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Have American Businesses Been Stranded By the MBAs?
theodp writes "In his new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, legendary car-guy Bob Lutz says to get the U.S. economy growing again, we need to fire the MBAs and let engineers run the show. The auto industry, writes TIME's Rana Foroohar, is actually a terrific proxy for a trend toward short-term, myopically balance-sheet-driven management that has infected American business. In the first half of the 20th century, industrial giants like Ford, GE, AT&T and others used new technologies to create the best possible products and services with the idea that if you build it better, the customers will come. But by the late '70s, if-you-can-measure-it-you-can-manage-it MBAs were flourishing, and engineers were relegated to the geek back rooms. 'Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys,' argues Lutz, 'and software firms by software guys.' Learning that China plans to open 40 new graduate schools of business in the next few years, Lutz quipped, 'That's the best news I've heard in years.'"
Most engineers know next to nothing about marketing and sales... to the degree that they actually despise interacting with customers. You can have the best product in the world, but if no one knows about it, your business will fail. Consistently in this world, inferior products with better marketing win over superior products. You have to know how to get your name out there, and how to get people to buy your stuff.
I agree your average engineer has zero business skills, but moving them to the back room and having MBAs run the show is still bad.
Get rid of the MBAs and let the engineers have business input, but not run front office.
Oh, and get rid of the lawyers, they are even worse than an MBA.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The problem appears when the managers don't understand what the geeks are doing and give orders based on unrealistic (or completely wrong) understanding of what's happening downstairs.
A percentage of geeks have people skills, they should be the ones in charge.
No sig today...
Indeed, people with different beneficial skills are essential in any organization. The key idea there isn't "different", however; it's "beneficial skills".
MBAs typically have absolutely no helpful skills or abilities. They are often people who tried engineering, but couldn't cut it. They are people who tried accounting or finance, but couldn't cut it. They are people who tried marketing, but couldn't cut it. They are, in essence, the rejects of the business world.
For many of them, their only "skill" (if we can even call it that) is forcing bullshit down the throats of productive, useful people. They do this by holding wasteful meetings, by putting in place absolutely stupid and counterproductive workplace policies, by making decisions about stuff they know absolutely nothing about, and by hiring in a way that protects them from any negative repercussions.
They've been successful at this, and that's why America is as economically and socially fucked as it is today. The rejects are leading the operation, and it shows. Thankfully, it's only a temporary "success". It inherently can't be sustained. It's a so-called "race to the bottom", and the bottom is going to be met very quickly. "Free trade", off-shoring, outsourcing and other popular MBA techniques are the best way to destroy not only individual companies, but entire economies.
I don't think that anyone is suggesting that a software business, for example, should consist only of software developers. Rather, it should merely be led by people who understand how to properly build and provide on-time, on-budget, functioning software systems, rather than by some MBA who can spew out this month's buzzwords in order to fool some other idiot MBA at some other company into buying a shitty software system. Different kinds of people will still be needed, of course, but they should be useful workers, not MBAs.
Yes geeks often lack people skills, but MBAs aren't the fix.
I've always done well because I have a geek streak (but not truly geeky, relative to the geeks that work for me) and people skills. Without my geeks, however, I am nothing. I'd probably be in sales.
Hey, I'm glad engineers exist, because without their inability to convey complex concepts to average people, tech writers and trainers wouldn't be needed. I rose through the ranks very quickly because I could translate Engineereze to Usereze on the fly.
According to executive bios at apple (http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/) 4/10 of them have MBA's. Additionally of the top positions, legal, hardware engineering, industrial design, and software are not traditionally associated with an MBA anyway.
I dunno about MBAs but but I agree that most businesses focus to much on short term gain, often at the cost of their long term success. It's part of the mind set, of high powered business, and perhaps even Americans in general.
The problem are pure business guys who understand everything the MBA tought them, but don't have a true appreciation for the type if business they are running.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Its going to be very hard for the US, UK etc to be competitive. Even if you could build a factory in Europe or America and sustain a strong business (using Henry Ford principles lets say) bankers would not give you the money, you'd have to build in china to get the funding. Andrew Grove former Intel exec and John L. Hennessy, MIPS chip inventor, said the same thing. Economists are also turning against the way modern business is outsourcing to developing countries for a short term gain, Paul Craig Roberts and Michael Hudson to name but a few. Outsource to Asia, you'll impoverish us all, we'll in turn have less purchasing power, and not be able to buy the goods produced. No ones listening there is only attention paid to shareholder value, not even the customer, and who are the largest shareholders in a publicly listed company the BANKS. The MBA's may have the same problem that the economists profession, if we can call it that, has. That is to say a corrupted syllabus, designed to serve the needs of a few moneyed interests.
Only an MBA could be as ignorant as you are, and publicly display so much blatant misunderstanding of reality.
Engineers and technicians are often the best at dealing with customers. Hell, many of them enjoy it, too. They just don't like to bullshit the customers, though. They want to provide them with the best service and the best products. True, this may not be in the best short-term interests of the company, but it often works much better for everyone in the long run.
Engineers and technicians are good at thinking for the long term. They can think beyond the next quarter's results. They realize that maybe they can't please the customer today with the current offerings, but they'll be able to provide the customer with what the customer needs in the future. Sure, the company could sell them some shit today and make a little bit of money now, or we could be truthful with them and make a far bigger and more significant sale in the future.
When this happens on a large scale, the whole economy benefits. Resources end up being allocated far better, and the resulting systems actually do help improve productivity. Contrast this to America today, however. With MBAs running the show, we end up with trickery being used to sell useless products that don't provide any tangible benefits. That's why we see the daily Slashdot stories of some software system implementation project being millions upon millions of dollars over budget, and then often just discarded in the end. This misuse of resources harms the entire economy, and is what allows third-world nations like India and China to pull ahead of America.
