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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."
Totally agree with this, Its should be same in IT companies as well
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.
Though it wouldn't hurt many to actually have lengthy and non-propagandist History and Geography lessons.
Yeah, except this start up boss has founded 3 successful multi-billion dollar companies in 3 separate industries. I'm willing to bet he probably has a good idea on how to run things. (How to not have your cars catch on fire is another issue :P )
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.
I think the most important thing from this interview is that Musk played D&D and is a self professed nerd.
And then the MBAs will take over, fire the physicists, hire a bunch of equally vile and sociopathic marketing types, and will find ways to cut corners, move all manufacturing to low-tax cheap-labor cess pools, hire equally vile and sociopathic IP lawyers to sue anyone who ever had an idea that even vaguely resembled the company's, rob the company of every dime it has, drive it into the ground.
Rinse and repeat.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There's a reason why the Manhattan Project needed Leslie Groves. Few people remember him today, but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that he was every bit as important to the success of that endeavor as the scientists. He was also the guy who supervised the construction of the Pentagon, completing it ahead of schedule and under budget.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Yeah, you don't know what you're talking about. Post doctoral research in social sciences(which don't typically fall under STEM, in spite of that "science" there) tends to be informative and useful. Graduate level history has a ton still to uncover. I could see your argument applied to thinks like art of philosophy, but I don't really agree.
If anything the T part of STEM(and that's where my job is) is among the most suited areas for associates degree.
"I think X is mostly bullshit therefor X isn't really useful" isn't a good approach to academia.
If you read the actual article (and even the snippet above) it says you have a better chance being hired at HIS companies if you do not have one, based on the percentage of his upper level business people and the degrees they hold. Also in the original interview he goes on to state exactly what you are saying, that he hires based on skillset, and in his opinion the people without MBAs tend to be the more eligible candidates if you ignore degree. His hireing practices are based more on what have you done, rather than what agree you have obtained, since your academic carer can be fixed to an extend by what classes you choose to take in order to bump up your GPA.
According to Musk, 'I hire people in spite of an MBA'.
What's that, he doesn't like mindless groupthink, and the inability to understand the difference between a rule of thumb and actual thought, judgement and understanding of reality? No wonder the guy is a failure.
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.
Unless you're talking homeopathy, I'm pretty sure medicine falls under the category "science".
News flash: highly successful engineer who did not go to business school thinks business school is a waste.
Shocking update: highly successful businessperson who went to business school thinks engineers don't know what they're talking about.
This is pretty normal... the path you took to get where you are starts to look like the best or only path. There is room for all specialties and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints.
"95% of all Slashdot
Saying you dislike MBA's is not the same as saying you don't need managers and executives. Groves was brilliant at organizing and running major projects, but he was an army officer for the Corps of Engineers, not an MBA. The degree hadn't even been invented back then, which helps explain why we aren't speaking German or Japanese.
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.
Not really... Musk recently came out with a rebuttal to the "rampant FIRE! threat of his cars." So far nobody has been hurt, and in every case I've heard of the car warned the owner that it was in distress, and allowed/assisted time to evacuate. Plus the battery pack design itself does a good job of comparmentalizing the problem.
No doubt someday someone will take a Tesla at high speed right over the vertical support for a guard rail, and rip the battery pack the length of the vehicle. But you also have to ask how survivable that kind of accident would be in a conventional vehicle.
Don't forget, lithium batteries have almost the energy density of gasoline - but not quite. Plus gasoline is a liquid, once the tank is ruptured, you don't have a lot of control over where the gas flows. I saw one mention that statistically the Tesla, even with 3 fires on its low production quantity, is ahead of gasoline fires on conventional vehicles.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It will hurt the person receiving it, who then has to watch the rest of the world re-enact history.
Being able to laugh at the average level of geography knowledge doesn't make up for it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
" the challenges Elon has faced in Tesla are a clear demonstration of what MBAs (and Lawyers and Lobbyists) are good for - success in the real world."
While this is true, I suspect that what he sees (and dislikes) about the fact is that MBAs (and especially lawyers and lobbyists) are necessary tools in much the same way that soldiers are: they fight with the other guy's MBAs, lawyers, and lobbyists, laying waste to much real value in the process; because the alternative of having the other guy's MBAs, lawyers, and lobbyists march in unopposed is even worse.
Engineers, scientists, and the like, by contrast, get sent out to prod the obnoxiously complex and notoriously noncompliant laws of nature into enough semblance of obedience that they can be put to good use.
Obviously, there is value to having a good lawyer, or a good army, at your back; because there are others out there who have the same, and don't have your best interests at heart; but there is a certain tragedy in watching men, time, and money, get thrown into the meatgrinder in order to keep two adversaries off one another's backs; while there is a certain triumph in seeing the application of human effort bring new areas of nature within the scope of human understanding and utility.
