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A reporter follows three kids who slipped through the cracks of New York’s educational system.
Harvard Business School's "Masters of Disaster"
By Virginia Prescott on Thursday, March 12, 2009.
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Consider this: big corporations and banks that share free-falling stock values and intractable debt have something else in common — disgraced top executives with business degrees and pedigrees from Harvard Business School. Our guest today calls them the “masters of disaster” and says that their failures put their alma mater squarely at the center of the global economic crisis.
Philip Delves Broughton is a journalist and —full disclosure — graduate of Harvard Business School. He is also the author of Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School. He joins us from New York City.
Philip Delves Broughton at the Times Online UK: "Harvard’s masters of the apocalypse"
(Photo courtesy BrianR via Flickr/Creative Commons)
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A few years ago I had the misfortune of being assigned to work with a newly minted mid-career MBA on a project to commercialize a piece of software. He dazzled management with spreadsheet after spreadsheet showing that the product would be a wild success. Unfortunately, he didn't bother to talk to any potential customers who would have told him that the product did not meet their needs. After the company invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, the product rang up a single $50,000 sale.
Another example of the ineptitude of business schools is that this same person hired one of his professors--the dean of the business school at a well respected state university--to do a market analysis for this product. The result was a handwritten paper that--surprise, surprise--confirmed everything that the spreadsheets showed.
All in all, my take away is that the only thing worse than an MBA is an MBA with Excel: pure GIGO--garbage in, garbage out. And that the people teaching these MBA students are classic cases of those who can't, teach.