You got a point there - but this point highlights the key failure of the MBA crowd - they are trapped within their own echo chamber. A good manager needs to be a translator in the first place, he needs to translate between his engineers, his designers, his sales people, his financial people and the customers, all of which are using different languages. If this kind of communication fails at any level, you end up fucked. To stay within your RPG example, a good manager is the raid leader in your picture, who, without micromanaging, keeps the communication up between his dps, healing and tank class leaders while learning a new, tough raid. And that's where the TFA's point fails - you wouldn't want to put the main tank (engineer) in charge of that, because he rightfully views everything from the tanking perspective, thereby neglecting the needs of the dps and healers, which are secondary to him.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
While I was attending University of Missouri, Columbia we had to take accessment exams and every year the engineering department would stomp on everyone else in EVERY catagory including the ones they were supposed to be good at.
And yes it drives me nuts to watch movies. Almost to the point where to enjoy a movie, with a lot of technical elements I need to have a beer or five so I don't nit pick.
The only things smarter than an engineer is a technician (I happen to be both). Engineers may know all the math, but they usually have no practical hand on and have a nasty habit of designing things that are half impossible to repair.
"WHY would it every break I'm a very smart engineer"
To which the tech responds: "You are a fucking moron. You put the part (that "never" breaks every 6-18months) behind three other parts and an access panel for absolutley no reason, when there was plenty of space to mount it where I could fix it in five minutes instead of 6 hours.
HP is a great example of a company founded by engineers and later ran in to the ground by MBAs.
Company problems are like people problems, sometimes there's a systematic reason, other times it's completely down to the individual and the circumstance.
While you've focused more on the personal skills that many geeks lack, you're also missing that many geeks don't seem to understand how difficult running a business, really is. Even small businesses. There's so many things going on, so many things out of your control, so many people you rely on, and so many unintuitive "systems", which are really hard to get a grasp on.
The worst companies I personally know of, that I have worked for, or with, are run by engineers/scientists.
While there is something to be said for the executives having been in that industry, there's also a lot to be said for people with outside perspective, and a fuck load to be said for people who understand how businesses run. The article has said MBA's, but I take that more to mean accounting/management/finance/economics professionals, so MBA's/CA/CPA/CFA/* all in one bag. It's condescending to suggest that this is due to "MBA's", and the real discussion seems to be one of "short-term balance sheet driven management" versus "long-term" and or "non-balance sheet driven management".
Well, short-term versus long-term versus some mix of both, has and continues to be, one of the most debated topics amogst "MBA's". To suggest that somehow they don't understand this, is absurd. Hell, the very fact that Bob Lutz is writing about it, shows this is absurd, since he is in fact one of those "MBA" people.
Oh well, for those who haven't read the the Business Week article, I recommend it. It really gets to the heart of his story. The TIME one, not so much.
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Most of the posts will probably be "yeah MBAs don't contribute anything" versus "engineers are geeks who can't communicate". In reality MBAs working for companies usually know what the company does in detail, and there are plenty of engineers who can communicate.
It's still an issue though, because the opportunity cost of learning about "business" is less learning about something else. According to this article,
The rise of MBAs is also tied to the rise of finance. Most people agree that the US funneled too many resources into the finance sector, which then just destroyed them. Instead of designing more complicated mortgage securities, those physicists could have been doing physics. Although "managing" doesn't necessarily have to be about finance, most business schools spent a lot of time teaching their students about CAPM and Black-Scholes. (If you don't know what these mean, good for you!)
But of course business schools are not a fixed target. Most have reacted to the financial crisis and are now, for instance, emphasizing globalization and how to work in multiple countries. Time will tell I guess if this path is any better.
Personally, I think the biggest damage is done by the outlook that most MBA programs teach. Instead of thinking that your company's goal is to build the best vacuum or whatever, you learn that the goal is to maximize shareholder value, and that gaming the system is what everyone is doing. Over the long run, countries probably don't want too many of those people in charge.
Yeah right dude, Steve Jobbs certainly knows nothing about marketing.
Let's face it, the best tech companies out there are run by tech guys.
Bob Lutz is dead-on. Several companies I've worked for were run by the sales guys, and they ran the businesses into the ground by focusing on short-term profits and allowing their products to languish and eventually become irrelevant. They failed to see that investing in good technology and having a vision would ultimately give you an even larger market share. Just like Apple and John Sculley. Sure he got the company back on solid ground, but he couldn't maintain it because he wasn't a visionary tech guy. When they brought Jobbs back again, we all got iPods, iPhones, Macbook Airs and iPads. The PC world has been transformed, and Apple's market cap exceeds Microsoft's.
This isn't about people skills, it's about MBAs telling the engineers how to build a car. The software analogy is correct, managers with no programming background typically think a computer is magic and will make unrealistic requests or ask for things they really don't need but think they do. For example a project i was recently involved with where the manager wanted to plot some points on a map and take a screenshot of google maps. Plotting the points was easy but the screenshot in browser would have been difficult since its javascript and violated Google's TOS. Wasted a lot of time trying to come up with a screenshot solution in browser and finally just explained to the manager it would be easier to store the coordinates and create a link that could place those coordinates back onto the map. Turns out that was perfectly acceptable because they just needed to show the map to a third party, it didn't need to be saved as a screenshot image at all. A programmer would have realized the limitations of javascript and the Google TOs and the project would have been done much faster with the proper directions in the first place.
Put the engineers back in charge and let the MBAs worry about marketing.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
For 25 years I've watched as the same thing has happened to the pharmaceutical industry. It's just a few years behind the automobile industry. We've largely blamed the MBA's but maybe it's just the natural order of things.
1) Start an industry
2) Grow an industry
3) Get rich (profit)
4) Get greedy
5) Collapse
The idea that current management is broken is correct. It's broken because it's not focused on managing companies it's focused on managing stock prices. Unfortunately, IMO, there is so much value in the equity market that major businesses no longer care what they produce or how they produce it as long as they produce stock value along side it. This attitude is a result of a couple of things. First the short term value from investments is worth many times the actual value of the company can produce from real assets/production/sales/fees/etc. Second we've tied executive compensation to stock price through options, grants, incentives, etc. It's not a problem of who is managing the companies it's a problem of incentives and motivations.
Fixing the problem doesn't necessarily mean putting a geek in charge but instead means altering incentives so they favor long-term profit and sustainable growth (20, 30, 50 years or more) beyond short-term stock bumps. Often engineer personalities get in the way and make them harder to incentivize than the bean counter personalities. Too often the geek only cares about the purity of a solution or the optimization of a process and that makes it difficult to incentivize him to put long-term profit first. Additionally, if the geek you select is flexible enough to not be stuck in the optimization mode then he is going to game the system just like the MBA in favor of stock indicators for his personal compensation. It's not dishonest or wrong it's human nature. You tell your manager what you care about by how you pay them. They in turn work to maximize those items to which their variable compensation is tied.
