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Q: Do MBA's add value to the world? ( Answered 5 out of 5 stars,   7 Comments )
Question  
Subject: Do MBA's add value to the world?
Category: Business and Money
Asked by: jjj-ga
List Price: $10.00
Posted: 08 Sep 2002 18:59 PDT
Expires: 08 Oct 2002 18:59 PDT
Question ID: 62925
A friend and I have been discussing the type of individuals that go to
business school, and debating whether engineers or MBA's do more to
improve the lives of a large number of people.  To help us settle this
debate, please produce a list of 10 individuals that meet the
following criteria:

o they have graduated from a business school with an MBA degree
o they're generally well-known
o one could make a strong case that they've accomplished something
signficant and have improved the lives of a large number of people.

Thanks,
--JJ
Answer  
Subject: Re: Do MBA's add value to the world?
Answered By: omnivorous-ga on 09 Sep 2002 16:10 PDT
Rated:5 out of 5 stars
 
Being from the Chicago school of economics, the proper way to examine
the question of value is:
*  is there a continuing proven demand for MBAs?
*  is the demand shrinking or growing?

Thus, a Chicago-school MBA or economist would argue that baseball has
grown tremendously as a business in the past 20 years, so we can't
judge the success of the game by the Cubs winning record.  So too,
judge not all MBAs by Ken Lay or Jeffrey Skilling.

The Masters in Business Administration (MBA) first emerged in 1908. 
It expanded greatly after World War II when new management science
techniques added to the art of running a business.  During the 60s and
70s, mathematical and statistical tools continued to be added to
curricula as regression analysis was applied to financial and business
problems; stock and option pricing models were developed by Nobel
Laureates teaching in leading business schools; and computer
technology became widespread in modeling.

There are now about 725 schools with MBA programs worldwide; more than
400 of them are in the United States.

According to Fortune Magazine in April, 2001, the leading CEOs of the
Fortune 200 had these advanced degrees:
79 MBAs 
15 JDs/LLBs 
12 Ph.D.’s 
2 M.D.’s 
18 Other graduate degree 

So much for the macro view -- what you really want is a list of 10
people who have made a significant change and have an MBA.  My
esteemed fellow researchers have been most snide about MBAs.  Might I
remind them that an engineer did not invent the light bulb. 
Application of mathematical theories to business and economics has put
the Nobel Prize in the hands of American business school instructors
for the past 25 years:
http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/index.html

Enough of that!   Here's your list of 10 MBAs who have affected the
lives of large numbers of people.  I'll leave it to others to judge
"improvement," though their business (and other) success should speak
for itself:

1.	Fred Smith, chairman and founder, Federal Express.  Smith is a
legend among MBAs because he developed the hub-and-spoke delivery
concept in a business case at Harvard Business School.  He got a C on
the paper.  He raised the most venture capital ever assembled to-date
in the early 1970s -- to start an overnight competitor to the U.S.
Postal Service and United Parcel Service.  The company now has more
than 200,000 employees and revenues of $21 billion:
http://www.chiefexecutive.net/depts/innovators/181.htm

2.	Arthur Rock, along with Laurence Rockefeller, virtually founded the
venture capital business.  In the process they helped fund every major
semiconductor company (including the first -- Fairchild Semiconductor
-- and the biggest -- Intel).  In Gordon Moore's Nobel biography, he
credits Rock with making him an entrepreneur:
http://www.nobel.se/physics/articles/moore/

Rock also helped fund Apple Computer:
      http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue80S/mag-old-80s.html

Rock's MBA is from Harvard, 1951.  

3.	Steve Ballmer, president and CEO of Microsoft, MBA from Stanford
University.  Ballmer was the first professional manager hired by Bill
Gates in 1980 and is Gates' most-trusted manager:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_24/b3787001.htm

The value of an MBA is such that a number of executives -- Bill Gates
included -- have attended short-course "Executive MBA" programs. 
Though Gates never graduated from Harvard because of the opportunity
that he saw in the personal computer industry, Gates did attend a
Harvard Excecutive MBA program during the 1980s.

