v***@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com
2006-01-21 01:51:15 UTC
American Business Schools are seedbeds of leftist
propaganda. What's worse, the net result is students who learn to kiss
up for fear of arousing leftist lunatics and see the kissing up as a
substitute for ethics. Ultimately the charade of modern business
schools thrives because they delude greedy but temperamentally
unsuitable students into thinking that people skills can be taught
from books (and unbusinesslike faculty) in adulthood and not in early
childhood from more basic experiences. (Animal minds are born fully
developed, hence instinct, while human minds more adaptibly develop by
age five, producing personality; but eventually both are rather
hard-wired.) Most human relations and business strategy lessons you
learn in b-school could just as well be learned from Solomon's
Proverbs or Aristotle's Rhetoric. The captains of American Industry
didn't believe in democratic capitalism: Henry Ford was denied WW2 mil
contracts because of his Nazi ties, Edison's sidekick Steinmetz was a
socialist, and John D Rockefeller believed the monopolistic efficiency
of his Standard Oil was theocratically mandated; It should therefore
be of no surprise that these "captains of industry" set up business
schools that didn't believe in the American way of business.
Since a lot of business is psychology and sociology, cultism,
started by none other than Freud, is rampant. Let's examine their
teachings. Participative management came to us via Myrdal Scandinavia
and Tito Yugoslavia and was largely based on the Tavistok studies
whose sample size was a mere thirty. This was foisted on Japan by a
MacArthur who believed that a little socialism was needed to combat
resurgence of fascism. Yet in the 1980s leftist faculty found all
sorts of things the Japanese themselves wanted to get rid of to try to
impose on us. Do these gurus today apologize now that Japan is in
trouble? No, they seek to have us emulate communist China, or the
"knowledge" feudalism of the university. Wait, didn't the
university-style environment they promote cause Arthur Andersen and
KPMG so much trouble? Did they ever tell you that large USA made cars
weren't the problem in the 1970s, but that gas prices made consumers
buy smaller USA-name cars made with defective Asian parts and yet
somehow the peaceniks who rebelled and bought "pacifist" Japanese cars
turned this into something else. The Japanese were only good at
upfront quality, because to lose face also lost head, but USA quality
was broken-in quality and lasted longer after a few upfront glitches.
Also, as USA education was deteriorating, our mechanics weren't
telling us the reason they preferred foreign cars was because they had
no clue how to upkeep the computerised USA 1980s carborateurs. Now,
as customer service has become automated and effectively plummeted to
1970s levels, did anyone mention it was caused by the petroleum
inflationary environment, and the excellent customer service of the
1985-95 era was due to low inflation, as inflation is intimately
involved with mass paranoia and irrationality?
Many professors of business schools never practiced business, or if
they did, they seek to avenge their short but traumatic experience.
With the advent of differential pay, faculty from other disciplines
(engineering, economics, psychology) transfer to b-schools without any
real interest in their subject. Peter Drucker and Michael Porter made
more of their mark in the popular press, because they were too lazy to
work in the serious journals. One of the genuinely serious scholars
of modern management, Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer, however, in the Fall
2002 edition of the journal Academy of Management Learning and
Education, concluded "There is little evidence that mastery of the
knowledge acquired in business schools enhances people's careers, or
that even attaining the M.B.A. credential itself has much effect on
graduates' salaries or career attainment." The business school has
become yet another charade with which the unemployables of leftist
academia may perpetuate their own existance.
I've seen way too many newly-minted top MBAs end up doing jobs they
could have done with a highschool degree: including stockbroker or
real estate broker. Now, sure, this is "business" but, get real. They
don't use any of their new skills. Ironically, the grubmint is now
the great MBA hirer because they can finally send their favorites to
just about any third-world-standard school to get the degree. One of
the surest clues to an MBA program which is worthless is if more than
five percent of those admitted or graduated work in anything related
to computers, a job they could have done out of high school! The MBA
wizkids ruled the day in the 1960s and the 1980s. Warren Buffet got
an MS not an MBA because the MBA didn't exist in the early 1950s.
However, MBA's today are worth about half what they were worth in the
1980s. In the 1980s MBAs made top dollar because there was a dearth
of MBAs graduating in the hippie 1970s, and only a handful of MBA
schools (Baruch wasn't even AACSB.edu accredited back then). In the
1990s there was an explosion of MBA programs, turning the whole thing
into a commodity. Furthermore, computerised productivity gains made a
lot of managers even more redundant than their subordinates:
Management has become flattened and disintermediated by automation.
