I would like to point out that when I speak of what MBAs learn I am not speaking from second hand info. I am speaking from personal experience, I graduated in 2008. I skimmed through Mintzberg's introduction and I found his theme of "stronger organizations, not just higher share prices" was perfectly in line with what many of my professors were teaching. It was a common theme in my MBA program that managing for the quarterly report was short sighted and self destructive in the long term, that reports and models are fine tools but don't replace talking to actual consumers (*especially* those who chose to buy someone else's product over yours) and to your own "low level" employees to find out the truth regarding operations, to leverage the knowledge of your most experienced workers, line managers, etc and cautioned to consider your lack of experience relative to these people. I don't believe we were taught that management was a science as Mintzberg seems to claim, his its an art and requires experience argument is consistent with my professor's perspective. I'd like to ad that my professors were a mix of those whose primarily experience was academic and those who had significant and successful careers before moving into academia.
Furthermore my particular program was for the fully employed and there was no lack of real world experiences being brought into the class room. I took a couple of elective classes during the day with the full time students and while they may have had less real world experience they were taking the same classes taught by the same professors offering the same ideas. Regarding the full timers I did not sense the know-it-all attitude Mintzberg seems to be complaining of. Of course I went to a state university (ranked in the top 50 in the US), perhaps things are different in the "ivy league" schools.
So again, I challenge the notion that MBAs are not taught how to do "the right thing". Some obviously are, whether they follow through and follow what they were taught is another matter entirely.
You'd think anything purposely designated to be left on the Moon is about as abandoned as property can get.
And in internationally accepted practice, such as naval salvage, you're entitled to it.
IANAL but I believe the law changes when the vessel is on a military or scientific mission for the government. For example there is currently a dispute over the salvage of gold from a Spanish galleon that sunk centuries ago. One of the points being argued is whether the ship was on a military or scientific mission (spain retains ownership) or a commercial mission (salvager attains ownership).
It may not be abandoned in a legal sense. For example it is my understanding that a naval vessel remains property of the navy until stricken from the navy's registry.
Being stricken from the registry only means it's no longer being carried on the books as an active vessels. It remains government (Navy) property until title is specifically transferred or renounced. For example, Arizone was stricken from the registery in 1942 - but the USN still retains title to her.
Thanks for the clarification. However I still wonder if being stricken is some sort of line between being treated as a warship and being treated as a commercial ship with respect to salvage. For example if a ship has been stricken and sinks while being delivered to a buyer who does not yet have title does commercial salvage law apply?
Of course in situations like the Arizona the ship would still be protected as a war grave if not a warship.
Over the decades I have not needed support from a PC vendor other than the occasional driver on a website. YMMV of course. I am writing as an individual not someone managing an IT department.
Even if divested the new owner will most likely honor warranties, offer drivers, etc. As I think Lenovo does for old IBM ThinkPads.
Regarding ineptitude, my point is that I really only care if the folks in engineering and operations are inept.
The AC above made fun of Slashdotters' business savvy, in a discussion about HP, who have shown they can't run a business to save their lives. It doesn't matter about how decent their PCs are if their boardroom antics threaten to cripple that
This discussion began with "I won't purchase an HP device", I think it is reasonable to return to that point. Regardless of the antics of the executives and board members *if* the folks in operations build a decent PC it remains a decent PC.
It may not be abandoned in a legal sense. For example it is my understanding that a naval vessel remains property of the navy until stricken from the navy's registry. Also it may not be abandoned in the scientific sense either. A future mission may visit the site to study the effect of long term exposure on various materials. IIRC things like this have already been done, Apollo 12 landed near a robotic Surveyor probe and recovered some parts for such a purpose. The lander may be expended not abandoned?
IANAL but my understanding is that vessels at sea are under the legal jurisdiction of the country whose flag they fly. Warships even remain the territory of their country after being sunk. I'd expect spacecraft would operate under similar rules, especially government owned spacecraft.
I am just guessing but I expect its not about possessing the "discarded" gear, rather its about trying to profit from it. If it had been passed on to his kids/grandkids or put in a museum for display I doubt the government would have cared.
Yes, because HP has shown themselves to be masters of the art of running a business....