4.	Robert McNamara, Harvard MBA, 1940.  Joined Ford Motor after World
War II; rose to be president as the car company recovered from its
woes of the early 1950s; was Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and
Johnson and is best known for measuring the wrong things during the
Vietnam War; then served 13 years a respected leader of the World
Bank.  At the World Bank he focused on ameliorating the shock of the
1970s oil price hikes and inflation, as well as curbing corruption in
government spending:
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/McNamara/mcnamarabio.html

McNamara wasn't know for his inter-personal skills, particularly early
in his career.  In David Halberstam's book, "The Reckoning," Lee
Iacocca is quoted as saying that McNamara's coming to Ford "was one of
the best things that ever happened to the company, and his leaving it
was also one of the best things that ever happened."

5.	Charles Schwab, Stanford MBA, 1961.  Schwab pioneered the discount
brokerage industry after the liberalization of the U.S. financial
industry, then was able to take early advantage of the Internet to
build the leading on-line trading company.  Thank him that you're not
paying 1% of the purchase price for stock transactions any longer:
http://www.aboutschwab.com/proom/whop1.html

6.	Meg Whitman, Harvard MBA, the CEO of e-Bay, which is changing
e-commerce in ways that we don’t' even understand yet:
http://pages.ebay.com/community/aboutebay/overview/management.html

7.  Michael Bloomberg, Harvard MBA, 1966.  Current occupation: Mayor
of New York City.  Real accomplishment: starting a real-time news
service for investors that now employs 8,000 people worldwide.  Given
that Reuters and Dow-Jones had a 100-year headstart, that's quite an
accomplishment:
http://about.bloomberg.com/bloomberglp.html

8.	   Phil Knight, chairman of Nike, Stanford University MBA, 1962. 
Knight put an American company back at the forefront of the shoe
industry, which had seen foreign companies capture increasing market
share of the U.S. market into the 1970s.  In the process Nike defined
whole new categories of sports marketing and techniques -- and made
Michael Jordan a household name (and a millionaire).  Nike employs
22,000 people:
http://www.nike.com/nikebiz/nikebiz.jhtml?page=7

9.	List too serious so far?  Would you believe that Scott Adams, the
Dilbert cartoonist and member of the Cynic Hall of Fame, has an MBA
from UC Berkeley?  He puts it to good use, skewering clueless managers
and engineers:
http://www.annonline.com/interviews/970527/biography.html

10.  And then we'll propose Clack, from the NPR Car Talk radio show. 
Tom Magliozzi also has an MBA:
http://cartalk.cars.com/About/tom-bio.html

Now if this was a bar bet, the list couldn't go without some arguing,
so I'll propose a few other honorable mentions:
*  Peter Lynch, Wharton MBA, who managed Fidelity's Magellan Fund for
13 years, making it the world's largest mutual fund by following a
growth strategy:
http://www.speakersforum.com/celebrity/peterlynch.html

* We've had tons of lawyers as presidents, but George W. Bush, Jr. is
the first with an MBA.  We usually wait a decade or two to evaluate
our presidents, but here's Business Week's article on his Harvard
B-school years:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/feb2001/nf20010215_777.htm

*  Thomas G. Stemberg, Staples chairman, founded and built the chain
of office supply stores into an $11 billion company.  He's also a
director of Petsmart, a chain of pet supply stores:
http://investor.staples.com/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=spls&script=120&layout=-6&item_id=7695


*  Arjay Miller, who was one of the Ford Whiz Kids, along with Robert
McNamara.  Miller eventually went to Stanford to build it into one of
the leading schools of business in the U.S.:
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/community/bmag/sbsm0005/feature_arjay.html


Not a bad little list.  I'll have to keep this up and see I can find
some more notable MBAs.  May make a good book some day.

And you Google researchers lighten up on the critiques of the MBAs!  I
don't see any of you doing the accounting homework questions.

jjj -- thanks for the fun exercise!


Best regards,

Omnivorous-- GA
MBA, University of Chicago, 1979
jjj-ga rated this answer:5 out of 5 stars
Thanks for a thorough and well-thought out answer.

Comments  
Subject: Re: Do MBA's add value to the world?
From: secret901-ga on 08 Sep 2002 19:54 PDT
 
Many CEO's of big companies have MBA's (IBM, GE, etc), but finding
people with MBA's who is not working in some corporation is hard. 
Here's a partial list.  Some other researcher will be able to find
more.
1. George W. Bush: Received his MBA from Harvard Business School in
1975.  He's well-known and one can argue that he's accomplished
something significant, although whether what he does improved the
lives of a large number of people is a matter of debate.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html
http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2001/february/newsmakers.html
2. Michael Bloomberg: Mayor of New York City. Received his MBA from
Harvard Business School in 1966. His reforms in New York City are
popular.
http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2002/february/newsmakers.html
Subject: Re: Do MBA's add value to the world?
From: pinkfreud-ga on 08 Sep 2002 20:02 PDT
 
Regarding the matter of whether engineers or MBA's do more to improve
the lives of a large number of people...