A masters degree normally is ten courses, but if you are switching
majors, you need an additional ten courses. Normally the masters
degree adds value only in one of two ways: it displays your expertise
in a different field, or it displays that you have upgraded by getting
it from a better school than undergrad. That's how the MS of the
1950s became the MBA of the 1960s. Ivy league schools considered it
beneath them to grant undergrad degrees in business. But the problem
today is it has become canned as a commodity. The net result is it is
meaningless. The old MBAs required you to major in SOMETHING. In the
1980s we had MBAs who had three different resumes with three different
majors. You might as well do an MS in Finance or Marketing. The
middle manager has been disintermediated; There are no more
generalists. That's my point. Go back to the MS. Or even just
"certificates" (five courses, one semester). The added time and
expence aren't worth it. Furthermore, one of the biggest complaints I
hear from friends who teach MBA programs is that there is no way those
dopey students will ever have the math skills or mental concentration
to really understand what is being taught.
The most important thing to realise about degree mills is it
doesn't depend on the method of delivery. In any big city, a quarter
of the oldest universities are degree mills. But you know what, when
the job really depends on the degree, the employer assignes a degree
to the degree and only hires from the degrees that matter. The reason
you get degree mills is whe some stupid bureaucracy deems it necessary
that you have that degree. If that degree mattered, you wouldn't get
the job because no one is going to hire someone who can't do the
job. If the deree is just window dressing deemed necessary by some
idiotic bureaucrats, that's where degree mills create value, however
superficial. Furthermore, worker retraining funds have offered yet
another excuse for useless degrees to proliferate. The fact is we
have too many people walking around with useless degrees even if you
only count brick and mortar schools. What we need is to replace
degrees with testing. Testing is the great equaliser because it
totally frees up the delivery end to competiton by standardising the
results. When you get grant-hugger Ivy engineering grad-course
professors giving mix-matched old exams for which there is a black
market, then you know standardised tests are the only way to ensure a
quality product. Ironically, we already have most of the mechanism for
this in place. After one's baccalaureate, one takes the third,
specialised GRE exam in bio, econ, chem, lit, psy, or engineering.
Some high quality public universities required these exams for
graduation in the 1960s. All we have to do is extend these exams from
max-800 to max-2000: Max-800 would continue to test for the
baccalaureate, but max-1200 would be the masters and max-2000 would be
the doctoral qualifying exam. And the other way to be sure degrees are
worth something is to tie the interest rate on student loans to a
schools repayment rate. Schools where students prepay their debts must
be good at getting them jobs so they should be rewarded with the
lowest rates.
- = -
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Columbia'81+, Bio$trategist
BachMozart ReaganQuayle EvrytanoKastorian
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/vjp2/vasos.htm
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
[Guilty conscience produces extremism] [Urban sprawl confounds terror]
[Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards]
propaganda. What's worse, the net result is students who learn to kiss
up for fear of arousing leftist lunatics and see the kissing up as a
substitute for ethics. Ultimately the charade of modern business
schools thrives because they delude greedy but temperamentally
unsuitable students into thinking that people skills can be taught
from books (and unbusinesslike faculty) in adulthood and not in early
childhood from more basic experiences. (Animal minds are born fully
developed, hence instinct, while human minds more adaptibly develop by
age five, producing personality; but eventually both are rather
hard-wired.) Most human relations and business strategy lessons you
learn in b-school could just as well be learned from Solomon's
Proverbs or Aristotle's Rhetoric. The captains of American Industry
didn't believe in democratic capitalism: Henry Ford was denied WW2 mil
contracts because of his Nazi ties, Edison's sidekick Steinmetz was a
socialist, and John D Rockefeller believed the monopolistic efficiency
of his Standard Oil was theocratically mandated; It should therefore
be of no surprise that these "captains of industry" set up business
schools that didn't believe in the American way of business.
Since a lot of business is psychology and sociology, cultism,
started by none other than Freud, is rampant. Let's examine their
teachings. Participative management came to us via Myrdal Scandinavia
and Tito Yugoslavia and was largely based on the Tavistok studies
whose sample size was a mere thirty. This was foisted on Japan by a
MacArthur who believed that a little socialism was needed to combat
resurgence of fascism. Yet in the 1980s leftist faculty found all
sorts of things the Japanese themselves wanted to get rid of to try to
impose on us. Do these gurus today apologize now that Japan is in
trouble? No, they seek to have us emulate communist China, or the
"knowledge" feudalism of the university. Wait, didn't the
university-style environment they promote cause Arthur Andersen and
KPMG so much trouble? Did they ever tell you that large USA made cars
weren't the problem in the 1970s, but that gas prices made consumers
buy smaller USA-name cars made with defective Asian parts and yet
somehow the peaceniks who rebelled and bought "pacifist" Japanese cars
turned this into something else. The Japanese were only good at
upfront quality, because to lose face also lost head, but USA quality
was broken-in quality and lasted longer after a few upfront glitches.
Also, as USA education was deteriorating, our mechanics weren't
telling us the reason they preferred foreign cars was because they had
no clue how to upkeep the computerised USA 1980s carborateurs. Now,
as customer service has become automated and effectively plummeted to
1970s levels, did anyone mention it was caused by the petroleum
inflationary environment, and the excellent customer service of the
1985-95 era was due to low inflation, as inflation is intimately
involved with mass paranoia and irrationality?
