A column at the NYT, written by Chris Marquis, a professor at University of Cambridge Judge Business School.
When the case method is used in medicine and law, it serves a different set of goals.... In both fields, students are confronted by the messiness of reality, and the goal is to foster disciplined skepticism: ask what’s missing, challenge assumptions and test how an analysis could be wrong.
Business school cases operate on another logic.... The point is to practice acting like the person in charge.... I wrote dozens of case studies during my decade at H.B.S., some of which are described as classics and best sellers. These are not products of independent research, but carefully packaged corporate narratives. The disclaimer printed in tiny type on every H.B.S. case concedes this point: Cases “are not intended to serve … as sources of primary data.” The data they include can be selective, biased or even fabricated.
For the many cases I wrote under the guidance of senior faculty members, events that reflected poorly on the company were softened or omitted and the roles of certain executives were burnished. The companies held final approval, with drafts reviewed by their lawyers and P.R. staff. Rather than being vehicles for disinterested learning, as one might expect at a university, the case studies end up as instruments of reputation management....
Furthermore, edits that push the case narratives away from reality are often meant to make it “work” in a classroom. Complexity is systematically shaved away, and dissenting voices often go unheard....
The result is a curriculum built around false narratives. Some of the most celebrated ideas in management have not been the ones that survived peer review or replication, but the ones that could be turned into TED Talks, consulting frameworks or airport best sellers....
Business schools have a divided mission: They seek to legitimize an economic system focused on private gain while also developing guardrails to tame it. They found a remarkable way to manage this tension: the “win-win” story in which the conflict between private gain and public good simply evaporates....
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42 comments:
"They seek to legitimize an economic system focused on private gain ...."
Got any other ideas for a better system, professor?
Capitalism is the very worst kind of economic system, aside from all the rest of them.
Actually its the law schools that should be shut down. Anybody should be allowed to take the bar exam, and if you pass you're a lawyer. No more gatekeeping.
Relevant
Restaurant critic says, "I don't like meat, so it should be taken off the menu everywhere!!"
Socialism and monopolistic economic regimes undermine capitalism and public good through redistributive change schemes that promote pride and corruption in Diverse populations.
RCOCEAN II said...
Actually its the law schools that should be shut down. Anybody should be allowed to take the bar exam, and if you pass you're a lawyer. No more gatekeeping.
Lawyers and Judges should be replaced by open source AI yesterday.
This is the perfect use case. Train your models on previous cases and determine what the desired outcome of each case should have been.
Having a completely consistent deterministic fully egalitarian law system with near instant decisions at almost no cost is within our grasp.
There are a dozen models right now that would replace every professor in the country and do a better job at instructing students for a fraction of the current cost.
My main gripe with B school is that in both undergraduate and MBA levels, I was not offered a simple class on sales and salesmanship. A very high percentage of marketing majors land in sales jobs, with little to no sales training.
And I agree, it is the law schools that need to be torn down. Training liars for hire.
A man who teaches at a business school and has apparently never read or understood Adam Smith. "Business schools are organized explicitly around a private good: the pursuit of profit."
Indeed. One hopes it will stay that way, for “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
The author pretends that the study of law is nobler than the study of business. Where do the graduates of Harvard Law end up? In super-highly paid associate positions in Big Law, which is the goal of most of them. Or they beaver away at "NGO" busybody jobs where they hope to enforce their views of how life ought to be organized. We should not help them make believe that they are in it for "justice."
I give C.S. Lewis the final word: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies."
And yet another point in AI's favor is it never drones on complaining it's expected to produce bullshit.
Do Business Schools skim over/rehab the Bear Stearns, Enron, AIG, Lehman Brothers et al?
Little wonder they keep happening.
Learning has been outsourced to Netflix.
Little wonder Netflix subscription keeps going up.
I would agree that "Business schools" and MBA are a waste of time. But people need to think that there's some sort of merit involved in who gets hired by Big Business. Corporations also appreciate that the Business Schools allow them to streamline the hiring process.
As a failed academic and a successful businessman. I have no idea what I would teach someone about business beyond basic finance and math. 1 year max, probably a lot less. I'm totally mystified how modern business is done that creates billionaires with international companies worth hundreds of billons and many thousands of employees. Even watching it happen, it seems like some kind of magic. Modern logistics is a marvel of things too large for my mind to contain, and it seems like it completely changes every few years.
It’s always the people who have corrupted the system that claim it needs to be shut down because of corruption. How bout we purge assholes and their fake data instead, then focus the HBS on actual real-world data like the MBA program I was properly trained by.
Most of what I learned decades ago about business and manufacturing became obsolete long before they quit teaching it. It was a tremendous waste of time, but people made a lot of money selling it and the associated software and training.
The one lesson that seems universal among the most successful business people is to hire really smart people and motivate them with freedom and opportunity.
bagoh20 said...
The one lesson that seems universal among the most successful business people is to hire really smart people and motivate them with freedom and opportunity.
One scheme I am cooking up is to put together a curriculum and teach a class at one of the the home school collectives.
Usually you teach for an hour or two once a week and you give the students projects to work on with their parents at home.
