The debate on "how to fix business schools" that rages on at the Harvard Business School's blog is just plain disturbing. As someone who is on the edge of graduating from Ross at the University of Michigan, I take personal offense to the fact that a subset of people actually believe that people go into MBA programs as perfectly righteous human beings and come out cold-blooded economists.
The logic behind the argument on how MBA programs need "fixing" is beyond me, but I suppose I do understand its origins. History has shown us that when something really bad happens, we must find someone to blame. When kids acted out in the 1980's, some fanatical parents blamed dirty lyrics in rap lyrics from the Beastie Boys. So, what did they do? They "forced" the music industry to put big fat labels on their albums that said "Explicit Lyrics". Any good marketer (with an MBA) can tell you what that did: It created demand for products labeled as such because they were taboo. I know from personal experience because I was a kid who bought one of the Beastie Boys albums labeled that way.
When someone thought kids were too violent, they blamed Bugs Bunny cartoons because Wiley Coyote trying to drop an anvil on the Road Runner was just too violent and we wouldn't want kids trying to mimic that behavior now would we? For the record, I grew up watching those cartoons and I never tried dropping an anvil on anyone. And, what have we replaced with Bugs? I was unfortunate enough to not be able to sleep in on a Saturday and watched about five minutes of a Pokemon cartoon. I could actually feel my brain turn into a gelatinious goo. It had so many flashes of light and scene changes, I felt like I had just ridden a roller coaster without any safety restraints.
There are hundreds of more examples, but let's look at it logically: Is the following statement true? The people running the companies that caused the economic downturn all had MBAs. Therefore, people who have MBAs will cause market downturns.
Anyone who has taken a logic class can tell you that this is a false causal relationship. This is like saying: When it rains, it is wet outside. It is wet outside, therefore it must be raining. What if I just poured a big bucket of water out on my porch? Other things cause it to be wet outside, right?
This whole MBA debate is no different. No amount of schooling is going to turn me into an unscrupulous, evil money grubber. It's a more likely argument to say that if I were unscrupulous, I was that way before I started my MBA program. One can also turn this into a circular argument. I bet if you looked at many of the backgrounds of those who helped cause this mess, you'd find out many of them went to private high schools. Maybe private education is to blame?
I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not going to provide any hard data on this one, but I've heard many say that your personality is pretty much set in stone after your tween years. If this is the case, then the likely culprit are the people who raised these kids to believe that making money in spite of who you had to step on to get there is a way to cultivate success: their parents.
Now just ask yourself who their parents are, and then maybe we can finally track down the real people to blame.
0 comments:
Post a Comment