The best thing you can do is find good managers (MBAs or Geeks not withstanding) and incentivize them to run the company with the primary goal being long-term sustainable profits. I think more often than not you're going to find this is an MBA type with a compensation package not tied to stock but a smart board will look for the right personality traits, coupled with the right skills, coupled with the right compensation package. The answer is definitely not "just give it to the engineers" however.
The other is changing market conditions. In the case of ATT, consumers simply rebeled against the price they had to pay for what became a commodity. It is hard to explain to a young person how much the rate for phone service has fallen. Using a cell phone I can call from anywhere in the continental US to anywhere in the continental US basically for what my parents paid for local calls, inflation adjusted. With Skype out of country calls fell from maybe fifty cents a minute or so to a less than a dime a minute(the countries I call are not on the unlimited plan). ATT revenues has been more than decimated by market forces.
One thing that did happen in the 70s and 80s, particularly 80s, was the concept that profit was a right and that firms when they employed a certain number of people needed to ongoing bussiness, even if the management was incompentant. This, in effect, removed the incentive for compentant MBAs. As long as a manager has a piece of paper, the firm had done due diligence, and the financial sector, backed by tax payer money, would insure that funding for the incompetent and inefficient firms would be ongoing. The primary negative consequences was that compentent and creative individuals found it harder to get funding, and employess.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
David Brin put it like this in the early '90s:
"Want to help Russia and America at the same time?
Send half our lawyers (freedom in both countries will go up.)
Send half our MBAs (both our economy and theirs will boom.)
And send half of NASA's managers (America gets a great space program and Russia some good farm labor.)"
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
There are a lot of engineers out there who have business credentials too. At my company, a large aerospace company, "working level" engineers mostly have a BS in engineering/science & 2 advanced degrees -- a technical degree and an MBA.
Engineers still know something that is no longer taught to business majors -- that you have to make decisions for the long term. When you're building systems that cost many millions & must perform for decades you must keep this in mind at every stage of the process -- both business & engineering functions.
Decades ago this was a part of business majors' education. In management courses, accounting, every course you were taught to always make decisions assuming your firm is an on-going concern. Now business students are taught to extract as much money as possible in the least amount of time and get out. Think short term and eventually you'll destroy enough companies that that you no longer have anyplace to invest ... and the "wealth" that you have amassed is worthless. This same thinking has spread to government & investors.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
Well, I've seen worse in other operating systems.
Not any modern mainstream OS's.
Windows ME, Vista's UAC. Bad UI design happens and it happens mainstream.
And the allmighty shareholder value.
And as long as execs only have this in their mind, companies will be bled dry and wasted. I wouldn't say that engineers should run companies. I'm an engineer and I would probably not be much more successful at running a business than the locust MBAs that run them today, just for different reasons. I would probably fail to produce a profitable product, striving for the perfect tool rather than keeping my eye on the cost.
Execs today have a different problem with the way they run a company. They don't even care what gets produced, or even whether something gets produced. Their eye is on the stock market and how to push the shareholder value up. And the perversion is that this is easiest done by doing exactly the opposite of producing: Firing people. Lay off half your staff and your SHV goes through the roof. And for good reason, it does actually push your revenue in the short term since you save on staff expenses (and for most companies this is a really big cost position). The drawback is that with fewer people you can usually also only produce less, or at least of lower quality. The times when you could save on staff by automatizing or streamlining production are past. We're automated and streamlined nearly perfectly in most areas. Firing people today means that certain work simply will not get done.
But this will not show until later, and for now it is beneficial for the shareholder value. The perversion is that it is the sensible thing to do if you want your company to survive. Because if you don't, your stock price will drop and it will become trivial for a "slimmer" company (that did fire its staff) to swallow you. This is, btw, the way a lot of these companies survived until today. They laid off their productive staff, pumped their value and swallowed up companies that actually did produce (and hence didn't lay off stafff, and hence were "cheap" to get because their stocks accordingly dropped). And that game got repeated, the productive staff was fired, the shareholder value went up, another productive company was devoured. And so on.
The problem is that today almost only the locusts are left over. And it's quite useless if they ate one another, since they're all just husks and shells, filled with administrative staff that don't really produce much anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Indeed you need many different kinds of people to manage/run any organization. In any well run organization, every one understands they have a role to play in keeping the organization working AND that they responsibility is shared. In a well run organization an engineer/programmer/scientist is not sneered at and verbally abused, nor are the sales/accounting/IT people. The problem that has occurred as Lutz keeps repeating is that because of B-schools MBA's specifically and B-school graduates in general have been told/taught that ONLY a B-school graduate knows anything about how to manage a company. They are TAUGHT that only this quarters results are important, that research and IT support is a waste of money and if you don't have an MBA you are a waste of company resources. A long time ago people started at a low level in a company and worked their way through the company learning along the way what works and what doesn't in that company Now B-school graduates learn real garbage, move into middle management and drag a company down. From my own experience as a scientist managing a successful company, I no longer hire B-school graduates. The last one I hired told me I don't know how to run my own company and that they could increase my profits several hundred fold if I would just stop wasting resources on taking care of the staff and coddling the other scientists. When he came into my lab I laughed at him and then showed him the door
...you end up with GIMP
The problem has very little to do with people skills. As a manager at a larger company, you don't need people skills. You aren't doing most of the negotiating etc yourself, you're just steering the company.
In order to STEER you need to know where you are and where you're going. This is the problem with MBAs. They generally have zero skills related to the field they are managing and end up not knowing where there are and then with a flawed understanding of where they are they can't possibly know where they are going.
MBAs are for sales managers and marketing. The problem is they've made it into the real management branches as well.
I'm a computer engineer, and let me assure you, most engineers don't know dick about productization. Sadly neither do the bean counter MBAs. Perhaps people in cognitive engineering, which is a subdiscipline of industrial engineering. At least they know something about meeting needs and usability. Rely on the typical engineers for designing products and you'll end up with "clever" bullshit that useful for like three people.