Many professors of business schools never practiced business, or if
they did, they seek to avenge their short but traumatic experience.
With the advent of differential pay, faculty from other disciplines
(engineering, economics, psychology) transfer to b-schools without any
real interest in their subject. Peter Drucker and Michael Porter made
more of their mark in the popular press, because they were too lazy to
work in the serious journals. One of the genuinely serious scholars
of modern management, Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer, however, in the Fall
2002 edition of the journal Academy of Management Learning and
Education, concluded "There is little evidence that mastery of the
knowledge acquired in business schools enhances people's careers, or
that even attaining the M.B.A. credential itself has much effect on
graduates' salaries or career attainment." The business school has
become yet another charade with which the unemployables of leftist
academia may perpetuate their own existance.
I've seen way too many newly-minted top MBAs end up doing jobs they
could have done with a highschool degree: including stockbroker or
real estate broker. Now, sure, this is "business" but, get real. They
don't use any of their new skills. Ironically, the grubmint is now
the great MBA hirer because they can finally send their favorites to
just about any third-world-standard school to get the degree. One of
the surest clues to an MBA program which is worthless is if more than
five percent of those admitted or graduated work in anything related
to computers, a job they could have done out of high school! The MBA
wizkids ruled the day in the 1960s and the 1980s. Warren Buffet got
an MS not an MBA because the MBA didn't exist in the early 1950s.
However, MBA's today are worth about half what they were worth in the
1980s. In the 1980s MBAs made top dollar because there was a dearth
of MBAs graduating in the hippie 1970s, and only a handful of MBA
schools (Baruch wasn't even AACSB.edu accredited back then). In the
1990s there was an explosion of MBA programs, turning the whole thing
into a commodity. Furthermore, computerised productivity gains made a
lot of managers even more redundant than their subordinates:
Management has become flattened and disintermediated by automation.
A masters degree normally is ten courses, but if you are switching
majors, you need an additional ten courses. Normally the masters
degree adds value only in one of two ways: it displays your expertise
in a different field, or it displays that you have upgraded by getting
it from a better school than undergrad. That's how the MS of the
1950s became the MBA of the 1960s. Ivy league schools considered it
beneath them to grant undergrad degrees in business. But the problem
today is it has become canned as a commodity. The net result is it is
meaningless. The old MBAs required you to major in SOMETHING. In the
1980s we had MBAs who had three different resumes with three different
majors. You might as well do an MS in Finance or Marketing. The
middle manager has been disintermediated; There are no more
generalists. That's my point. Go back to the MS. Or even just
"certificates" (five courses, one semester). The added time and
expence aren't worth it. Furthermore, one of the biggest complaints I
hear from friends who teach MBA programs is that there is no way those
dopey students will ever have the math skills or mental concentration
to really understand what is being taught.
The most important thing to realise about degree mills is it
doesn't depend on the method of delivery. In any big city, a quarter
of the oldest universities are degree mills. But you know what, when
the job really depends on the degree, the employer assignes a degree
to the degree and only hires from the degrees that matter. The reason
you get degree mills is whe some stupid bureaucracy deems it necessary
that you have that degree. If that degree mattered, you wouldn't get
the job because no one is going to hire someone who can't do the
job. If the deree is just window dressing deemed necessary by some
idiotic bureaucrats, that's where degree mills create value, however
superficial. Furthermore, worker retraining funds have offered yet
another excuse for useless degrees to proliferate. The fact is we
have too many people walking around with useless degrees even if you
only count brick and mortar schools. What we need is to replace
degrees with testing. Testing is the great equaliser because it
totally frees up the delivery end to competiton by standardising the
results. When you get grant-hugger Ivy engineering grad-course
professors giving mix-matched old exams for which there is a black
market, then you know standardised tests are the only way to ensure a
quality product. Ironically, we already have most of the mechanism for
this in place. After one's baccalaureate, one takes the third,
specialised GRE exam in bio, econ, chem, lit, psy, or engineering.
Some high quality public universities required these exams for
graduation in the 1960s. All we have to do is extend these exams from
max-800 to max-2000: Max-800 would continue to test for the
baccalaureate, but max-1200 would be the masters and max-2000 would be
the doctoral qualifying exam. And the other way to be sure degrees are
worth something is to tie the interest rate on student loans to a
schools repayment rate. Schools where students prepay their debts must
be good at getting them jobs so they should be rewarded with the
lowest rates.
- = -
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Columbia'81+, Bio$trategist
BachMozart ReaganQuayle EvrytanoKastorian
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/vjp2/vasos.htm
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
[Guilty conscience produces extremism] [Urban sprawl confounds terror]
[Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards]