Touche Mr MBA

In Gujarati, MBA is an acronym. It can stand for: "Mane badhu avreche", or "I know everything." This is apt, of course, if you have ever met an MBA, particularly one from a high profile institution. Those three letters, which took 2 years of education and probably $100,000 to acquire, are waved around like a war standard.

Since I had thought of acquiring that flag myself, I finally found someone who can help me justify my 4 years and counting to get a different three letters. PhD, or "piled higher and deeper". Apparently, the idea of a degree in Management is scarcely 100 years old. It is an American invention, created by a man who wanted to answer the question:

How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?

This man devised a wholly unscientific discipline surrounding his answer to this question. It is a discipline that became loaded with jargon, which then turned into scripture. In the words of its founding father, F.W.Taylor,

… the science of handling pig iron is so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible for the man who is best suited to this type of work to understand the principles of this science, or even to work in accordance with these principles, without the aid of a man better educated than he is.

Consultant. Your profession is justified.

Read this article by Matthew Steward in the Atlantic. It is irreverent, insightful, and an ingenious account of how words like
Business process re-engineering and organic change and lateral flows of information have turned us into a society of robots, each of whom believes their programming is better than the robot next to them.

But what does an M.B.A. do for you that a doctorate in philosophy can’t do better?

The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.