Seriously, we should not have sold off chrysler and simply bailed out GM. The problem in America is that America's business school are in charge of far too many of our businesses. These are basically neo-cons who think short terms rather than long-term or what is good for everybody. An engineer who is in charge would keep everything local so that they can deal with issues quickly. An American MBA has no real knowledge so they trust that others will botch everything and they can pass the blame.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
said, "Charge me a buck more and make this part out of metal instead of fucking plastic" or words to that effect?
Pick the product, I mean it doesn't matter what it is anything thing from your car, house, cell phone, kids bicycle, toilet paper, laptop pick the damn product.
THAT is the MBA / Bean Counter Problem.
They don't think in terms of high customer satisfaction they think in terms of "I can shave 0.0001 dollars per unit" and "I can predict that we will only increase our returns and warranty repair by 0.0001% and we will increase profit by .5 %".
Huge pet peeve... I like gauges I like to see actual oil pressure in my car, actual engine temperature but these days those are rare things in cars. I know the cost difference might be 2 dollars per car and frankly I will happily pay 30 times that since 60 bucks on the cost of a new car is nothing.
Plastic gears in assemblies... My wife drives a Mercedes C320 and there is a plastic gear someplace under the dash that is attached to a vacuum servo of some kind that has something to do with the air handling. The damn thing has some teeth missing and it chatters now and the sound is really annoying. The replacement part costs 40.00 bucks. But it will cost close to 1000.00 bucks in labor to get at the damn thing since you have to basically dis-assemble the dash to get at it.
The above reasons are why they need to be yacked out of the chain of command.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
It's been my experience that most geeks have people skills.
The only geeks I've ever run into that don't have people skills are self important idiots that consider themselves artists, rather than producers, that can't be bothered with trivial things like writing competent documentation, or tracking their time honestly. Dangerous notions like, "Good code speaks for itself, so you don't need comments" or "Would you cost estimate the Mona Lisa?" come from this camp.
Everybody else can take an abstract idea, and communicate it in a way that's appropriate for their audience, at the very least.
Geeks with talent have people skills, can tell a client what they want or need, and can communicate it all with a product that just works.
This isn't difficult stuff to understand.
If any of these basic concepts are too much for you, maybe you're in the wrong business.
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The geek squad used to be good and they did a good job now it's all about how much you can sell and it you don't up sell your hours get cut and they want sales men over techs any ways. Best buy used to make a big deal about how there sales men where NON commission but now they are hidden commission where if they don't sell rip off monster cables and extended warranty they get there hours cut down. I hear that at staples the easy techs are under alot of pressure and lack of sales can make it that you get kicked out of the business machines department. Also at staples they when from on of best bonuses in retail to one of worst.
Circuit city used to have sales people who knew what they where doing and selling and then 2 times Circuit city fired the long term sales people and replaced them with new people who had no idea on what they where selling.
Most engineers know next to nothing about marketing and sales... to the degree that they actually despise interacting with customers. You can have the best product in the world, but if no one knows about it, your business will fail.
Which is true and important and entirely beside the point. MBAs aren't about marketing. They hire people for that. MBAs are all about managing, not marketing. MBAs are the guys who export American manufacturing jobs to the Third World, the guys who cook the books to pump up their employer's apparent profitability enough to raise the stock price again this quarter, the guys who, with apologies to Oscar Wilde, "know the price of everything and the value of nothing." They're the guys who have spent the last 30 years or so systematically dismantling America's industrial base while simultaneously enriching themselves. They nearly destroyed the world's economy three years ago, and yet, mysteriously enough, they're still in charge of basically everything today.
They are the people to whom Santayana was referring, when he warned about repeating the past's mistakes. They are our leaders.
May Chthulu have mercy on our souls.
Check out my novel.
These kind of stereotypes are not helpful and not particularly apt.
For every one of the introverted, insular "ivory tower" type geeks you are talking about I can point to a Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Andy Grove, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Eric Schmidt, etc. You may not LIKE any of these people and you may find their geek cred lacking, but they all started in the trenches and all have been heavily involved in the day-to-day works of their companies. They are all geeks and business people.
Working in a small business I had to do sales for a time. Prior to this I had been "behind the scenes" guy. Over the years I got to know a lot of the salesmen from other companies pretty well. Very few fit the stereotypes of super extroverted, super suave schmoozers. Yeah, most of them were probably more engaging conversationalists (or at least more willing to hear themselves talk!) than an average engineer geek, but I met plenty of very successful salespeople whose personalities shocked my stereotypes.
One stereotype that I have developed more and more over the years is that an MBA without some kind of background in a field is useless. Ok, if you're a chemical engineering PhD and get an MBA that's one thing. If you're generic poli sci/econ humanities undergrad with an MBA, chances are, you're an idiot.
You mean, the Windows Snipping Tool?
I'd never heard of it before, but now that you have informed me... Google's page 1 of "snipping tool javascript" doesn't seem to suggest it can be used from Javascript at all. It's a user program. It's not even included in XP, it has to be downloaded along with several other tablet PC prerequisites. And Linux/Mac are obviously not supported.
Is that some kind of joke?
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Oh, and get rid of the lawyers, they are even worse than an MBA.
Lawyers are risk management. Getting rid of them is getting rid of insurance--opening yourself up to major downside risk in everything from employment discrimination to your lease to the agreements you make with your clients. Effectively, it's a transaction cost of doing business.
Engineers tend to intuitively dislike lawyers because they seem to make things less efficient--transaction costs do that. When everything goes well, the lawyer was basically an expensive insurance policy that you never collected on. But when things go badly, a good lawyer can make the difference between riches and insolvency. Even having good agreements drafted can discourage people from suing you. Putting together a new corporate form can easily save millions, for example.
Sometimes a lawyer does too much--they effectively purchase too much insurance, spending far more to achieve additional downside protection that is not worth the expenditure. Think of it like a corollary to Amdahl's law. In these cases, good lawyers can (Depending on a client's preference and the specific trade-off) advise you about the relative costs and downside risks, or make some of these decisions using his or her own judgment.