I thought we were discussing buying a HP computer not HP stock? If they build a decent PC its an option, who cares about the boardroom/c-suite antics. Many computers are purchased from local white box PC clone shops. How likely are they to be around next year, yet they seem to remain an option.
That said, it is terribly sad to be thinking of HP in this way.
There goes your excuse for calling the umpire an idiot.
Not really. Human or electronic the umpire will be "confronted". "Hey ump clean your glasses" becomes "Hey IT clean the ump's optical sensor", "That umpire has been bought" becomes "That umpire has been hacked".
I apologize for this second post but immediately after the previous long reply a much more elegant and concise response occurred to me.
An MBA is an add-on. It is not a core area of expertise, it is cross training in disciplines that the "student" is most likely unfamiliar with. It provides the "student" with a broad but general understanding of the entire organization, where the "student" had previously only possessed a detailed understanding of a particular segment of the organization and little to no knowledge, or an erroneous understanding, of other segments. It provides a basis from which the "student" may developed a more detailed understanding of formerly unfamiliar segments.
Maybe you did study them but the fact that you mention that it is a common problem shows me that is all too often the results.
Not quite. Wanting to take a successful product and to make incremental improvements is not inherently a bad thing, it is only bad when it is your core focus. It can be useful to extend the viability of a current product line. While we may have studied IBM's focus on mainframes and minis as the personal computer was emerging, and this was a mistake for IBM, IBM also had a group operating in a more entrepreneurial fashion that basically invented the PC we know today.
MBAs might even be okay as the leader of a some types of companies. But for many they should not be the leader which all too often they are.
Is Apple on the "not be" list? Is so Steve Jobs thought differently since his hand picked successor has an MBA.
Again, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that MBAs are pure bean counters. I also used to believe in such urban myths, then I actually went to business school and learned how wrong I was. At my university much of the work in the core classes are done as a permanent group of 5 or 6 students. The school assigned these groups at the start of the program. One of the criteria for putting these groups together was to make sure each group had a least one person with an accounting or finance background, people with these backgrounds were a minority. The logic was to have one such person in the group to help all the engineers, scientists and line managers - who represent the majority - get through the accounting and finance classes.
You and others in this thread keep throwing out how strategy, group dynamics and psychology, and other topics need to be considered. Well these and other topics are part of the program, accounting and finance represent only a minority of core classes. You all keep mentioning how executives need to have an understanding of the business/industry they are in. Well the vast majority of the MBA students in my program were engineers and other front line workers, not accountants. You have an incredibly erroneous perception of what is taught in an MBA program and what sort of people go into an MBA program.
MBA's have their place but that place is rarely at the head of a company. CFO maybe but never a CEO....
MBAs have their place but MBAs are not known for inovation and leadership. It is the difference between an expert and logistics and and expert at strategy. Both are useful but in war you better have a strategist in charge.
If you believe MBAs merely study accounting and operations you are seriously mistaken. These represent a minority of the classes and topics studied. Strategy based classes and topics are at a minimum just as common, and when you consider elective classes they are probably far more common. Well, at least at my university which was a state university.
Even your examples of doing studies show the flaw. It will only tell you what people know they want. Sometimes they have no idea of what they could have. MBAs running the show will give you subtle refinements over time and often stagnation.
Wrong. We studied examples of companies who focused on stated preferences, produced only incrementally better products and ultimately failed. Its a common story in large organizations that have a successful product.
Note that I wrote "we actually learned how to conduct surveys to determine people's actual preferences rather than their stated preferences". You do not directly ask a person if they want a particular feature or even to score a feature on a scale of 1 to 10. One far better approach is to present the person with a set of tradeoffs and see which way they lean. These type of questions are often somewhat indirect. After a battery of such questions a more reliable weighted ranking of factors can be produced. This can include aspirational factors that represent a new and disruptive feature or product.
Without an technical background endemic to the field that is a company's bread and butter, you will never be able to lead that company.
Myself and many of my classmates have such experience in our respective industries.
MBAs learn about widgets. Think about that, a widget is a generic device. There is no industrial soul in a widget and as a consequence there is no industrial soul in an MBA.
Wrong in so many ways. For example we were taught that passion is a critical part of an entrepreneurial process. New product development is a kind of entrepreneurial process even when done at a large corporation.
