and pride to build them so they work well.
Another sign of the MBA takeover is the obsession with "mission statements", as if a company wouldn't even know what business it was in without some one-line statement that says something about "providing quality solutions in the global marketplace". Along with that came the fad of replacing company names that actually told you what they built or who started the company, with meaningless names that are just acronyms or made-up words. Hewlett-Packard, the maker of the world's best electronic test equipment, a company founded and run by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, became "Agilent", a word that means nothing. And on it goes...
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