Granted, there are a lot of fundamental problems with the legal system--good tort reform for everyone might be a better solution than limited liability conditional on legal forms, for example--but it also greatly benefits business (e.g. agreements are enforceable), so legal expenses are a cost of doing business well.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Reading this piece, I can comfortably say that the author is right on the money with regards to how a focus on being "data driven" is actually slowly running companies into the ground.
I started off my career writing really low level network stack drivers. I got pretty familiar with the windows kernel, became a star in my office and got put on an MBA track because I had demonstrated some aptitude with customers and sales. Fast forward a few years and I've got an MBA under my belt and work for what was formerly a very large provider of consumer SaaS that is now trying to win in what can be loosely described as the call center space.
My days are now spent trying to determine strategic initiatives on the basis of consumer behaviour as represented in a slew of really badly coded Cognos reports. This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that analytics and data driven decision making is anything but in most companies. Data is used to validate a hypothesis instead of being explored to reveal patterns, associations and trends. Every executive asking a question about customer behviour is secretly asking for validation of their own theory on the business and wants to gloat about it come performance review time. Obviously, in this kind of operating model, data is bastardized to lead to really bad decisions.
I'm all for scientific approaches to management, however they need to be undertaken following a method that is in line with the scientific method to be labelled as such. When I leave this job (which is ridiculously well paying but completely unfulfilling compared to my career in engineering) and run off to create my startup, I will probably hire an MBA at some point. However, I won't hire them to be a bean counter.
What many companies fail to realize is that the key to having a great leader is equal focus on product and market. The MBA that I would hire would be chosen because they've demonstrated an ability to be highly technically proficient but decided to expand their horizons and take on "soft-problems" as well.
I think that this is a self-fulfilling (and self-limiting) prophecy. People skills are a skill and can be learned, when necessary and important, just like any other. The idea that geeks need to be locked in a back room is a mythology that serves certain people, but certainly not the geeks themselves.
I had a software engineering job once -- one-year review comes up and my manager tells me, "Your problem is that like any engineer you can't communicate with others. You need to read such-and-such book on communication." Well, that's just bullshit. I've always enjoyed public speaking and presentations, and I left that job to become a college lecturer (with very high student evaluations, etc.) But god forbid my engineering manager actually think that through, instead of regurgitating mythology.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The problem appears when the managers don't understand what the geeks are doing and give orders based on unrealistic (or completely wrong) understanding of what's happening downstairs.
A percentage of geeks have people skills, they should be the ones in charge.
Exactly, bean counters count beans. Their grasp of the everyday operations, the people involved and the dynamics between them is truly lost. The bean counter adds a number here and subtracts a number there and they improve the bottom line, however, the number added may mean that the employee will be required to work 10 hour days, 7 days a week and the subtracted number may mean the employer will have to reduce the workforce, compounding an already difficult problem. Add in the fact that every time the bean counter cuts costs, their bonus increases, you can see the conflict of interest.
I worked for a company that had a very high standard of quality control (this was necessary due to the product's environment.), bonuses were calculated on sales versus scrap. The bean counter mind set was that one turbine blade ordered was one sale, but in reality, it may take two or three molds to ensure one defect free turbine blade (the company had a 70% scrap rate). When the scrap rate started affecting the bonus size, the company laid off approximately 600 people to keep the bonus level from dropping.
Shuffling numbers was easier than improving the production process paradigm. Although I am not into sports, I am reminded of a saying that goes; Keep your eye on the ball and not on the scoreboard.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
ask what the manager *really* wanted
you dont have a lot of experience dealing with business/management requirements, do you?
People, what a bunch of bastards
My father was a management accountant, and worked in a fairly diverse set of businesses. While his job was more or less the same one in each business, he always made an effort to understand the rudiments and fundamentals of the business in his spare time. For example when working for glass company, he familiarised himself with how glass was made, the major companies in the industry, and the types and uses of glass. He would never have as much expertise as someone who worked in that industry their whole lives, but he would have enough understanding to acknowledge and even foresee problems when they came to his attention.
I seriously doubt that MBA managers make these kinds of efforts when they take charge of companies. The dominant ethos of that profession appears to be to run a company by the numbers just long enough to move on to a higher paid position. Most that I have met have little to no underlying understanding of the businesses they are being paid handsomely to operate.
So we have a situation where NASA managers literally do not know how rockets work, and yet will pride themselves on that fact, even as their shuttles and rockets explode after take-off. Our banks are being run by "fairly dim former [sports] players", who couldn't even perform a compound interest calculation without assistance. And above all the senior decision making levels of government, the civil service, and private industry are saturated with people who are literally incapable of understanding even why they are making their decisions, let alone which they should make.
The quintessential manifestation of this pervasive dysfunction in western management was the US President George W. Bush. The man ran everything he ever managed into the ground, and stayed true to form while in office. People may moan about old families, money, and influence, but a large portion of the blame lies in a culture which sees fit to appoint unqualified, unknowledgeable, sweet talkers to positions of responsibility, and moreover to even deny those positions to competent candidates.
This isn't about choosing between inarticulate geek savants and networkers. This is about choosing between experienced professionals who can communicate effectively if dryly, and people with the training, mentality, and ethics of used car salesmen. The analogy is exact.
May the Maths Be with you!
People work best together. You mix the best attributes from several different kinds of people. Hell, if you want a good geeky example look at different classes in multiplayer games. No one can do or master everything. That's why it's best to do what you know yourself and let other people handle the other parts.
Actually, using WoW to demonstrate a real-life point would be the sign of a true geek. One that doesn't really get the world out there.
The reason MBAs come in and slash and crash businesses, it's because they get HUGE bonuses for short term profitability.
It isn't an MBA problem. It's a shareholders-demanding-immediate-profits-problem.
One word, Android.
You are wrongly accusing weaknesses in linux desktop GUI functionality with the difficulty of penetrating an entrenched market. I have used Windows, OSX, OS/2, Irix, linux (gnome, KDE, XFCE) extensively and the Windows and OSX GUIs have their failings the biggest failing being the retarded "it wasn't developed here" brick wall. A good example, multiple desktops, they have been available in the linux GUI for ages but blind stubbornness kept them from being a standard part of other GUIs.
And some people just don't play well with others.