Yeah, but leading an inspired R&D team is not something anybody can do. On the other hand, anybody can go down a budget and knock 10% off every line and fire the manager who misses the mark by the largest amount, then lather, rinse, repeat the next year.
Neither can any engineer be a useful member of that R&D team. Every year there is no shortage of computer science graduates who couldn't write a non-trivial working program if their life depended on it. There are people of marginal skills in all fields of endeavor, management or engineering. To look at these people and draw some conclusion regarding the entire field, or to draw a conclusion as to what they were taught, is quite silly.
The problem with mathematical models is that they tend to cause you to ignore reality in favor of the model.
The shortcomings of modeling were thoroughly discussed, an incomplete set of factors plus garbage in garbage out. One of the steps is to compare your predictive model to the real world to see how close to reality it gets. Only once you believe you are "close enough" do you introduce factors that do not exist in today's real market, ie your new product and/or services. Even then the results are not to be taken as gospel. Given all these shortcomings, it is often still better than having an "expert" just throw out a number.
Also what I am referring to is not for running ongoing operations. It is for making predictions, things like the expected market share of a newly introduced product. For ongoing operations one of the core lessons in business school was to occasionally leave your office and talk to some guys on the line doing the actual work.
You seem to be moving the goal posts. You claimed MBAs have no idea on how to deliver a quality product. I demonstrated otherwise. As I said, most software engineers are taught how to develop high quality reliable software. That fact that many software engineers do not do as they were trained, and that many MBAs do not do as they were trained, does not change the fact that they were trained to do otherwise. The reliance purely on cost and the race to the bottom that such a strategy entails is something they were specifically taught to avoid.
My experience is that nowadays all MBAs know is how to reduce costs and thus move your product downmarket. They can talk for hours about how to save 5 cents in shipping costs, but have no idea how to produce a superior product that would allow you to double your price and people happily dole out the cash (apropos of Apple and the late Steve Jobs).
Strange, I earned an MBA in 2008 and my experience is exactly the opposite. Apple was an example frequently used by professors in product development and marketing classes. Apple was also a common topic for student research papers in these areas and even in macroeconomics classes (ie how does Apple plan for or adapt to the business cycle - they don't, they just rely on superior design and superior marketing to power through economic downturns).
I attended a business school at a state university, I believe we were rated in the top 50 nationally. I have a hard time believing that what we were learning was terribly different from other universities. You sure the guys you refer to actually went to business school, or did so sometime in recent *decades*? Not some kind of online diploma mill?
Someone should write a paper or a book about the destruction of American business by the MBA.
Really is it logical that a computer companies top person isn't an EE?
Is it logical that a software companies top person isn't a programmer?
Is it logical that a car companies top person isn't a automotive engineer?
I confess that I once had the arrogant engineer's stereotypical perception of MBAs. This made business school so much more fun for me. I was constantly amused by having my former beliefs turn out to be complete nonsense.
Having an MBA and experience in the industry that your company operates in are not mutually exclusive. I am an engineer that recently earned an MBA. About 1/3 of my class were engineers or scientists of some sort. For those whose experience was managerial in nature many managed things directly on the factory floor, production line, etc. I would suggest that the popular perception of MBAs is no more accurate than the popular perception of programmers and hackers.
Similar things were also true of the professors that I had. Some were more the traditional academic in background but others were former electrical engineers, mechanical engineers,... One of the later was a marketing professor. I once would have expected learning how to manipulate people in a particular marketing class, however we actually learned how to conduct surveys to determine people's actual preferences rather than their stated preferences, how to build a mathematical model of the market, how to simulate the introduction of a new product into that market and determine the market share it may capture, etc. Sure its a mathematical model and has various limitations but the process was mathematical, scientific and defensible given the state of the art. I was thrilled to learn that when a marketing person makes a prediction regarding expected market share the number may be scientific in nature, not just some number pulled out of... um... the air.
Now do all MBAs follow the mathematical process I just described, certainly not. Just as not all programmers following the good methods and practices that they were taught when they were in school. Every field has individuals who know what they are supposed to do but do otherwise. This is just as true for engineers as it is for MBAs.
Now unions are co-opting it,... democratic party operatives are co-opting it...
They're certainly trying to co-opt it, but the kids organizing Occupy Wall St are doing something very smart, namely not letting any one organization control it.
