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How to Stop the Dilbertization of IT?
Alien54 writes "In the simplest terms: too many IT workplaces have become Dilbertized -- micromanaged, bureaucratic and stifled creatively. It's become an environment where busy work is praised and morale is low. How is it possible to bring IT's appeal back? 'IT professionals that have worked in the field for a long time often speak about a shift in their work where they have gone from tossing ideas back and forth to make for better technology solutions to fighting fires all day. "There's less emphasis on creativity, and more on maintenance. Tweak this, work on this ... In being reactive not proactive, everything is a crisis. Something has to be done right now, putting out fire after fire, going a long way to making IT a less pleasant environment," said Skaistis. Beyond making for a unpleasant work environment for the techies already in-house, this firefighting serves as a warning to potential recruits: you will not like this job.'"
I think we are going through the same process in IT. There are a variety of methods of production and management, some of which are highly arcane. The standard of documentation and management in many companies seems to be low, to say the least. IT staff just do not understand kaizen, quality management, or any of the wider corporate things that can actually help them do their jobs better. They confuse better tools with better working practices. Strangely, in the early days of IT things were often better because the tools were limited in performance and scope and the organisation had to be built carefully around them (I was there...)
When we get past this stage, things will change. Quality will be built in to the processes. I suspect there will be far fewer applications in use, and many of the tools available will be greatly simplified. (The same ought to apply to business as a whole; it's hard to understand why the majority of office workers need Powerpoint or the decoration features in Word to do their jobs well.) Fewer people will be employed in IT, and their jobs will be better defined.
The question I don't know the answer to is what they will actually be doing.
Pining for the fjords
Your argument assumes that management and labor are on equal footing.
My opinion is that there is a small but significant grey area between where one is ready to quit a job on moral/ethical grounds, and ready to quit a job on aesthetic/personal/professional grounds. Lots of people (myself included) have experienced some amount of this grey area, and could probably benefit from this discussion.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
I prefer to see it as socially stratified. What we're seeing is the triumph of social precepts over scientific precepts.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
The big problem as I see it is attitudes like yours: IT is a "creative" field, and profit is somehow evil. What needs to happen is that IT people need to stop being treated like children. Management needs to stop babying IT people, and explain to them that it's their (management's) way or the highway. It's that simple. IT isn't some kind of holy profession, around which the rest of the business revolves. IT is just one *tiny* aspect of most businesses, and should be given appropriate consideration. IT people with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement need to be weeded out of organizations. Finance people generally don't demand to be allowed to be "creative" in their jobs. Operations people don't bemoan the lack of "creativity" in the workplace, and the evil profit motive. Management needs to stop being afraid of IT people holding them hostage some kind of arcane knowledge, and insist on hiring only IT people who are professional, and understand the business needs.
A close friend of mine is a professional CEO at mid sized companies. He's a turnaround guy. He takes damaged companies and make them profitable. Very often, one of the first thing he has to do is to fire the existing IT staff or just the IT directors, and bring in real professionals. He's always bemoaning the lack of IT people who know a single thing outside of their narrow field of focus, and their inability to act as part of the organization.
I don't respond to AC's.
But you wanted to make this a slam against me ("attitudes like yours") so bad that you couldn't be bothered to think past your first impression. What needs to happen is that IT people need to stop being treated like children Which is an effect of the way profit is being used to control people. Management needs to stop being afraid of IT people Which is an effect of the need to control those people using profit. understand the business needs Whose business needs are we understanding? Are we understanding the business needs of the execs and venture capitalists, or are we understanding the business needs of the employees, or are we understanding the business needs of the customers?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
There's less emphasis on creativity, and more on maintenance.
Welcome to IT! It's great to hear that you've taken a job working on America's information infrastructure.
IT is like a roadway. You spend a shitload of effort to build it - designing bridges, blasting through mountains, cutting through forests, etc. Then you're done, and then, for the next 100+ years, it gets maintained thanks to an additional shitload of effort. IT is perhaps a bit different because a roadway can't be screwed around with as easily as, say, your accounting software.
New hardware, new software, new technologies, new customer requirements. Maintaining software is the core of what IT is. And well-controlled, well maintained software is the difference between organizational success and failure.
If you haven't maintained software, then you are not qualified to design or build new software.
