Among the not-so-crazy things the author points out in this article...
Quote:
If we ask why no one stopped these people, however, we come right back to business school. It was the market fundamentalism that dominates business school thinking that assured us that markets are self-regulating. It was the management myth—the idea that there is some specialized, teachable body of expertise that constitutes management—that confirmed the strange notion that these people were capable of regulating themselves. And it was the shareholder-value model from Business 101 that said all you need to do is load up managers with tons of stock options and they'll be sure to do the right thing.
... and the money quote:
Quote:
The reality is that business school is now chiefly a community of intention. It brings together people who share certain career aspirations—for the most part, to make big bucks—and occupies their time teaching them a few technical things that they don't need to know, along with a code of conduct that says, in essence, whatever is legal is ethical; and if it makes money, it's a positive duty.
I totally agree with this. One reason why this recession, I hope, will be such a socially disruptive force is that it provides a powerful counterargument to this "free market knows everything" nonsense conservatives have been trotting around ever since the Soviet Union fell. Capitalism and the free market are incredibly powerful movers for human prosperity, of course, but like anything else, they need to be tempered with reasonable controls. At some point, we in the U.S. forgot that.
In regards to MBAs, I've become extremely skeptical that everyone in top B-schools is really there to learn a big bunch of new skills. The MBAs who were screwing the pooch in the banks and AIG and the rest were ticket-punchers, flattering themselves that they were really much smarter than they turned out to be, and apparently willing to disregard the social implications of what they were doing in the interests of turning a buck.
Now obviously, a business education can be used in many different ways. I hope that after this experience, employers will be a little more concerned with hiring graduates who take an ethical approach to doing business. I don't know if that's really something you can teach in business school... I feel like you'd have to incorporate that aim into admissions as well.