I do not put much value in an MBA either despite the fact I am currently pursuing one. My circumstance is that my employer partnershiped with a university to offer 1/2 off tuition and I get an additional $3k reimbursement from my employer each year. End result is I will pay about $6k out of my pocket... too good of an opportunity to pass up.
Most of the material has been common sense, in my opinion. The organizational leadership classes have been interesting. Right now I'm in a class that focuses on ethics and sustainability. Nothing to this point has been about cutting costs for temporary increase in profit. There is plenty of talk about efficiency, though.. but that is a necessity for a business to survive.
I plan to use my MBA to make a point in future job interviews - I am willing to take that step to continue learning. Regardless of the overall usefulness of the degree, it does take dedication to juggle my current job, school, and helping raise my 9 month old son.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I can tell you one thing:
If a businessperson ever doubts an engineer, they are most certainly not highly successful.
Engineers make things. Businesspeople hoard money. Of course they both think they are right... but one of them is.
While he walks through the dining room of the restaurant he realizes: "this is the profit center!" ...
Now he turns to the kitchen and realizes: "this is the cost center!"
Guess which part gets closed first and who gers fired
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Troll much, bro?
Hardly.
Most is a waste of time. Academia offers little for most graduates in non-STEM courses that isn't obtained by going out and getting a damned job and learning what the real world is like 10 hours a day instead of spending 52 minutes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons 9 months a year with 10 weeks off for breaks.
Oh, you got a marketing degree? Did your study group make a presentation? We'll be sure to put it up on the refrigerator with your gold star. You can look at it every day while paying off your tuition for the next 20 years.
Are there a minority of graduate-level experts in history and art who do great things who benefited from a couple more years of schooling? Sure. ...but how much of the world needs to be made up of research historians and future art professors?
MOST is a colossal waste. How many non-science degree'd folk would have been better off by just getting a damned job in their profession a couple years sooner?
Also, I see that medicine is debated below as "non-STEM," but I'd call it science, for sure.
Or, you know, I'm trolling, and getting modded down by people with useless degrees that they use to impress other people with useless degrees so they all feel better about their "accomplishments."
This is pretty normal... the path you took to get where you are starts to look like the best or only path. There is room for all specialties and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints.
I quite agree with you. However, there's a subtle irony to including "business" majors here.
A century ago, there really were no "business majors" in college. If you went to college, but you were a rich kid who hoped to work in your father's business someday or whatever, you might be a history major or an English lit major, or maybe even something that sounds more exotic today, like classics or art history. If you were inclined toward the sciences, you might even concentrate in biology or chemistry, while getting your overall "liberal arts" perspective.
Nowadays, many universities see the largest number of undergraduates majoring in "business." At some schools, nearly half or more undergraduates are primarily instructed in "business," rather than one out of many disciplines that was traditionally part of the "liberal arts" perspective in college.
I'm not arguing that we should get rid of business majors or reinstitute some old-school liberal arts curriculum. But, it's very clear that the modern "business major" has actually done more than just about any other discipline in reducing the number and variety of "specialities and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints" that you might encounter among college-educated people.
The sheer dominance of the business major actually has tended to reduce the very thing that the parent poster says we should value.
Here's the MBA worldview:
1) If it doesn't exist on a spreadsheet, it doesn't exist.
2) You don't have to know the details of the business to run it.
3) Productivity is what we say it is.
4) Everything is measured in money. The physical world barely matters.
MBAs seem to share this worldview with those ever accurate, johny-on-the-spot folks commonly known as "economists." They know everything too.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
and makes me think that there is still hope. MBAs destroy innovation, motivation, and productivity in the name of short term profits. MBAs represent modern scorched earth business tactics. Profit in the short term and destroy a thriving business in the long term. I run my own consulting business and an MBA is my weedout criteria - have MBA, will not travel.
You missed by far the most important one:
If you can't easily calculate a dollar value of something, it must be 0.
This rule alone is why all MBAs refuse to see any downside exists to strategies that inevitably create more rework, or piss off key customers enough to impact future sales.
You wrote: "Not a single person was laid off..."
But the unstated part is "...in your company".
If demand grows slower than supply (like due to limited money supply in the real economy, a law of diminishing returns of more consumer goods, increasing burden from negative externalities, structural unemployment, etc.) then other companies that are less productive may go out of business due to your improvements, taking jobs (and also ultimately customers) with them. We're about to see that rapidly accelerate with increasing use of robotics, AI, and other advanced automation.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/08/1530233/digital-revolution-will-kill-jobs-inflame-social-unrest-says-gartner?sdsrc=popbyskid
Here is a list I put together of about 50 things one can do about that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
A "basic income" (monthly social security payments for all from birth) is the simplest and probably most effective one of those for a democratic capitalistic society:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/11/17/american_basic_income_an_end_to_poverty.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/switzerlands-proposal-to-pay-people-for-being-alive.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html
The opposite position though:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/04/1222228/the-luddites-are-almost-always-wrong-why-tech-doesnt-kill-jobs
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.