True story: While working full time as an engineer I went back to school and was taking some courses that were a mix of information technology and business management so many of the fellow students were business types coming from the other end of the spectrum. This was during the late 90s when the economy was booming and technical skills were in demand and good wages were required to retain talent. During a break a CIO employed at one company was conversing with a middle manager of software development from another company. They knew in common various talented people who had worked for both of them at one time or another but had moved around to gain better wages and benefits. The CIO made a telling comment, "when this boom economy ends we are going to get back at them", them being the technical people who did not stick around for the lower wages and benefits.
True story: Working with a group of engineers an equipment upgrade plan was developed that would reduce chemical usage costs and reduce hazardous waste disposal costs. Our calculations showed a 1 year payback due to reduced costs alone with the currently intangible benefit of advancing process performance for future product needs that the product designers and process engineers predicted. In presenting the project to the division VP in front of factory management I was laughed at and told "if engineers were putting your own money into these projects you would put more realistic cost savings numbers" which was followed by a round of laughter from management. My response was that I would put up my own cash to fund the project but I expected to collect any measured profitable gains as my return on investment. The laughing stopped and everyone had a poker face. The project was not approved and two years later when the latest product design was released for full production the equipment that was the target of the engineering upgrade was causing huge yield losses due to ineffective performance on the new product design.
We need the talent of MBAs, they learn valuable business skills and techniques in school, but they are currently overrated and overreaching in their decisions and control. When you extend this to the MBAs who climb the corporate ladder to the board level they are corrosive not only to their own work force but to the entire economy and future of the nation.
It's been my experience that most geeks have people skills.
The only geeks I've ever run into that don't have people skills are self important idiots that consider themselves artists, rather than producers, that can't be bothered with trivial things like writing competent documentation, or tracking their time honestly. Dangerous notions like, "Good code speaks for itself, so you don't need comments" or "Would you cost estimate the Mona Lisa?" come from this camp.
Everybody else can take an abstract idea, and communicate it in a way that's appropriate for their audience, at the very least.
Geeks with talent have people skills, can tell a client what they want or need, and can communicate it all with a product that just works.
This isn't difficult stuff to understand. If any of these basic concepts are too much for you, maybe you're in the wrong business.
Several questions :
1. Do you consider yourself a geek with people skills? If you answer yes, please proceed to question 1a.
1a. Could you picture a world where your post is construed by others to be lacking in social skills? If yes, please proceed to question 1b.
1b. If you could picture a world where your post comes across as lacking social correctness, do you think that posting it with the intent to be rude is thematically irrelevant from your original answer? If yes, please proceed to question 1c.
1c. Does it really matter if I've constructed my list items with bad "naming" skills?
If you answered NO to any of these questions, don't worry about it. No one cares about your opinion.
If you answered YES to any of these questions, don't worry about that either. No one cares about your opinion in that case either.
That's precisely what the problem is.
Engineering firms should be run by someone with engineering experience who then gets an MBA or similar training.
Software firms, likewise - take a coder and give them MBA or equivalent training.
Don't do it that way? You get what we have today. Everyone* with an MBA is a fucking PHB moron.
*By "Everyone" I mean "with 99.9% certainty
I seriously doubt that MBA managers make these kinds of efforts when they take charge of companies. The dominant ethos of that profession appears to be to run a company by the numbers just long enough to move on to a higher paid position.
That's pretty much it. That's how the corporate American works and we're taught accordingly.
Engineers who want to know the business end of things this is what you study:
Pretty much the first semester of B school is all you really need. That's all. everything else is fluff. And as far as the group behavior/personal dynamics class goes, we were taught that "sensitivity training" was the solution for all human resource problems - it was all basic psych and sociology and lots of buzz words. Let's put it this way, if you don't have any social skills, getting personal coaching will do much more for you than those fluff classes.
There! Now you won't waste 2+ years and $40K+ on a big piece of toilet paper.
Want a Masters Degree for ego, promotion, or whatever? Get it in something you'll enjoy.
Business PhDs argue about all manor of interesting stuff. Business BA and MBA programs are just degree mills operated by business academics so their salaries can be even vaguely competitive with the business world.
MBAs are soft degrees for people who want money but lack direction, drive, and guts, i.e. they're risk-averse personally. You don't really want that sort of person running your company.
You might view an MBA as a qualification to manage someone significantly less educated and less intelligent than yourself. I'd hire an MBA from a tier n school for managing engineers from say tier n+2 schools.. or tier n school engineers if the MBA's undergrad was a STEM degree. I'd usually hire a business BA from a lower tier school only for managing people who held no collage degree.
You also shouldn't make managers from the engineers who cannot manage. duh! Yet, there are actually enough engineers and scientists who can handled the organizational load & inter-personal factors.
I'd imagine the "scientists" you mentioned were academics who started a company. Imho, anyone fresh out of academia should not be running a company, this even covers business PhDs. Instead, they should take a couple years acclimating to the real business world.
Conversely, you'll actually find good manages much more frequently among some non-academic science degrees, although not computer science. Bowing has been considered the best run large aerospace company for decades. Bowing traditionally prefers hiring physics majors for their management positions. I'd imagine that mathematics majors make fairly good managers for software developers too, google certainly does that occasionally.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
So now we also need to worry about the MBAs killing and eating all the technical people?!?
Huh? It is the evil people who develop the technology and science that has advanced human civilization?
It is more the fact that the corporAte environment has become very friendly for corporate psychopaths, who will do a quick buck during a 6 month/1 year stint (merger, outsourcing, unnecessary reorganization, firing of random number of employees (1000, 5000 and 10,000 are common) offshoring) and then flee to the next company and management position.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Thankfully we have engineers to develop more efficient ways of harvesting meat. The MBAs just take the credit.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Frequently, an MBA is obtained by an individual with a BA or BS in some other field. Engineers, for example, often go on to get an MBA to fill in the economics, budgeting and planning and resource allocation skills that they will need in addition to their basic (engineering) knowledge. In this sense, an MBA can be a useful degree.
The problem arises when companies compartmentalize their functions, making the business management side of the house responsible for one set of decisions, engineering for another and operations for something else. Each group does 'their thing' and throws it over the fence to the next one. So the end solution is suboptimal.
