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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.
Guaranteeing yet another generation of assholes will be coming down the pike.
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.
Well, apparently he did score a perfect 800 on the maths section of the SAT, graduated Harvard magna cum laude with a degree in applied mathematics economics, and won some maths related awards in university. But yeah, go on hating him to hate him. That's very mature of you. That said, he did drop out of Stanford's MBA program to join Microsoft and having the MBA himself would seem like a necessary part of being able to teach in an MBA program. However, 34 years of experience at one of the largest, most profitable companies ever, including many years as President before becoming CEO would certainly seem to be more than enough field experience during which to have gained wisdom (that is, knowing what not to do just as much as what to do) with regards to organizational leadership.
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.