I completely disagree with your assessment. I just got out of IT (as in help desk/support/system admin) and into a pure programming job. The reason was I've seen 3 good friends lose alot (wives, friends, any semblance of a life) in the IT industry because IT is anything but a steady state. IT people are still asked to deal with gargantuan complexity and growth. They are expected to roll out insanely complex systems at the drop of the CEO's hat, just because he feels like it. At least in the late 90's people expected this stuff to cost money. Now a days what used to get quoted at $5 million is expected to be handled by a single guy making 600 users, Windows 2003 AD, Cisco Call Manager, Cisco IPCC, more than 40 PRI circuits, and 3 DS3 WAN circuits. These 2 guys manage the routers, switches, firewall, everything. When presented with the impossibility of these 2 people actually handling the workload managements response was "Sorry, if you don't like it, we already talked with xyz outsourcing corp, you're lucky to have this job". Mind you, this company is a very large call center. Their entire operation depends on IT. If the network is down they lose > 100k/day. If users can't log in, it costs > 1k/hr/person. And management isn't willing to address issues. It is also bizarre that they are pulling the "we'll outsource you" card, since they just brought IT back in house after a disasterous "outsourcing" expedition over the last 2 years.
I quit this world one month ago (after 7+ years at least partially performing general IT stuff). Now I purely develop software. I'm happier now than I've been in 8 years. I only work 40hrs/wk, my cell phone never rings after hours, and I don't have pissed off disdainful users cursing me at every turn because they forgot their password or had number lock turned on and couldn't log in for 10 minutes.
Should have used preview...
Sorry slashdot ate my post, here is the whole thing:
I completely disagree with your assessment. I just got out of IT (as in help desk/support/system admin) and into a pure programming job. The reason was I've seen 3 good friends lose alot (wives, friends, any semblance of a life) in the IT industry because IT is anything but a steady state. IT people are still asked to deal with gargantuan complexity and growth. They are expected to roll out insanely complex systems at the drop of the CEO's hat, just because he feels like it. At least in the late 90's people expected this stuff to cost money. Now a days what used to get quoted at $5 million is expected to be handled by a single guy making less than 50k/yr. And when it doesn't happen, they are fired or required to work 24x7 to pull off a miracle. Any slight flaw is seen as a complete failure. Paradoxically, budgets have been cut so severely that there is no such thing as a "test environment" and IT is expected to have some sort of magic ball to predict exactly what is going to break when massive changes are rolled out.
I still have 2 good friends in IT. They both work 60-70+/wk. One travels 75%+. The other is officially on call 24x7. He estimates that he gets a call between 2-6AM at least 4 times a week. He is one of 2 people managing more than 600 users, Windows 2003 AD, Cisco Call Manager, Cisco IPCC, more than 40 PRI circuits, and 3 DS3 WAN circuits. These 2 guys manage the routers, switches, firewall, everything. When presented with the impossibility of these 2 people actually handling the workload managements response was "Sorry, if you don't like it, we already talked with xyz outsourcing corp, you're lucky to have this job". Mind you, this company is a very large call center. Their entire operation depends on IT. If the network is down they lose more than 100k/day. If users can't log in, it costs more than 1k/hr/person. And management isn't willing to address issues. It is also bizarre that they are pulling the "we'll outsource you" card, since they just brought IT back in house after a disasterous "outsourcing" expedition over the last 2 years.
I quit this world one month ago (after 7+ years at least partially performing general IT stuff). Now I purely develop software. I'm happier now than I've been in 8 years. I only work 40hrs/wk, my cell phone never rings after hours, and I don't have pissed off disdainful users cursing me at every turn because they forgot their password or had number lock turned on and couldn't log in for 10 minutes.
If you want to control your life instead of your boss controlling it, you need to join a democratically run union. United we bargain, divided we beg. IT is no different from any other industry. The working class and the employing class have different interests. The bosses are already organized, why aren't we?
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
A close friend of mine is a professional CEO at mid sized companies
lol. oh ok. so you^H^H^H^H^H your friend went in to these poor little companies and saved them?
why don't you give us some real life examples? you don't have any. and even if you could name names, you wouldn't know the truth if you^H^H^H^H^H^H^ your friend turned around the company or left a wake of destruction...or worse yet, did nothing.
the first thing he has to do is to fire the existing IT staff
ah. i think that's a play from the very first page of the gartner manual, or cio magazine "top 10 things to do to appear effectual"...i forget which.
sorry, i believe that you believe what you are typing is true...but you don't have a clue.
you should know that "turnaround guys" rank barely above a lawyer in terms of slimeyness, and if you thought your mentioning of your example would automatically lend weight to your post, you should really start to question why you're even on slashdot.
you will have to do better then a "a close friend" story...