The problem is that the mainstream media is not on board with that plan. The media will gravitate to the union leaders, democratic party spokespeople, celebrities, etc who show up at the protests, rallies, etc. The "kids" you refer to may be somewhat marginalized like the actual founders of the tea party movement.
Much like the tea party started with those legitimately concerned with fiscal mismanagement and an ever encroaching federal government and has subsequently been co-opted to some extent by republican social issues and republican party operatives. It will be interesting to see if the tea party can regain its original focus
Seen any polls of likely Republican voters lately? How's Bachman, Santorum and Perry doing lately? (may their political careers rest in peace).
My point is that these are not the "real" tea party folks. The passing of their political careers would not be the end of the tea party, it would be the end of some of the co-opting of the tea party.
That's going to be a pretty tough sell just to answer the philosophical question "Are we alone?"
Fortunately there are other reasons. Scientific research that potentially offers economic benefits, this includes basic research (benefit is later rather than sooner). Energy production, solar power is far more viable outside the atmosphere. Speaking of outside the atmosphere, how about production of materials and goods that involve processes that are polluting or otherwise present a health or environmental risk. Production of materials or goods that would greatly benefit from low gravity environments. Access to immense amount of resources (asteroids - metals, chemicals), note that such access also *dramatically* reduces the cost of future space based endeavors. And of course there are other things like, oh, a military "high ground" advantage.
Now I'm sure some are tempted to dismiss producing goods in orbit due to "shipping costs" but consider this. Shipping goods across the ocean was once prohibitively expensive except for the most expensive or rare goods. That has changed dramatically. Shipping the cheapest goods across the ocean is now economically viable. Space based production will most likely follow a similar pattern.
Again, I am not claiming an immediate economic benefit (beyond employment and dual use technological advances - perhaps these should be included as factors offsetting the cost of a space based endeavors). I am merely pointing out motivations that are a bit more viable than the discovery of alien life. Of course I am curious too, but its something pretty low on the priority list.
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to point out that when I speak of what MBAs learn I am not speaking from second hand info. I am speaking from personal experience, I graduated in 2008. I skimmed through Mintzberg's introduction and I found his theme of "stronger organizations, not just higher share prices" was perfectly in line with what many of my professors were teaching. It was a common theme in my MBA program that managing for the quarterly report was short sighted and self destructive in the long term, that reports and models are fine tools but don't replace talking to actual consumers (*especially* those who chose to buy someone else's product over yours) and to your own "low level" employees to find out the truth regarding operations, to leverage the knowledge of your most experienced workers, line managers, etc and cautioned to consider your lack of experience relative to these people. I don't believe we were taught that management was a science as Mintzberg seems to claim, his its an art and requires experience argument is consistent with my professor's perspective. I'd like to ad that my professors were a mix of those whose primarily experience was academic and those who had significant and successful careers before moving into academia.
Furthermore my particular program was for the fully employed and there was no lack of real world experiences being brought into the class room. I took a couple of elective classes during the day with the full time students and while they may have had less real world experience they were taking the same classes taught by the same professors offering the same ideas. Regarding the full timers I did not sense the know-it-all attitude Mintzberg seems to be complaining of. Of course I went to a state university (ranked in the top 50 in the US), perhaps things are different in the "ivy league" schools.
So again, I challenge the notion that MBAs are not taught how to do "the right thing". Some obviously are, whether they follow through and follow what they were taught is another matter entirely.
You'd think anything purposely designated to be left on the Moon is about as abandoned as property can get.
And in internationally accepted practice, such as naval salvage, you're entitled to it.
IANAL but I believe the law changes when the vessel is on a military or scientific mission for the government. For example there is currently a dispute over the salvage of gold from a Spanish galleon that sunk centuries ago. One of the points being argued is whether the ship was on a military or scientific mission (spain retains ownership) or a commercial mission (salvager attains ownership).
Being stricken from the registry only means it's no longer being carried on the books as an active vessels. It remains government (Navy) property until title is specifically transferred or renounced. For example, Arizone was stricken from the registery in 1942 - but the USN still retains title to her.
Thanks for the clarification. However I still wonder if being stricken is some sort of line between being treated as a warship and being treated as a commercial ship with respect to salvage. For example if a ship has been stricken and sinks while being delivered to a buyer who does not yet have title does commercial salvage law apply?
