Harvard's masters of the apocalypse - Times Online - The Diigo Meta page

• 07 Apr 09
  

  Katie Day

  Questions the value of a Harvard MBA, given the state the world's economy is in and the role its graduates played in the debacle...

  MBA education business economics

  • The Masters of Business Administration,
    that swollen class of jargon-spewing, value-destroying financiers and
    consultants have done more than any other group of people to create the
    economic misery we find ourselves in.
  • I write as the holder of an MBA from Harvard Business School – once regarded
    as a golden ticket to riches, but these days more like scarlet letters of
    shame. We MBAs are haunted by the thought that the tag really stands for
    Mediocre But Arrogant, Mighty Big Attitude, Me Before Anyone and Management
    By Accident. For today’s purposes, perhaps it should be Masters of the
    Business Apocalypse.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • 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. Yet
      there is remarkably little contrition.

    • You can draw up a list of the greatest entrepreneurs of recent history, from
      Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and Bill Gates of Microsoft, to Michael
      Dell, Richard Branson, Lak-shmi Mittal – and there’s not an MBA between them.
      

      
      Yet the MBA industry continues to grow, and business schools provide vital
      income to academic institutions: 500,000 people around the world now
      graduate each year with an MBA, 150,000 of those in the United States,
      creating their own management class within global business.
      

• 17 Mar 09
  

  KO -

  mba

• 15 Mar 09
  

  Adriana Lukas

  business interesting MBA management crisis harvard ethics finance delicious

• 14 Mar 09
  

  jagannath rao adukuri

  • “We all failed to understand how much [the financial system] had changed in
    the past 15 years or so, and how fragile it might be because of increased
    leverage, decreased transparency and decreased liquidity: three of the
    crucial things in the world of financial markets,” he said.
    

    
    “We all failed to understand how that fragility could evidence itself in a
    frozen short-term credit system, something that hadn’t really happened since
    1907. We also probably overestimated the ability of the political process to
    deal with the realities of what could happen if real trouble developed.
    

  • You can draw up a list of the greatest entrepreneurs of recent history, from
    Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and Bill Gates of Microsoft, to Michael
    Dell, Richard Branson, Lak-shmi Mittal – and there’s not an MBA between them.
  • 1 more annotations...
  • • about a third of students were inclined to define right and
      wrong simply in terms of what everyone else was doing.
• 12 Mar 09
  

  ursulahheg

  Harvard business school

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