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Elon Musk Talks About the Importance of Physics, Criticizes the MBA
New submitter ElSergio writes "In a two-part interview with the American Physical Society, Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, talks about how important it is to be able to think in terms of first principles, a tool learned as a physics student. Later in the interview, he recommends against obtaining an MBA, claiming, 'It teaches people all sorts of wrong things' and 'They don't teach people to think in MBA schools.' In fact. if you are in business and want to work for SpaceX, you will have a better chance getting hired if you do not have one. According to Musk, 'I hire people in spite of an MBA'. He goes on to point out that if you look at the senior managers in his companies, you will not find very many MBAs there."
Years ago I read a book called The 12 Hour MBA Program. I have never met an MBA who knew something important about business that wasn't in that book.
I have many degrees that put letters after my name, including an MBA. I still remember how one of my professors railed on the MBA because all it did was enshrine "spreadsheet thinking," ruined creative thinking, make people more susceptible to buzz-word thinking, make dumb people feel smart, make them better at smart CYAs for dumb decisions and about 5 other criticisms that currently escape me. He even called them the "Middle-manager's Business Accreditation" because people at the top cannot behave that way, or they ruin companies, so most MBAs won't make it there for long; and the people at the top love MBAs at the middle level because the top brass are not limited by the MBA's decisions and know how to control them.
Physicists like to think they are smarter than everyone else, but they often make big fools of themselves on non-physics topics that require social intelligence.
A quick search of Amazon and eBay turns up quite a few "quick MBA" selections. Titles like:
The One-Day MBA
MBA in a Day: What You Would Learn at Top-Tier Business Schools
The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster 2012 -Man
The 10-Day MBA
Complete MBA For Dummies
I couldn't find anything remotely similar for a degree in physics.
What else you got?
MBAs on paper are supposed to teach you a lot of useful things. In practice most students walk away with one thing in their mind: how to cut costs to a minimum even if it drives the business to the ground so long as they collect their bonus before it does so.
You can read all about it from Henry Mintzberg who is a Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University, and has spent the last two decades trying to fix the present MBA mess.
His book "Managers not MBAs" is a must read for anyone thinking about hiring an MBA.
Henry Mintzberg has data that shows MBAs tend to correlate with negative traits. This means that an MBA at the very least starts with a "higher probability of not being a good employee", so now they have to prove that they are better than the norm.
I am an MBA and I agree with him comments to a degree. A lot of my classmates did not think. As a graduate myself I question how anyone thinks they can run a company entirely with numbers and figures - it just doesn't work. There is a personal aspect to things since humans are not machines (at least not yet ;). I am of the belief that it is my job to manage people, and by that I mean shield them from the crap above so that they can do their job. Then again I am humble enough to know when I am over my head and ask the people that actually know their shit or have to deal with it on the daily basis.
Then again, this could be said for ANY degree or practice. I knew many pharmacists who were huge on always giving a drug to treat when sometimes removing drugs was a better solution. I also know many self proclaimed IT gurus who think they know best but have never actually sat down with an end user to figure out how to enable them to work better.