Of course in situations like the Arizona the ship would still be protected as a war grave if not a warship.
Over the decades I have not needed support from a PC vendor other than the occasional driver on a website. YMMV of course. I am writing as an individual not someone managing an IT department.
Even if divested the new owner will most likely honor warranties, offer drivers, etc. As I think Lenovo does for old IBM ThinkPads.
Regarding ineptitude, my point is that I really only care if the folks in engineering and operations are inept.
If you read the article, the module was dropped to the moon to be destroyed on impact. In any sane world, such action relinquishes any claim.
Perhaps NASA would describe the event as depositing the module on the moon for future materials study? :-)
On a more serious note I believe that when the navy scuttles a ship it remains government property.
To avoid redundant posts I'll provide a link to another comment regarding "abandonment". http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2472782&cid=37693140
The AC above made fun of Slashdotters' business savvy, in a discussion about HP, who have shown they can't run a business to save their lives. It doesn't matter about how decent their PCs are if their boardroom antics threaten to cripple that
This discussion began with "I won't purchase an HP device", I think it is reasonable to return to that point. Regardless of the antics of the executives and board members *if* the folks in operations build a decent PC it remains a decent PC.
It may not be abandoned in a legal sense. For example it is my understanding that a naval vessel remains property of the navy until stricken from the navy's registry. Also it may not be abandoned in the scientific sense either. A future mission may visit the site to study the effect of long term exposure on various materials. IIRC things like this have already been done, Apollo 12 landed near a robotic Surveyor probe and recovered some parts for such a purpose. The lander may be expended not abandoned?
IANAL but my understanding is that vessels at sea are under the legal jurisdiction of the country whose flag they fly. Warships even remain the territory of their country after being sunk. I'd expect spacecraft would operate under similar rules, especially government owned spacecraft.
I am just guessing but I expect its not about possessing the "discarded" gear, rather its about trying to profit from it. If it had been passed on to his kids/grandkids or put in a museum for display I doubt the government would have cared.
Yes, because HP has shown themselves to be masters of the art of running a business....
I thought we were discussing buying a HP computer not HP stock? If they build a decent PC its an option, who cares about the boardroom/c-suite antics. Many computers are purchased from local white box PC clone shops. How likely are they to be around next year, yet they seem to remain an option.
That said, it is terribly sad to be thinking of HP in this way.
There goes your excuse for calling the umpire an idiot.
Not really. Human or electronic the umpire will be "confronted". "Hey ump clean your glasses" becomes "Hey IT clean the ump's optical sensor", "That umpire has been bought" becomes "That umpire has been hacked".
I apologize for this second post but immediately after the previous long reply a much more elegant and concise response occurred to me.
An MBA is an add-on. It is not a core area of expertise, it is cross training in disciplines that the "student" is most likely unfamiliar with. It provides the "student" with a broad but general understanding of the entire organization, where the "student" had previously only possessed a detailed understanding of a particular segment of the organization and little to no knowledge, or an erroneous understanding, of other segments. It provides a basis from which the "student" may developed a more detailed understanding of formerly unfamiliar segments.
Maybe you did study them but the fact that you mention that it is a common problem shows me that is all too often the results.
Not quite. Wanting to take a successful product and to make incremental improvements is not inherently a bad thing, it is only bad when it is your core focus. It can be useful to extend the viability of a current product line. While we may have studied IBM's focus on mainframes and minis as the personal computer was emerging, and this was a mistake for IBM, IBM also had a group operating in a more entrepreneurial fashion that basically invented the PC we know today.
MBAs might even be okay as the leader of a some types of companies. But for many they should not be the leader which all too often they are.
Is Apple on the "not be" list? Is so Steve Jobs thought differently since his hand picked successor has an MBA.
Again, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that MBAs are pure bean counters. I also used to believe in such urban myths, then I actually went to business school and learned how wrong I was. At my university much of the work in the core classes are done as a permanent group of 5 or 6 students. The school assigned these groups at the start of the program. One of the criteria for putting these groups together was to make sure each group had a least one person with an accounting or finance background, people with these backgrounds were a minority. The logic was to have one such person in the group to help all the engineers, scientists and line managers - who represent the majority - get through the accounting and finance classes.