I once worked for an interfering, micromanaging, annoying, unimaginative, and unengaging manager whose solution to the Dilbertization of the workplace was to BAN ALL DILBERT CARTOONS.
It seems the cartoons made us employees cynical.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
I don't know if this and the rest of your comment are original material or not but it is profound, so I decided to say so rather than use mod points as I originally set out to do. More and more in my own observations of the modern world the term "game the system" pops, unbeckoned into my head and I don't even remember when II first learned the term.
I do remember in short studies of game theory learning that it is easy to construct a game in which a mutually beneficial outcome works against outcomes with are "best" for all participants. What continues to surprise me is not that such games spring into existence in the real world, but that those who have at least some power over the game rules continue to do nothing to change them so that the outcomes that are best for the individual are more synchronized with those that are best foor the organization.
I guess that's a round about way of saying "why doesn't someone above simply fire the PHB?" And if the problem exists at a higher level, why doesn't someone above that do some firing as well? Examples in the real world are easy to find. Imagine a Microsoft without a CEO who makes a PR blunder every time he opens his mouth. Imagine if Ken Lay, or the Enron board had fired Jeffry Skilling when he first announced that he wanted the company to be "as asset free as possible" rather than giving him even more authority to implement such a PHBesque notion.
In all my career the Dilbert-like (and this is certainly not a new phenomenon) activities have only sometimes been initiated by my immediate boss, and almost never at the top of the company, but somewhere in the murky in-between, where rumor has it that people are all first cousins or go to the same church (because there is no other rational explanation for their existence).
I suspect that in some very successful companies there is still one of those overpaid (though not in such case so much overpaid) people who can peer down into the organization and burn off the underbrush so that those doing constructive things have more chance to grow. Most companies somewhere along the line lose these key people at the top and become the Enrons and Microsofts of today.
One big problem though in many countries it is harder and harder to fire people for a variety of reasons, even when they grossly under-perform, or mis-perform. We have to look no further than our governments (particularly federal) for just how bad this can, and probably will get even for companies like Google that start out with so much talent and enthusiasm. Even if they can at first have a fairly good control over their talent pool (as they grow rapidly) at some point there are going to be full of "Wallys" who no one can figure out what to do with, but who have kept enough within the rules to avoid being terminated.
I don't by any means think, as the article implies, that this is confined to IT. Quite the contrary, we see it everywhere more and more. The change, if it is going to happen at all (I'm not optimistic) has to come from our elected officials who can once again make it easy for companies to clean house. After all, in a society that more and more takes care of the unemployed and under-employed, worse things can happen than being the victim of a corporate "downsizing". the question is whether there is anyone at most companies making sure that the right PHBs and Wallys are let go during such events.
One subset of primates learned how to exploit the others for fun and profit.
Ten thousand years later the game is more complex (bigger population sets, larger financial numbers, includes multiple social levels) but it's still the same.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
When you sell yourself cheap, only losers want you. You wont get calls unless someone has an emergency, and you can bet that half the time, their check will bounce anyway.
This is a hard lesson for Consultants to learn, but CHARGE MORE, bitch!
If your services are worth something, make the fuckers PAY for it. If you provide a comprehensive IT solution including everything you mentioned, why the fuck are you willing to give it away? Prospective clients will think maybe you just got out of jail, or you are on some FBI pervert list.
Are you a professional, or not? If you charge like a beginner, potential clients will assume you are a beginner. First, stop charging by the hour and charge on the value of your services. What is the value of a 99.999 uptime network to a small-to-medium size business? Charge for that by the month, not the hour, with a penalty clause for downtime. Share the risk, and clients will appreciate that you care about what you are doing, and not just racking up a fee.
I dont care what you are charging right now, DOUBLE it, and I bet you get more (and a better class of)clients.
Finally, make sure you are damn good at what you do.
Profit, bitch!
It used to be HR and the accounting departments that codified and enforced the corporate culture, now with HIPPA, SOX, ITIL, etc. the IT department has become the enforcement arm of culture control. IT was originally supposed to help productivity, accuracy, responsiveness, etc. Now it is the Taliban going around with cultural compliance as the foremost goal.
