If you're interested in understanding what's wrong with corporations right now, what's driving our global capitalist omnishambles? This is an amazingly insightful (if long, and entertainment-industry focussed) deep dive into the madness of modern management theories:
@cstross This reiterates, with much more detail, things I've been saying for years: That Ivy League business schools and their MBA programs are directly and actively harmful both to business and, in fact, to the entire world. They do not teach how to manage, they teach how to mismanage, because they are based upon theories of "success" that are utterly and completely divorced from the realities of what actually makes a business successful — producing something that people want, well, at a price that people can afford to pay for it. (And then there's the banking and investment sector, which becomes ever more single-mindedly focused year after year upon hoovering wealth out of the economy.)
Another part of the problem is that I don't think the world's "business leadership visionaries" actually understand that no matter how good their products, they aren't going to be able to sell them if nobody but themselves has any money to buy them with.
@zakalwe My takeaway is that success in business is NOT about bullshit like leadership or founders … it's about survival. Anyone can be a founder, anyone can prance around in front of a marching band and make pompous speeches, but the definition of success in business is simply staying in the game. And modern management culture is blind to this.
@cstross The US system of production depends on business owners using their wealth as productive capital and major business owners have abandoned this. If this continues, the end result will be a gutted economy dominated by a handful of wealthy people, like that of Russia or Mexico. These people aren't capitalists. I've started calling them economic nihilists.
@ratkins I'm opposed to killing. (But I'd be quite happy to ban MBAs from all non-manual labour for a number of years and confiscate their assets for the duration on the grounds that they're almost certainly the proceeds of crime.)
@cstross And any rational person in an actual democracy would vote for leaders (there’s that word again) who would institute regulation, hell, even a tax regime, that would tamp down the excesses of the MBA-class. But the underlying problem is regulatory capture.
I am watching this dynamic close up and personal with many of my former clients, who have now moved into the extractive phase solely to make their stock price go up by any means necessary.
They used to make a great product, & are busy gutting it on the Number Go Up alter.
Notice no corporation ever settles into their old age of a stable stock price & issues dividends anymore?
@EricCarroll If I was Planetary Overlord, I'd have to urgently consider proposals to abolish shares and dividends and replace them with company interest-bearing bond issues as a way of raising working capital. Share ownership in joint stock corporations has turned into a toxic death-spiral of short-termism.
@cstross <Reads article. Looks at how UK politics keeps trying to pull power away from experts and back to central Government. Rereads article>
Ooooohhhh. Let’s ban teaching MBAs.
@mrdalesmith Those folks with MBAs I know (who aren't shitheads) say it's really basic stuff, the magic you get from it is the interpersonal networking with other MBAs. So look at Rishi Sunak as the type specimen.
I think we could do better by crunching the MBA down to the absolute basics of management theory and making it an elective extra course available with any other degree. In other words, dilute and devalue it by making it part of what everyone knows, rather than mystical executive shit.
@cstross@mrdalesmith That will never happen because the business schools at universities rely on this mystique to get huge tuition fees from students. It's not in their interest to devalue it.
@cstross@mrdalesmith Not sure that a nationalised university system is what you want. You really don't want Johnson or Truss (or Trump!) setting curricula!
@davecl42@mrdalesmith Indeed, but it should be possible to design circuit-breakers to prevent political meddling. The NHS is a case in point: despite decades of trying to corrode it, the Torie haven't quite succeeded in breaking it.
@cstross Something I feel all these pieces miss is how the demographics play into this. The need to grow enormously and the need to spend so much money on everything that there is no real impact of doing it wrong (no nega feedback loop) is intimately linked to the fact the retirement schemes money needs to get invested somewhere. And there was bluntly not enough stuff to invest in.
So we have a whole industry dedicated to finding ways to do this, and modern management is the answer to that.
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