Anecdote: When I was at Boeing, we were developing a higher capacity electrical power generating system (EPGS) for the 747-400. One aspect of this was to spec relays and contactors to withstand the higher available short circuit current. And once the vendors had developed the 'heavy duty' components, it was my job to test them (blow them up). One special purpose relay incorporated some voltage sensing logic which would cause it to switch to an alternate source should the primary fail. It was a very low volume part. So we took a sample to the lab, hooked it to a 4 generator source and applied a short to its output. Bang! The magic smoke came out (not supposed to happen). Back to the manufacturer for a redesign. The next sample, less smoke came out. The next one, even less. After a number of iterations, the vendor had it down to the case just bulging a bit. Still not suitable.
At this point, the purchasing guy called up and asked what the hell we were doing blowing up all these $7500 relays. $7500?!! If someone had told me that's what they cost, I could have easily designed the part out of the airplane. But that wasn't my job. The guy whose job it was was still adapting a WWII era design to the system. And he had no idea of parts cost. Not his job, just build the system so it works. Cost is a different department (where all the MBAs work).
Have gnu, will travel.
The quintessential manifestation of this pervasive dysfunction in western management was the US President George W. Bush.
And at every opportunity, he boasted of being a "C" student, rubbing his "greater position" in the faces of those who'd spent their lives hitting the books.
Wasted a lot of time trying to come up with a screenshot solution in browser
Or the programmer could *communicate* and ask what the manager *really* wanted, rather than blindly following the instructions...
And THIS is the real reason China hasn't caught up in innovation; working in China 6-7 months a year, it's always astounding how engineers, workers, and mid-level people just blindly follow instructions without stopping and thinking about what they are actually doing.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Just because someone made a large personal profit does not mean they were not a complete and utter failure in a grand scheme of things. I would hardly call our baking executives as success stories given the banking crash, though none of us can deny how rich they got off the bailouts. Were our economy and justice system not so rife with incompetence, many of our captains of industry would be unemployed and/or jailed.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Well, you see, business is a tough game. The core guiding principle of business is greed. The winner of the game in business is often the one who is the most capable lier. So, sure, the MBA:s may know their stuff, but their stuff is greed and lying, so they should be taken out and ...told to stop being greedy and lying and then maybe assigned some work sewing blankets or something that is actually useful.
(Wait! What?! Yes, "the whole goddamn system is out of order!".)
I seriously doubt that MBA managers make these kinds of efforts when they take charge of companies. The dominant ethos of that profession appears to be to run a company by the numbers just long enough to move on to a higher paid position.
That's pretty much it. That's how the corporate American works and we're taught accordingly.
That's not how I was taught at a public university ranked in the top 35 in the US. As matter of fact in some of our case studies the take away was that the perspective you offer was partly responsible for failure.
Engineers who want to know the business end of things this is what you study: Basic Accounting, Economics: basics of Macro and Micro, Managerial accounting (reports: balance sheet, income statement, cash flows!!! ), Finance: although the manual for the HP 12C covers it all ...
Uh, no. In my classes we were also taught to look for the financial gimmicks and tricks sometimes used to inflate financial reports. When found we were told to stay away from such companies. Well one professor actually suggested otherwise, he was of the opinion that one should wait for that company's failure, buy it cheap, discard the management and turn it around. He thought rehabilitating a mismanaged company with otherwise good products can be quite lucrative.
... Biz law - contracts. Pretty much the first semester of B school is all you really need. That's all. everything else is fluff ...
I call BS. Claiming the above is a semester demonstrates a tendency towards *extreme* exaggeration, it lowers your credibility. Also other typical classes are not fluff. Statistics: A quite different class from the one I had that was part of scientific/engineering program. Organization Behavior: While often joked about the case studies also showed company failures because management blew off the issues raised in this class, more below. Negotiations: often an elective but also considered one of the most important classes by those who take it. Global Business: Obviously critical today, and if someone thinks it is about outsourcing then that person obviously hasn't taken such a class. Marketing: As an arrogant engineer expecting this to all be snake oil I loved learning how ignorant I was. Marketing can be highly scientifically and mathematically based. Info Tech: Again, software types like myself are often terribly mistaken as to what this class is about. Stategy: Do you seriously consider this topic fluff? The case studies we read suggest otherwise. Entrepreneurship: Another elective rather than a core class but for many its a critical class, again something you would consider fluff?
And as far as the group behavior/personal dynamics class goes, we were taught that "sensitivity training" was the solution for all human resource problems - it was all basic psych and sociology and lots of buzz words. Let's put it this way, if you don't have any social skills, getting personal coaching will do much more for you than those fluff classes.
My organizational behavior class was quite different. This topic surfaced in many other classes and in various case studies neglect in the OB area was one of the factors leading to team or company failure. It also helped me to see events over my career in a different light. Teaching social skills is not what OB is about. As a matter of fact that sort of stuff was done outside of class, for example a club focused on public speaking.
There! Now you won't waste 2+ years and $40K+ on a big piece of toilet paper. Want a Masters Degree for ego, promotion, or whatever? Get it in something you'll enjoy.
I have a MS CS and an MBA. The MS CS was largely more of the same, taking many of the BS CS classes a bit further. There were some interesting electives and doing some research in one of these was fun. However unless you
If that helped him win "C" student votes with the expense of some "A" student votes, then he's not so dumb or incompetent as a politician. There are lots more "C" students than "A" students :).
Fact is he got reelected, so he "passed". If Obama doesn't get reelected then Obama fails.
If the person that gets reelected was doing a bad job, then the voters and/or the voting system fails.
I seriously doubt that MBA managers make these kinds of efforts when they take charge of companies.
That's an AWFULLY broad brush you are painting with there. A MBA is a college degree. Nothing more. People with MBAs go into finance, accounting, marketing, sales, engineering (yes, engineering), and of course management. Having a MBA is not an automatic ticket to management either. At best it might get you some interviews you might not get without the degree much like an engineering degree can open a few doors. After that it is up to the talent of the individual. Futhermore, lots of people get MBA degrees AFTER they already are in charge (see executive MBA programs) because they seek to do their job better. Management has a skillset much like engineering, and many (though not remotely all) of those skills can be learned in school.