You and others in this thread keep throwing out how strategy, group dynamics and psychology, and other topics need to be considered. Well these and other topics are part of the program, accounting and finance represent only a minority of core classes. You all keep mentioning how executives need to have an understanding of the business/industry they are in. Well the vast majority of the MBA students in my program were engineers and other front line workers, not accountants. You have an incredibly erroneous perception of what is taught in an MBA program and what sort of people go into an MBA program.
MBA's have their place but that place is rarely at the head of a company. CFO maybe but never a CEO. ...
MBAs have their place but MBAs are not known for inovation and leadership. It is the difference between an expert and logistics and and expert at strategy. Both are useful but in war you better have a strategist in charge.
If you believe MBAs merely study accounting and operations you are seriously mistaken. These represent a minority of the classes and topics studied. Strategy based classes and topics are at a minimum just as common, and when you consider elective classes they are probably far more common. Well, at least at my university which was a state university.
Even your examples of doing studies show the flaw. It will only tell you what people know they want. Sometimes they have no idea of what they could have. MBAs running the show will give you subtle refinements over time and often stagnation.
Wrong. We studied examples of companies who focused on stated preferences, produced only incrementally better products and ultimately failed. Its a common story in large organizations that have a successful product.
Note that I wrote "we actually learned how to conduct surveys to determine people's actual preferences rather than their stated preferences". You do not directly ask a person if they want a particular feature or even to score a feature on a scale of 1 to 10. One far better approach is to present the person with a set of tradeoffs and see which way they lean. These type of questions are often somewhat indirect. After a battery of such questions a more reliable weighted ranking of factors can be produced. This can include aspirational factors that represent a new and disruptive feature or product.
Without an technical background endemic to the field that is a company's bread and butter, you will never be able to lead that company.
Myself and many of my classmates have such experience in our respective industries.
MBAs learn about widgets. Think about that, a widget is a generic device. There is no industrial soul in a widget and as a consequence there is no industrial soul in an MBA.
Wrong in so many ways. For example we were taught that passion is a critical part of an entrepreneurial process. New product development is a kind of entrepreneurial process even when done at a large corporation.
Yeah, but leading an inspired R&D team is not something anybody can do. On the other hand, anybody can go down a budget and knock 10% off every line and fire the manager who misses the mark by the largest amount, then lather, rinse, repeat the next year.
Neither can any engineer be a useful member of that R&D team. Every year there is no shortage of computer science graduates who couldn't write a non-trivial working program if their life depended on it. There are people of marginal skills in all fields of endeavor, management or engineering. To look at these people and draw some conclusion regarding the entire field, or to draw a conclusion as to what they were taught, is quite silly.
The problem with mathematical models is that they tend to cause you to ignore reality in favor of the model.
The shortcomings of modeling were thoroughly discussed, an incomplete set of factors plus garbage in garbage out. One of the steps is to compare your predictive model to the real world to see how close to reality it gets. Only once you believe you are "close enough" do you introduce factors that do not exist in today's real market, ie your new product and/or services. Even then the results are not to be taken as gospel. Given all these shortcomings, it is often still better than having an "expert" just throw out a number.
Also what I am referring to is not for running ongoing operations. It is for making predictions, things like the expected market share of a newly introduced product. For ongoing operations one of the core lessons in business school was to occasionally leave your office and talk to some guys on the line doing the actual work.
You seem to be moving the goal posts. You claimed MBAs have no idea on how to deliver a quality product. I demonstrated otherwise. As I said, most software engineers are taught how to develop high quality reliable software. That fact that many software engineers do not do as they were trained, and that many MBAs do not do as they were trained, does not change the fact that they were trained to do otherwise. The reliance purely on cost and the race to the bottom that such a strategy entails is something they were specifically taught to avoid.
My experience is that nowadays all MBAs know is how to reduce costs and thus move your product downmarket. They can talk for hours about how to save 5 cents in shipping costs, but have no idea how to produce a superior product that would allow you to double your price and people happily dole out the cash (apropos of Apple and the late Steve Jobs).
