Here’s a belated link to Nate’s damning thoughts on the business school mentality:
You want to know whats to blame for your current economic crisis? Greed you say? Harvard Business School says I. Its that theory.. thay wretched buzzword style catch phrase… so often repeated… its impregnated every fascit of american economics. Its a deplorable, loathesome, and ultimate suicidal business theory. Its one that eventually damns and destroys everyone and everything that adopts it… from a business, to a school, to a city or town. But why? Why is it so destructive?
Several different ways actually.. and I’m going to provide some fairly varied examples from completely different, and seemingly unrelated, areas to demonstrate them.
Nate provides examples from NASCAR to the housing market in illustrating how a mindless focus on revenue growth leads to an abbreviated financial lifespan. A few months ago, I saw a newly hired technology executive fired, quite justifiably, because his “plan” for the company he had recently been hired to run was – surprise, surprise – to focus on the short term, goose the sales numbers, and sell the company as fast as possible based on “the ramp”.
He got canned almost immediately after presenting that plan… mostly because he was the third or fourth straight executive who had come up with precisely the same “strategy”.