AI could in theory decide civil disputes, but it's hard to see how this would become the norm. Iin how many cases would you expect both parties to waive their right to a trial by jury and trust AI decide the matter? Or is the idea that we'd do away with the 7th Amendment and force people into an AI dispute-resolution system?
hawkeyedjb said it well. The pursuit of profit produces prosperity, which is as great a public good as health and justice.
There aren't reporters who can turn out detailed and unbiased case studies for business schools? Maybe it's J-schools that should be closed.
I went to business school after wasting a few years achieving a degree in English. I learned three useful things:
-Double entry accounting
-The time value of money
-The law of supply and demand
The rest was pretty much filler.
Something doesn't sit right about this article. I've never been to law school, but I can't imagine that it's goals are that different than business school. (Turning out graduates who will be successful in that profession.) I just have this gut feeling that someone dangled a check, and an offer to be published in the Times, in front of Chris and he couldn't resist. (Because he was trained in business, he knows a good deal when he sees it.) After all, Eat the Rich, is the popular trend among progressives right now. And who better to write an article about the evils of a business education than a repentant sinner/business professor?
My alma mater (one of the better public business schools) has abandoned the MBA degree, citing reduced demand. It seems employers and students want a more specialized business curriculum. I think that's a good thing.
Shouldn’t someone who doesn’t”t believe in profit be teaching Government instead of Business.?
…that SUNY Stony Brook professor- the one that reinvented a thousand years of economics and was quoted and sighted hundreds of times during the Obama administrations, must have retired or something…
“The data they include can be selective, biased or even fabricated”
…I’m having trouble understanding why this is a problem. Academic exercises use simulation. If this part is supposed to be the critical part proceed with caution because it sure sounds like the academic equivalent of ending grammar school arithmetic because Mary doesn’t ‘really’ have three apples…
…and while hbs may rely on case study more heavily than other institutions it’s still only a part of the program. Harvard free palestine types really really want to get rid of Mankiw’s book though…
"it sure sounds like the academic equivalent of ending grammar school arithmetic because Mary doesn’t ‘really’ have three apples…"
LOL! If Mary has three apples and the government takes four... well, she'll just have to run a deficit, like the government does.
“ LOL! If Mary has three apples and the government takes four... well, she'll just have to run a deficit, like the government does.”
No, Mary would just get thrown in jail.
If you want them, there are ways to get apples into the jail.
These liberal prescriptions that NYT loves to publish always feature the passive voice. Who, professor, should shut down business schools now that you say it is "time" to do so? Would it be the government? And if the business schools or the people who run them don't want to be shut down by the government, can agents of the government use force? How much force, professor?
@ Baghdad Bob - Your B school professors couldn't teach you sales or salesmanship for the same reason my engineering professors couldn't teach me how to run a chemical plant - they didn't know a thing about it.
I found my MBA to be a great foundation for my career. I graduated over 40 years ago so perhaps things have changed.
hawkeyedjb @ 12:03pm,
Double entry accounting may be a specialized thing that could reasonably deferred until business school, but those other two are something that people should have at least the outlines of when they graduate from high school!
Most of that piece was bad because the guy just wants his activism of choice pushed in business school, but the part about case studies was shocking. The companies have to approve the case studies? In no way is that actual research or academic rigor. If that's what they're studying, he's right that this isn't an academic discipline, and these schools should not exist.
I don't know what he's talking about - that companies have to approve case studies. My husband's MBA included a whole lot of case studies that sure sounded like object lessons in what not to do, to me.
Maybe it's different in England, being socialist and all.
I would like to recommend the Acquired podcast - somehow the podcasters make a case study into a 3-4 hour - or more - page turner. (I'm on Part 2 of Google, which means I'm like 6 hours in, and I can't wait for my morning walk to hear what happens next.) To be sure, their subjects seem to be the businesses that are wild successes, paradigm-changers, or otherwise extraordinary - but I would LOVE to hear them break down Enron, for instance. (Certainly it was extraordinary... Its demise came about a year after my husband graduated. Because he got his MBA in Texas and was focusing on energy finance, he and some of his class took a "field trip" to their corporate HQ in Houston; my husband took one look at the Harley parked artfully in the reception area and the leather miniskirt on the HR woman - a grownup woman with a title and all, not a brand-new grad who got stuck with the job - who took them around, and decided that he had no interest in applying. That company culture was not one where he believed he would thrive.)
loudogblog said...
"I just have this gut feeling that someone dangled a check, and an offer to be published in the Times, in front of Chris and he couldn't resist."
I had a few professional interactions with public relations professionals, and they reshaped my understanding of the world. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that everything you see in the NYT and other major media gets there through the process described by loudogblog. Once you accept that, the world starts to make a lot more sense.
(It may not always be money that changes hands. Often it's prestige, attention, etc.)
There are facts, and there are narratives. It is important to understand and master both.
…I was exposed to one example of what I think they’re talking about: in undergraduate marketing we did an RJR study that wasn’t entirely flattering to existing management and instead of letting it lie one of the RJR c suite showed up in class for presentation. Not totally uncommon but rare enough for this echelon to show up to an undergrad course. Well instead of discussing the case most of his time was spent spinning his side of the politics, seeking the approval of a bunch of core curriculum undergrads. A Tom Wolfe field day it was indeed…
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