Strange, I earned an MBA in 2008 and my experience is exactly the opposite. Apple was an example frequently used by professors in product development and marketing classes. Apple was also a common topic for student research papers in these areas and even in macroeconomics classes (ie how does Apple plan for or adapt to the business cycle - they don't, they just rely on superior design and superior marketing to power through economic downturns).
I attended a business school at a state university, I believe we were rated in the top 50 nationally. I have a hard time believing that what we were learning was terribly different from other universities. You sure the guys you refer to actually went to business school, or did so sometime in recent *decades*? Not some kind of online diploma mill?
Someone should write a paper or a book about the destruction of American business by the MBA. Really is it logical that a computer companies top person isn't an EE? Is it logical that a software companies top person isn't a programmer? Is it logical that a car companies top person isn't a automotive engineer?
I confess that I once had the arrogant engineer's stereotypical perception of MBAs. This made business school so much more fun for me. I was constantly amused by having my former beliefs turn out to be complete nonsense.
... One of the later was a marketing professor. I once would have expected learning how to manipulate people in a particular marketing class, however we actually learned how to conduct surveys to determine people's actual preferences rather than their stated preferences, how to build a mathematical model of the market, how to simulate the introduction of a new product into that market and determine the market share it may capture, etc. Sure its a mathematical model and has various limitations but the process was mathematical, scientific and defensible given the state of the art. I was thrilled to learn that when a marketing person makes a prediction regarding expected market share the number may be scientific in nature, not just some number pulled out of ... um ... the air.
Having an MBA and experience in the industry that your company operates in are not mutually exclusive. I am an engineer that recently earned an MBA. About 1/3 of my class were engineers or scientists of some sort. For those whose experience was managerial in nature many managed things directly on the factory floor, production line, etc. I would suggest that the popular perception of MBAs is no more accurate than the popular perception of programmers and hackers.
Similar things were also true of the professors that I had. Some were more the traditional academic in background but others were former electrical engineers, mechanical engineers,
Now do all MBAs follow the mathematical process I just described, certainly not. Just as not all programmers following the good methods and practices that they were taught when they were in school. Every field has individuals who know what they are supposed to do but do otherwise. This is just as true for engineers as it is for MBAs.
Now unions are co-opting it, ... democratic party operatives are co-opting it ...
They're certainly trying to co-opt it, but the kids organizing Occupy Wall St are doing something very smart, namely not letting any one organization control it.
The problem is that the mainstream media is not on board with that plan. The media will gravitate to the union leaders, democratic party spokespeople, celebrities, etc who show up at the protests, rallies, etc. The "kids" you refer to may be somewhat marginalized like the actual founders of the tea party movement.
Much like the tea party started with those legitimately concerned with fiscal mismanagement and an ever encroaching federal government and has subsequently been co-opted to some extent by republican social issues and republican party operatives. It will be interesting to see if the tea party can regain its original focus
Seen any polls of likely Republican voters lately? How's Bachman, Santorum and Perry doing lately? (may their political careers rest in peace).
My point is that these are not the "real" tea party folks. The passing of their political careers would not be the end of the tea party, it would be the end of some of the co-opting of the tea party.
That's going to be a pretty tough sell just to answer the philosophical question "Are we alone?"
Fortunately there are other reasons. Scientific research that potentially offers economic benefits, this includes basic research (benefit is later rather than sooner). Energy production, solar power is far more viable outside the atmosphere. Speaking of outside the atmosphere, how about production of materials and goods that involve processes that are polluting or otherwise present a health or environmental risk. Production of materials or goods that would greatly benefit from low gravity environments. Access to immense amount of resources (asteroids - metals, chemicals), note that such access also *dramatically* reduces the cost of future space based endeavors. And of course there are other things like, oh, a military "high ground" advantage.
Now I'm sure some are tempted to dismiss producing goods in orbit due to "shipping costs" but consider this. Shipping goods across the ocean was once prohibitively expensive except for the most expensive or rare goods. That has changed dramatically. Shipping the cheapest goods across the ocean is now economically viable. Space based production will most likely follow a similar pattern.
Again, I am not claiming an immediate economic benefit (beyond employment and dual use technological advances - perhaps these should be included as factors offsetting the cost of a space based endeavors). I am merely pointing out motivations that are a bit more viable than the discovery of alien life. Of course I am curious too, but its something pretty low on the priority list.