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- No Blame Thinking by Mike Wroblewski – “It’s not who’s wrong, it’s what’s wrong. It’s not who’s right, it’s what’s right. All other thinking leads to hiding the truth, distorting the information and covering up the problem”
- Three Sigma Bubble? Nonsense! by Marc Hersch – “Grantham’s argument is fallacious. The assumption underlying the use of three-sigma limits is that the system being characterized is in a state of control.” [investors and economic planners consistently fail to understand the volatility of markets – John, see Misuse of Statistics – Mania in Financial Markets]
- Lean Jobs: Current Salary Trends by Ralph Bernstein – “Salaries for people in dedicated lean positions in manufacturing haven’t changed much in the last couple of years, and salaries in manufacturing generally are down since last year”
- Management by Objectives – Why? by Gilad Langer – “You can set goals and metrics for a process, but that will eventually backfire with people.”
- How to Hold the Daily Scrum by Peter Stevens – “The Daily Scrum should be held at the same location and the same time every day, ideally in the team space in front of the team’s big visible task board.”
- Should Cross-trained Workers be Paid More? by Jon Miller – “In lean companies cross training is a prerequisite to advancement to supervisory and leadership positions, as the team leaders, group leaders and even area managers are responsible for training, filling in for absent workers and being intimately familiar with the processes they manage and possible problems within them.”
- What is your ideal organization? by Bob Sutton – “I give the students the final exam question on the first day of class, and it is due the last day. It is, ‘Design the ideal organization. Use course concepts to defend your answer.'”
- 5 Questions – Meet Kathleen Fasanella – “With lean, it’s employees who are truly investing in their employers and they feel it, the owners feel it. It becomes a genuine group effort.”
Harvard’s Masters of the Apocalypse
This article makes some good points, even if it is a bit sensationalist, and intentionally so: Harvard’s masters of the apocalypse by Philip Delves Broughton
In the late 1990s, their faculties rushed to write paeans to Enron, the firm of the future, the new economic paradigm. The admiration was mutual: Enron was stuffed with Harvard Business School alumni, from Jeff Skilling, the chief executive, down. When Enron, rotten to the core, collapsed, the old case studies were thrust in a closet and removed from the syllabus, and new ones were promptly written about the ethical and accounting issues posed by Enron’s misadventures.
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Is there a pattern here? Go back to the 1980s, and you find that Harvard MBAs played a big enough role in the insider trading scandals that washed through Wall Street for a former chairman of the SEC to consider it a good move to donate millions of dollars for the teaching of ethics at the school.
Time after time, and scandal after scandal, it seems that a school that graduates just 900 students a year finds itself in the thick of it. Yet there is remarkably little contrition.
Last October, Harvard Business School celebrated its 100th birthday with a global summit in Boston. While Wall Street and Washington descended into an economic inferno, Jay Light, the dean of the school and a board member at the Black-stone private equity group, opened the festivities by shrugging off any responsibility.
“We all failed to understand how much [the financial system] had changed in the past 15 years or so, and how fragile it might be because of increased leverage, decreased transparency and decreased liquidity: three of the crucial things in the world of financial markets,” he said.
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You can draw up a list of the greatest entrepreneurs of recent history, from Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and Bill Gates of Microsoft, to Michael Dell, Richard Branson, Lak-shmi Mittal – and there’s not an MBA between them.
Yet the MBA industry continues to grow, and business schools provide vital income to academic institutions: 500,000 people around the world now graduate each year with an MBA, 150,000 of those in the United States, creating their own management class within global business.
Given the present chaos, shouldn’t we be asking if business education is not just a waste of time, but actually damaging to our economic health?
Business schools unfortunately continue to take a heavily simplistic number (without an understanding of variation) and fad driven approach to management. W. Edwards Deming was against the damage they were causing decades ago, and I see little evidence they have learned from their failures.
Schools are good for making connections and getting a piece of paper. Some companies won’t consider you for some jobs unless you have an document saying you have an MBA. I strongly question the wisdom of only hiring an MBA to do some job. But many companies like to use simple criteria like – without a piece of paper saying you have an MBA we won’t consider you for this job. So if you want a job from them getting that piece of paper is important.
Related: What is Wrong with MBA’s – Management Training Program – Management Advice Failures – The Lean MBA