If you like oppressing people and "being right" then the new IT is for you - there is a big crop of IT people who enjoy making people's work life suck and then standing around smugly gloating that they do it to keep the corporation safe from lawsuits and fines and worse.
I think this article will do even more to ruin morale. My managers are always, ALWAYS asking "what are the other guys doing" or if they want to implement something, will say "And, you know, Hertz does it does it" or some crap like that. Once they learn moral sucks everywhere, why bother to improve it? One example of my Dibertness: I maintain Domino servers, but not apps. We have very sensitive data in the DBs. Somewhere, back before I started, it was decided that the server admins would not have application(database) access. This really sucks when we are trying to work on crashes or performance tuning. Never mind that I've been working with this app for a dozen years and I can find several ways to get at that data without working very hard. But I don't even need to do that, as I have the certifier AND access to all the IDs and passwords. I mentioned to my boss about how this was a real problem sometimes. "Oh, no. We really need to keep access separate (he knows we have the ids and certs) Besides, that was a big positive point for us in our last security audit." So, in order to satisfy an incorrect bullet point on a flawed security audit put out by a company that obviously, in this respect, hasn't a clue as to what they are doing, my job sucks a noticeable bit more. Dilbert enough for you?
Exactly! It is all about the money. The IT workforce mostly consists of guys loving what they do. Guys loving what they do aren't so picky about what they earn, they just want to do the stuff they love to do. Couple that with a almost total disdain for unions from the younger generation and you get the situation you have now. In the corporate world, what matters is the money. If you earn 10$/hour then you are only worth 10$/hour, if you earn 50$, then you are worth 50$, good for you. But more importantly, the amount of respect and employment benefits you receive is linearly proportional to the amount of money you earn.
The corporate world knows this, executies knows this, unions knows this, young programmers DO NOT know this. Therefore, while their skills may in fact be the company's most valuable asset, they are treated like just a bunch of resources that you can swap in and out, whichever way you please. Everyone should know that that is complete BS. There is a world-wide SHORTAGE of skilled IT professionals.
I wish techies all over the world would ask themself "Why am I not getting a larger slice of the cake?" because that is what the question is all about.
Football Odds
I still have 2 good friends in IT. They both work 60-70+/wk. One travels 75%+. The other is officially on call 24x7. He estimates that he gets a call between 2-6AM at least 4 times a week. He is one of 2 people managing more than 600 users, Windows 2003 AD, Cisco Call Manager, Cisco IPCC, more than 40 PRI circuits, and 3 DS3 WAN circuits. These 2 guys manage the routers, switches, firewall, everything. When presented with the impossibility of these 2 people actually handling the workload managements response was "Sorry, if you don't like it, we already talked with xyz outsourcing corp, you're lucky to have this job".
Look, they should get one thing straight: Managers BLUFF. I know one employee at my company that was severely underpaid, asked for a raise but they didn't want to give her anything at all. If they'd given her a few grand then, all would be well. Three weeks later, she had a new job and put in her resignation. Then the fun started when they realized they needed her really badly. She got a raise of about 14000$. Yes, she was that underpaid.
I also know of a guy which pretty much built the branch office of an IT support company from scratch, he was both the manager and expert tech rolled into one. He learned that one of his subordinates (hired centrally) made 7000$ more than him, with less skill and less responsibilities. He had a nervous breakdown when he found out, got an instant backdated payraise for a year and the big bosses were like "fuck fuck fuck we can't lose him".
Know your market price and charge it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
My biggest headache at work is the nontechnical people who are mid level managers in the IT department. Some of them come from Finance, others from other non-technical departments in the company.
So what do they do? Instead of running a team like most normal managers they have to meddle to prove their worth and validate their existance. So they do dumb shit like randomly reassign staff, change priorities every two months, and other PHB-style behaviors. They have no technical competancy so they cant help out in the work, so they overcompensate and do dumb stuff.
I would have hoped that these types of people would have filtered out of the IT department by natural attrition (new companies, etc), but they havent and it bothers me.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
"In any heirarchy, an individual will rise to his or her own level of incompetence, then remain there."
That was an amazing, enlightening book and I've never looked at anything the same since. You wonder why you're surrounded by idiots? Read that book... And never take that final fatal promotion!