The dominant ethos of that profession appears to be to run a company by the numbers just long enough to move on to a higher paid position.
A MBA is a college degree, not a profession. There are good managers with MBA degrees and bad managers with MBA degrees. The degree is just training. It is in no way, shape or form a profession.
Most that I have met have little to no underlying understanding of the businesses they are being paid handsomely to operate.
That would be true of many people regardless of whether they possess a degree in business administration.
I've been thinking along these lines for years. One of the original catalysts of this was reading a book called Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, by John Ralston Saul, an historian. It isn't a perfect book, but it is definitely thought provoking. It is difficult to summarize, but I'll give it a shot. He argues that our modern management class is obsessed with a somewhat myopic version of reason concerned mainly with measurement. This management class lacks a sense of imagination, of history, and of human nature, preferring to retreat to a world of graphs, tables, and equations.
The example he gave that sticks with me concerns the Mad Cow Disease crisis in the UK a while ago. Mad Cow Disease is a strange phenomenon, where protein structures called prions propagate when animals eat other animals that have the prions in their flesh. The prions eventually result in brain disintegration. They cannot be destroyed by cooking and processing. Managers in the beef industry knew that Mad Cow Disease existed, knew that it was growing, but they did not take it seriously. They likely tried to measure it in terms of number of cows infected, number of people infected by its human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and concluded that its rarity made it a negligible risk. They could have wiped it out by quick action, but they did not. What they didn't seem able to imagine was that this disease and the fear surrounding it would eventually result in the destruction of the entire British beef industry. Almost all of the stock of British cows was destroyed. Britain was banned from exporting beef to most of the rest of the world. The financial losses were huge for the industry. Saul argues that these losses were due in very large part to the lack of imagination of MBA type managers.
I also have first hand with these issues. A friend worked for a food manufacturer that hired as plant manager an MBA graduate whose only previous experience was in a machinery assembly plant. Predictably, food safety practices and quality control went out the window, as these things were seen as negative items on a balance sheet. Lab testing and random bacterial swabbing budgets were reduced, until predictably there was a food recall that cost the company prestige, customers and a lot of money. He managed the plant primarily from his upstairs office, and he spent most of his time staring at graphs. He would seldom come down to the plant floor, and he had little comprehension of the processes and details of the plant he was managing. In the end, he left in disgrace, after transforming a plant that had formerly been extremely profitable and efficient into a money losing albatross.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
What else did he manage or "run into the ground?" Texas Rangers? I thought he was supposed to have done a pretty good job there but can't say I really know.
He was allowed to purchase a part for a discount in order to be named an owner to help push through the stadium replacement from Arlington Stadium to The Ballpark at Arlington. He had no managerial duties, other than to run around and announce his ownership while begging for government handouts.
Isn't it interesting that someone against Affirmative Action (someone getting something based on who their daddy is, rather than who they are) got into colleges based on his father? Or that someone who claims he is against welfare worked so hard at getting the government to give him free money?
But yes, if they hadn't been looking to move the stadium at that time, they wouldn't have let Jr. buy in because he would have brought nothing to the table. But because they wanted welfare, they brought in the anti-welfare Bush to help them get lots of welfare. And no, I'm not Democrat, I'm libertarian and bitter over both parties. The overt hypocritical nature of both is staggering and I can't see how someone who relied on affirmative action and is against Affirmative action, or relies on welfare and is against welfare could be elected to one, let alone two, terms of president, especially given the record during the first term.
Learn to love Alaska
And if the purpose of this discussion was to make all the MBAs burst into tears and run home to their mommas, you'd probably have a telling point. But I don't think that's the object of the exercise in this case.
So far as I can see, the question under debate is to what extend the general MBA approach is toxic to the wider economy, and whether or not we are all of us paying the price for those "slash and burn" tactics.
I'm sure those BMWs are a source of great comfort to their owners, but they don't really constitute an argument for letting said owners keep slashing and burning.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
To be fair, it's not just Harvard. Rajanatnam, the Galleon hedge fund founder, went to the Warton MBA program. He was just convicted on insider trading.
Why is Snark Required?
That's like saying a rapist is better at picking up women because he gets laid more often.
I took a LEAN class from a professor who had been a management accountant for a good part of his life. He wrote a few books about how companies are often driven into inefficiency and/or ruin by allowing the accounting and finance arms of the companies to be the dominant decision makers. This one, Relevance Lost is from 1991:
http://www.amazon.com/Relevance-Lost-Rise-Management-Accounting/dp/0875842542
"Since it is generally impossible to measure what is important, bureaucrats instead turn their energies toward making important what is measurable."
--- J.M.W. Slack, Egg and Ego
"Since it is generally impossible to measure what is important, bureaucrats instead turn their energies toward making important what is measurable."
--- J.M.W. Slack, Egg and Ego
Nice. I hadn't heard that one before. Here is a quote from Einstein:
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
No ethics class (other than lawyer ethics, don't ask) coaches you on how to violate personal ethics without violating professional ethics, let alone encouraging violating professional ethics. Yet, you see many companies violate both personal and professional ethics. If that isn't taught (violating either personal ethics or professional ethics), why do so many companies do it?
Learn to love Alaska
I've long said that's what was killing Ford when I was there. There was no thought about what was happening next quarter, let alone 5 years down the line. It was all about making the numbers this week. That's what lead them to cede the small cars to the foreign companies, and concentrate solely on SUVs, which pretty much tanked the company when the SUV market fell over (that and the bad press about the Explorer, but that's another story).
Actually, as a self employed consultant, this is the most important part of my work - filtering out what the client says they want and figuring out what they *really* want... and then implementing it.
That post was no troll. Programming is not an assembly line, it's customer service. You have to take the time to understand what the business needs are, and that requires communication skills.
Fact is he got reelected, so he "passed". If Obama doesn't get reelected then Obama fails.
I know you're pointing out political calculus, but this is the entire reason that the US political system is so badly fucked right now. Nothing matters other than getting elected.
I'd *love* to see a politician get up and start actually telling the truth to America
I could keep going, but no politician who actually said half those things would have any future at all, no matter how true they are and how much we need to come to grips with them. It's all about getting reelected.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"