Mankind has managed to come a long way without (until very recently)
the assistance of MBA's. If we'd had no engineers, I would be sitting
in a torchlit cave painting this message on the wall with a piece of
charcoal.
Subject: Re: Do MBA's add value to the world?
From: blanketpower-ga on 09 Sep 2002 02:29 PDT
 
Some of the more famous ones... (add all the MBA's working for them,
and you have probably a few dozen). Collectively responsible for
wiping out about $5 trillion of value from the US stock exchanges in
the last year.

Joseph Berardino, Former CEO, Arthur Andersen (MBA, Harvard)
Company guilty of criminal obstruction of justice.

Bernard Ebbers, Former CEO, WorldCom (MBA, Rivier College)
Bankrupt company allegedly booked billions in expenses as long-term
costs.

L. Dennis Kozlowski, Former CEO, Tyco International (MBA, Rivier
College)
Allegedly failed to pay more than $1 million in sales taxes on
artwork.

Jeffrey Skilling, Former CEO, Enron (MBA, Harvard)
Andrew Fastow, Former CFO, Enron (MBA, Northwestern U.)

Bankrupt company created outside partnerships that allegedly hid
billions of dollars in losses.

(Credit for this list goes to the Denver Post)

Respectfully yours,
an Engineer

(P.S. say thanks for all the copper. Our mine produced well over a
billion pounds for you last year. Unfortunately, though, I will be
leaving at the end of the year - about a dozen of us have been
"downsized" in a reorganization by the latest MBA).
Subject: Re: Do MBA's add value to the world?
From: politicalguru-ga on 09 Sep 2002 05:57 PDT
 
I find the question problematic - a person doesn't have to be known to
improve the world. I think most people cannot give right away the
names of Nobel Prize winners for Medicine - and despite that they have
done more to improve the world than (say) Monica Lewinsky
(notwithstanding her contribution to the world treasure of humor),
who's rather well known. Maybe engineers are less famous, and appear
less in the media, but it doesn't mean that their contribution is
smaller.
Subject: Re: Do MBA's add value to the world?
From: ragingacademic-ga on 16 May 2003 12:31 PDT
 
Omnivorous - 

Great answer.  Thought I was the only MBA among these giants of
intellect...but I'm also an engineer ;-) (...and have an MA in Biz
Research from Stanford...)

'K, 'nuff self promotion...

I have a quip - and a complaint...

Stanford b-school legend has it that Ballmer negotiated his salary
with Bill for weeks and weeks prior to taking the offer - but never
negotiated the options deal... Starting salary was in the whereabouts
of $60k.  This was about twenty years ago, you know...  The option
package has made him one of the richest people on earth, if that has
escaped anyone's attention...

So that's the quip.

The complaint is that Meg Whitman should not be on that list - eBay
was a powerhouse before she showed up, it keeps growing through
network effects and its own momentum, and, if anything, she should be
on a list of...well, you can figure it out yourselves...  Whitman and
her management team have brought a lot of unwelcome change to eBay,
not unlike whats-his-name's doings at Yahoo!

ragingacademic
Subject: Re: Do MBA's add value to the world?
From: aceresearcher-ga on 16 May 2003 13:44 PDT
 
Google Answers Researchers are a group comprised of people with ALL
kinds of experience, expertise, and education, including MDs, Masters,
and PhDs in fields such as:
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Biomedicine
Subject: Re: Do MBA's add value to the world?
From: robo77-ga on 10 Oct 2003 10:27 PDT
 
Here's the skinny on whether MBAs or engineers do more to improve
people's lives. You can list as many successful MBA's as you want. 
The bottom line is that the majority of them had large teams of
engineers behind them, doing the "REAL" work and allowing their
business to actually deliver.  Without engineers, they would not have
succeeded.  Engineers put words and thoughts into action.  They are
the backbone of our economy and our lives.  Everything we use has been
designed and perfected by an engineer.  This shouldn't even be a
debate.

Now that I'm done, I need to get back to the design of our new
integrated circuit that will be in new cell phones within a year. 
Just another effort to improve the lives of millions of people.

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