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Yeah,I've gone through a few managers in my day. One absolutely stellar case evoked *incredible* morale (worked to compensate people in accordance with effort, worked to make sure workload was distributed, proactively monitored things mainly to ensure no one was on an unsustainable burnout path for any significant period of time). On top of being liked by employees (or because of it), he led it from new and a trickling revenue stream to a half-billion dollar per year thing after two years. Then some asshole executive demanded that something be done that our group deemed a bad idea likely to blow up in our faces, and our manager took that opinion forward with specific pitfalls to be addressed before it wouldn't blow up too badly. Manager was ignored, blew up in their faces, and when he pointed out the documentation he had brought forward earlier predicting and warning about pretty much exactly what went wrong, and pointed out the executive who signed off to dismiss our recommendation, the executive in question blasted the manager out of management over the fiasco and has since been promoted. Never before and never since have I seen such a good leader who actually made me respect what a manager *could* mean and how one could *actually* be worth something.
The guy who replaced him rattled off meaningless buzzwords and made a highly motivated effective team completely devastated. He moved desk assignments around pointlessly without explanation, imposed bizarre escalation paths to complicate every little discussion, ceased all motivational measures going on before him, and stopped working to get incentives for his employees. Basically the strategy was obviously wave his hands to look busy, make noise about how much money is coming in, but keep his head down by avoiding asking for money or anything at all that would potentially bother his manager, and waiting to be pulled to the next level before everything would hit the fan. The department ran on essentially inertia without growing meaningfully, but the manager got credit for a half-billion dollar effort, and promoted despite being utterly crappy as a leader (unliked by employees *and* unable to milk the group for meaningful work, usually a manager can at least do one of those). BTW, along the way the amount of money that could be fairly taken credit by our group declined for obvious reasons, but the manager propped it up by claiming credit for loosely related work from other groups that we helped a little along the way. Any person with half a brain at a second glance could see how his trick was being worked just from his damned presentation slide, yet it worked for him.
And yes, the number of "Wallys" has increased dramatically (even people who were doing great with leadership are left to wander as "Wally"s now). Also, people who make plenty of noise about what they do and the value they put in without actually *doing* anything has increased, and those people get a lot more credit and such than those who actually *do*. Cynicism among everyone else not merely dicking around or beating their chests is at an all time high, motivation on the ground. This is more like everywhere I end up working.
I can think of no logical reason how it ends up like this. I could understand running out of steam, but the effort/reward system seemed to just encourage a potentially highly successful group slitting its own throat.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
From TFA:
I'd say he hit the nail on the head. In the US at least, many, many managers lack even basic understanding of IT issues. Since they don't know what's possible with technology (at a deep level), they don't know the relative risks or rewards of trying to solve problems with technolgy. So they don't say no to the projects that are expensive and stupid, and they don't push for projects that could be very beneficial.
I believe that If we (IT) developed more of our own into managers, our lives would be much better.
I spent 22 years in IT. My goal was, like many system admins, to be invisible. A properly managed system that does not attract attention but "just works as it should" is, by an IT definition, an excellent system. Was I or any other system admin rewarded for this? Hell no! Was the guy whose server room crashed regularly punished? Hell no, he got promoted, for being good at handling emergencies. Emergencies created by his own lack of foresight. That's why IT is dead.
Unfortunately, management today, in every company I've worked with, has different ideas. In management, accounting, what-have-you, if you get noticed, THEN you're good. You have to do something to be noticed. Something big. Something flashy. That's not how IT works. The only time something big and flashy happens in IT is when the UPS explodes and the server room catches fire. That is not a good result.
This is, however, the type of shit that IT outsourcing companies have to do in order to be sure management thinks they are worth the money they are getting paid. I've been asked to fake emergencies (usually just before a budget review) so that our response to that emergency can get us a pat on the back. I learned dozens of ways to make a server look like lightning had hit it without pointing to deliberate sabotage. I basically stopped caring about doing "good" IT, and only started to care about revenue. That's when my career took off and I finally understood the nature of business, where honesty and ethics are a liability and get you fired. Twice, in my case. I'm a slow learner. Now I'm trying to find my moral compass again. But at least I can afford to do so.
When I worked directly for that company that outsourced its IT, I went for at most 3 years without a single server crash. Suddenly, they put servers in MY server room that were almost guaranteed to crash weekly.
Management loved it!
Soon as they saw systems go down, they'd see how fast we got them back up again (easy, when you'd planned or predicted most of the outages in the first place) and just throw more money at the outsourcing company. The order of the day was no longer prevention, but quick fixes to problems. It made us look "better" in the minds of management, and management bought it. Hook, line and sinker. In several companies.
Management that didn't have a clue that each crash actually cost them much more money in lost time and lost sales. Not a fucking clue! When the techs tried to tell them, using management language and sound financial analysis, they still only listened to their counterparts at the various vendor companies. Namely the lying scum salespeople. Not their own techies. I understood why later: because management are by training and experience incapable of understanding honesty and good intentions. When I worked as pre-sales (as in, after I sold my soul and my career took off), I saw exactly how the sales people would lie, cheat and steal to get that contract, then hand off their promises to the poor sap who had to implement it. When said poor sap had to go back and say that what the sales rep had promised either didn't exist or could not be done (I know it couldn't be done and I'd told the sales rep, but he changed the message when talking to the client and I kept quiet), it wasn't the sales rep who got blamed, it was the post-sales installation guy!! Meanwhile, the sales rep still got his nice fat commission, I got my cut, and the poor bastard who had to try to install that box of twigs we sold never got a promotion.
THAT is why IT is dead, folks. You can't manipulate or lie to a machine. It either gets the correct input or it dies. Most technically oriented people I've met are also honest. Often brutally honest. But honesty is a liability in today's business world. So the mindset that makes a good tech is the total opposite of the mindset that allows someone to get ahead in todays "business economy". That's good capitalism folks. No ethics. Honesty sucks. Whoever has the biggest bankroll wins.
So IT, good IT, is by definitio
-- Motto: If it doesn't make sense, always follow the money.
Alas, on the other side of the problem lies the "we only grok technology" developers, who don't understand the business side at all. Yeah, none of them do; it's crazy.
You can tell them the project has a budget, that it's bleeding money for every extra week they spend tinkering with their from-scratch templating language, and they just look at you. They say "yeah, about 3 months" for *every* possible project proposal, then just bitch about you when you try to explain how you the customer isn't paying for 6 extra months. Or some of them say "that'll take 3 years" when you show them the proposal for a simple website.
They want to be paid 6 figures for the "magic" they do, even if they spend all day browsing the free fonts online for the subtitles on your contacts page, and the company website has been returning a 404 for the checkout page for 3 days now. You can lay out the figures for them -- "we earn only an extra $10K a year through the website you're managing for us, and maybe an extra $20K of our other business comes through it... but you want us to hire a DBA to help you out?" -- and they say "yeah -- I don't have time for all that database stuff! oh, and maybe some SEO company can help those numbers of yours.. that's not my problem."
If only even a few of them were different.
You got it backwards. Information Technology wasn't taken over by Biz School product. It was always a PART of the business school product. And an expensive part at that (hopefully, it paid for itself, otherwise, we are all out of jobs). If you think otherwise, you don't understand who feeds (pays) who here.
/. types would learn the business skills necessary to run a business (and I mean the MBA level skills), then THEY could do the job better. Business and the business world is complex. It's easy to make fatal mistake and lots of people/companies do. Until you know to run your own business, you depend on them. Let me say that again - you depend on them (for jobs at least, and in the context of replying to the parent)
I get a little tired of the MBA/Biz school bashing here.
If
There is a naievete in your post that implies there is no value to business school and that simply, isn't true. The "World of Business" is just as complex and fraught with peril as ANY technical project or dream you can think of. In fact, the WoB almost always funds the technical projects we are speaking of (like IT). Personally, I have found that people who have the knowledge and education to understand what is going on, do the best in business. There are plenty of crazy professors working on projects in a garage. And that's great. I like to see that. But there are MANY more "business people" who are doing better than that. Why? Because they understand business.
When you have mastered financing, the banking system, money systems, derivatives, debt, interest, short-term cash management, long-term cash management, inventory, payroll (and associated HR issues), sales management, marketing, advertising, project management, facility management (perhaps, if you own your own place), accounting, taxes (state, local, and fed), inventory control, budgets, capital project allocation, risk/reward profile analysis, portfolio management, contract law, and anything else that might help you make money ---- then you can run the company and replace all the PHB's.
Remember, its about money. And business schools teach people how to make money. And to make lots of money, you need to know something about the above subjects so you can utilize them to your advantage.
(ps: I do agree with your comment that people stop learning. There is a lot of truth to that statement)