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Professor Steve Ballmer Will Teach At Two Universities This Year
redletterdave (2493036) writes "When Steve Ballmer announced he was stepping down from Microsoft's board of directors, he cited a fall schedule that would "be hectic between teaching a new class and the start of the NBA season." It turns out Ballmer will teach an MBA class at Stanford's Graduate School of Business in the fall, and a class at USC's Marshall School of Business in the spring. Helen Chang, assistant director of communications at Stanford's Business School, told Business Insider that Ballmer will be working with faculty member Susan Athey for a strategic management course called "TRAMGT588: Leading organizations." As for the spring semester, Ballmer will head to Los Angeles — closer to where his Clippers will be playing — and teach a course at University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. We reached out to the Marshall School, which declined to offer more details about Ballmer's class.
that will include a chapter on how to select the most throwable chair.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
and know what not to do. If anything Steve is the textbook example on how an MBA brought zero growth to Microsoft, and destroyed not only two biggest cash cows in history, Windows & Office, but doomed the company to failure by de-incentiving through MBA theory of the week games like bands, to constantly backdooring H1B1'ing the workforce.
Gates made Microsoft, but Balmer destroyed it.
No chair allows in the class !
Guaranteeing yet another generation of assholes will be coming down the pike.
I think he's teaching high school phys-ed.
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Is he an actual scientist? Did he do any scientific research? Did he merit a the title of university professor? Sure, he did make money, but that doesn't automatically mean he should earn a title that few people get after working very hard, usually without extreme luxury or profit.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Lesson 1: if the company executives are bigger news than the company and more importantly, its products, then you're doing something seriously wrong.
-Styopa
Step #2, follow him into success.
Step #4, take over the company when he steps down.
Step #5, fail repeatedly throughout a decade.
Step #6, teach MBA class at Stanford and USC.
John Roberts?
How to be a prick? ( well, a lucky wealthy prick.. but still a prick )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's been said many times - Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Maybe he should teach about how not to run a company into the ground by going over his tenure at Msoft.
Discussing the motivational forces driving an active leadership role participants will train to mobilise and focus energies.
(Protective clothing recommended)
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
Biz 101: How to ingratiate yourself with the right people
Biz 324: Managing technical staff for the non-technical (focus on developers)
Biz 412: Diversifying your product offerings, and what to do when you fail at it
Lesson 1: Make sure your college roommate is Bill Gates.
Lesson 2: Drop out. You don't need this stuff, go make money.
Lesson 3: Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers.
Lesson 4: When a monopoly is handed to you, ride it into the ground.
Lesson 5: When no one likes you, it's proper to own the L. A. Clippers.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Have you met some of the MBAs who teach business courses? For a shock, try asking a few of them some fundamental stats questions that a person who has taken some grad-level stats courses (a prerequisite for many scientific/quantitative fields) should be able to answer. I can tell you about MBA profs who use statistical analysis allegedly on a regular basis without knowing the term "R^2".
Ballmer's probably a step up from quite a few people career academics in the business field.
I can just imagine how biased and one-sided this class would be
Just wondering.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
How long have I been sleeping? What exactly is there for this man to teach? How to destroy every strategic advantage your company has in 10 years? I mean, I suppose arrogance and ineptitude ARE characteristics of the MBA.
It looks like the semester is over do you want me to make small changes to the textbooks so you can have a new edition?
101 - How to keep stocks flat.
102 - Ignoring the market How to spend billion to have a product fail
103 - The most important class - How to get lucky and land at a company just before the stocks rocket due to nothing you've personally done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"TRAMGT588: Leading organizations - what not to do"
Anyone can be a professor; you just have to get some college to give you that job. You don't need any kind of degree. It's just that, usually, colleges require an advanced degree (usually PhD) to be a professor, but they can hire whomever they want, so if they want to waive or lessen that requirement because of "industry experience", they can.
Please sing the lyric to the tune of Developers, Developers ...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Why would anyone want to listen to this lunatic?!
I totally believe in custom hosts files to help block ads, malware, etc. Thankfully they can be implemented on Linux, Mac OS, and even Winders.
I go a step further. I use a Winders box for most surfing just because it's also my gaming box. I use a Linux box for anything financial, e-mail, etc. I know the Windows box is possibly more vulnerable to compromise and putting it out in that environment is probably a worse way to pick up something unwanted, but it beats having a third system for general web browsing running Linux.
But hosts files are a first line of defense and sure make the whole online experience much nicer and undoubtedly safer.
as my History professors and English professors were.
Best Slashdot Co
I read that as 'start of the MBA season'.. and I was thinking.. no fucking wonder the guy had to leave. Jeezus.
Ballmer defenders like to point out the stock value and revenue numbers, which is valid, however Ballmer's reign ended Microsoft's dominance in mindshare and allowed their monopoly to essentially break up.
Mindshare dominance was temporary. And achieving it in the first place was not purely Microsoft's doing. The screwups of their competitors (Apple - Mac OS, IBM - OS/2) factored into this greatly. For example Apple's numerous errors in the late 80s and early 90s. Similarly Apple's getting things right is more recent years helped to end MS mindshare dominance. For example Apple switching to Intel and allowing Windows onto their hardware. This alone doubled Apple's market share. Windows was a necessity for many users, but by moving from a "choose one or the other" model to a "you can have both" model Apple exposed millions more to Mac OS X and got a greater piece of mindshare.
That's the consumer side, now the server side. Servers were historically UNIX. Companies were grudgingly looking at Windows based servers due to ever increasing costs of traditional UNIX boxes and the increasing performance of PC hardware. Just as traditional UNIX vendors are starting to feel some heat Linux enters the scene. Linux ran on the same PC hardware as Windows and since it is UNIX-based (in a technical sense if not legal sense) many companies felt more comfortable with it, moving from one UNIX platform (traditional vendors) to another UNIX platform (Linux).
No company's dominance lasts forever. A CEO that can not only see the company survive but substantially grow during such an end to dominance does deserve some credit.
... If anything Steve is the textbook example on how an MBA brought zero growth to Microsoft, and destroyed not only two biggest cash cows in history, Windows & Office ...
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...: "Under Ballmer's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's annual revenue surged from $25 billion to $70 billion, while its net income increased 215 percent to $23 billion, and its gross profit of 75 cents on every dollar in sales is double that of Google or International Business Machines Corp. ... These gains came from the existing Windows and Office franchises, with Ballmer maintaining their profitability, fending off threats from cheaper competitors such as GNU/Linux and other open-source operating systems and Google Docs."
Woz was very brilliant but he wasn't very practical.
Steve Jobs was a genius in his own right, but not necessarily the hacker/engineer of Woz -- but he worked very closely with design engineers.
His name is on hundreds of patents and that's not because he sat back and just signed them.
Woz alone would never have created anything like Apple, and Steve Jobs without Woz could not have either -- in life, we can't be good at everything, and it's a perfect storm if you can find people who can help you where you are weak.
But don't compare Jobs to Balmer -- that's unfair and ridiculous.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
However the MBA isn't a Science based study but a research/practical based study. MBA program is a lot about reading case studies and working to find better solutions.
An MBA is not like other Master's degrees. One does not delve deeper into on particular field and do research.
An MBA program is an overview of all the pieces of an organization. It covers statistics, organizational behavior (of people, psychology stuff), accounting, strategy, product development, operations, marketing, leadership, etc. Few of the students are coming from an accounting background, many are in fact coming from science and engineering backgrounds.
An MBA program doesn't change you, if you were a software engineer going in you are still one going out. However you are now a software engineer who understands the perspective and concerns of those in accounting, marketing and operations and you can now communicate with them more effectively and are more likely to persuade them.
Ballmer's probably a step up from quite a few people career academics in the business field.
Many professors in MBA programs are not career academics. My marketing professor spent the first ten years of his career as an electrical engineer. The professor in my new product development class had been a mechanical engineer. We made heavy use of statistics and mathematical modeling in his class, I was very pleasantly surprised. My entrepreneurship professor had launched five successful startups in the medical industry. All these and some other professors had real jobs, moved into management, got an MBA and eventually decided to get a PhD and teach.
Some classes were taught by non-PhD's like Balmer, adjunct professors. Business law was taught by an actual practicing attorney. Negotiations was taught by a sitting federal judge.
There were some career academics, but those were generally for classes that were major academic disciplines, economics (micro and macro classes) and math (stats class) for example.
I would add a nuance to your point and state that real world experience matters in IT, but not in CS.
Computer Science is more about algorithms, systems architecture, and a lot of math. I did very little programming when I did CS in grad school and a whole lot of pretty awesome math (computational complexity, graphics, optimizations etc). Not sure about undergrad, since I did ECE, which, once again, was a whole lot of math (DSP, control systems, engineering electromagnetics, circuit theory, VLSI etc).
In any event, real-world relevance is more important to IT than it is to CS. I would say that it is however somewhat important in engineering, which, once again, is a professional degree.
That's true in some cases, but very false in others. CS is not just about math, in fact, I have done almost no complex math since I left college and started my career like 7 years ago. CS to me has been more about critical problem solving, high impact design, and making sure you don't cause more work with the work you do. I work on a highly parallel data warehouse that uses both hardware and azure vm services and while I need almost no math, there is an incredible amount of research and thinking that go into it. This is one area where experience is quite important, but fancy algorithms are almost entirely useless.
oh, what the hell, just get together and figure out the 4 fellow students you want to kick off the tail of the curve, and the rest get As.
can anybody here rebound? extra credit!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I would characterize those areas as IT and software engineering, and not necessarily Computer Science.
I would perhaps state that some areas of computing (e.g., systems design, architecture) are better grouped under software engineering, given their nature.
I almost feel that there needs a distinction between software engineering and computer science. To paraphrase David Parnas, computer science studies the properties of computation in general while software engineering is the design of specific computations to achieve practical goals.
Muddling the two disciplines causes heartache because you have people who are great at designing software, but cannot grok advanced math; and on the other hand, you potentially limit your solutions to what's within the realm of current applicability, without exploring other possibilities (e..g, reinventing new algorithms for quantum computation).
And my thesis committee - "Ballistic properties of early 21-century office furniture and of Executive personalities: an exoteric analysis"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
What's he going to teach? How to f--k up a company that had a good thing going? How to steer your company into market niches that other companies already own? How to pay so little attention to the quality of your product while pursuing market niches that other companies already own that you can't maintain the market share with what you had? These are classes I could skip.