Elon Musk Talks About the Importance of Physics, Criticizes the MBA 343
New submitter ElSergio writes "In a two-part interview with the American Physical Society, Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, talks about how important it is to be able to think in terms of first principles, a tool learned as a physics student. Later in the interview, he recommends against obtaining an MBA, claiming, 'It teaches people all sorts of wrong things' and 'They don't teach people to think in MBA schools.' In fact. if you are in business and want to work for SpaceX, you will have a better chance getting hired if you do not have one. According to Musk, 'I hire people in spite of an MBA'. He goes on to point out that if you look at the senior managers in his companies, you will not find very many MBAs there."
There is not much to an MBA (Score:5, Interesting)
Years ago I read a book called The 12 Hour MBA Program [amazon.com]. I have never met an MBA who knew something important about business that wasn't in that book.
Better chances if you do not have one? (Score:3, Interesting)
As a one-time worker bee who is now a part of senior management (with an MPA and not an MBA, although they are pretty similar) I understand what he is saying but I disagree that people should have a better chance of being hired because they have the three letters next to their name.
I hire for open reqs based on the PERSON and their SKILLSET, not the degree they may or may not hold. You know, the way it should be. What Musk is promoting through another one of his ridiculous soundbites is that we should pay more attention to degrees (good or bad) than the skills someone brings along with them.
Musk can be absolutely brilliant and incredibly and insanely stupid all at the same time.
Middle-manager's Business Accreditation (Score:5, Interesting)
I have many degrees that put letters after my name, including an MBA. I still remember how one of my professors railed on the MBA because all it did was enshrine "spreadsheet thinking," ruined creative thinking, make people more susceptible to buzz-word thinking, make dumb people feel smart, make them better at smart CYAs for dumb decisions and about 5 other criticisms that currently escape me. He even called them the "Middle-manager's Business Accreditation" because people at the top cannot behave that way, or they ruin companies, so most MBAs won't make it there for long; and the people at the top love MBAs at the middle level because the top brass are not limited by the MBA's decisions and know how to control them.
Re:Phases of Evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a reason why the Manhattan Project needed Leslie Groves [wikipedia.org]. Few people remember him today, but it's not much of an exaggeration to say that he was every bit as important to the success of that endeavor as the scientists. He was also the guy who supervised the construction of the Pentagon, completing it ahead of schedule and under budget.
Physics versus MBA (Score:5, Interesting)
Physicists like to think they are smarter than everyone else, but they often make big fools of themselves on non-physics topics that require social intelligence.
A quick search of Amazon and eBay turns up quite a few "quick MBA" selections. Titles like:
The One-Day MBA
MBA in a Day: What You Would Learn at Top-Tier Business Schools
The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster 2012 -Man
The 10-Day MBA
Complete MBA For Dummies
I couldn't find anything remotely similar for a degree in physics.
What else you got?
Take it from an MBA expert (Score:5, Interesting)
MBAs on paper are supposed to teach you a lot of useful things. In practice most students walk away with one thing in their mind: how to cut costs to a minimum even if it drives the business to the ground so long as they collect their bonus before it does so.
You can read all about it from Henry Mintzberg [wikipedia.org] who is a Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University, and has spent the last two decades trying to fix the present MBA mess.
His book "Managers not MBAs" is a must read for anyone thinking about hiring an MBA.
Re:Better chances if you do not have one? (Score:5, Interesting)
Henry Mintzberg [wikipedia.org] has data that shows MBAs tend to correlate with negative traits. This means that an MBA at the very least starts with a "higher probability of not being a good employee", so now they have to prove that they are better than the norm.
Re:Phases of Evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really... Musk recently came out with a rebuttal to the "rampant FIRE! threat of his cars." So far nobody has been hurt, and in every case I've heard of the car warned the owner that it was in distress, and allowed/assisted time to evacuate. Plus the battery pack design itself does a good job of comparmentalizing the problem.
No doubt someday someone will take a Tesla at high speed right over the vertical support for a guard rail, and rip the battery pack the length of the vehicle. But you also have to ask how survivable that kind of accident would be in a conventional vehicle.
Don't forget, lithium batteries have almost the energy density of gasoline - but not quite. Plus gasoline is a liquid, once the tank is ruptured, you don't have a lot of control over where the gas flows. I saw one mention that statistically the Tesla, even with 3 fires on its low production quantity, is ahead of gasoline fires on conventional vehicles.
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:couldnt agree more (Score:2, Interesting)
Worked for 10 years in IT support for a top-10 MBA school (thus posting anonymously). Can attest, in spite of my school's technical cred, that the MBA is mostly worthless. Two years (four semesters) is not enough time to truly learn anything. But the biggest problem is the idea that both students and employers buy into: that those four little semesters make one skilled to make executive decisions in any business, regardless of what it is.
This boils down to accounting and finance, which is the only thing common to all businesses (except for contracts, but that's law - go back to school). Like a hammer to a nail, the MBA learns to address everything from the point of view of costs and profits: short version, sales is profits (keep salesmen happy), everything else (except, of course, management, which is you) is costs. If you can't justify your salary by increasing sales, maybe because you don't know anything about the product or selling anything, you'd better find some costs to cut (that is, discover some new efficiency opportunities) in, say, customer support, quality control, IT, engineering, R&D, any of that. So long as you can justify it with some charts and "projections", your boss will be pleased, because most likely he's an MBA, too, and knows the lingo. Just be sure to be promoted somewhere else before your cuts send the division down the way of the Blackberry.
OK, they're not all like that. Most are good people. But MBA schools pump out way too many graduates every year, including those who just coast through classes and expect that their degree will catapult them to a high salary. And all of them get nervous when it's time to suit up and find a job and start paying off their student loans. I've met some MBA students who start with stars in their eyes to change the world, others with a chip on their shoulder like a corner office is their birth-right, and still others just riding out a recession or who discovered their undergrad degree was next to worthless; 2-3 years later they'll all say and do anything for an office and a paycheck. There's no choice.
It's a crazy thing: a non-technical, two year post-graduate degree that rockets you into an exclusive class allegedly qualified to make executive decisions for both skilled and unskilled workers in any organization, from factory to hospital to hotel to retail chain to investment bank (and everything in between). And a new wave of them graduate each and every year.
Re:MBAs actually taught to think in delusional way (Score:4, Interesting)
You missed by far the most important one:
If you can't easily calculate a dollar value of something, it must be 0.
This rule alone is why all MBAs refuse to see any downside exists to strategies that inevitably create more rework, or piss off key customers enough to impact future sales.
Automating away jobs (Score:4, Interesting)
You wrote: "Not a single person was laid off..."
But the unstated part is "...in your company".
If demand grows slower than supply (like due to limited money supply in the real economy, a law of diminishing returns of more consumer goods, increasing burden from negative externalities, structural unemployment, etc.) then other companies that are less productive may go out of business due to your improvements, taking jobs (and also ultimately customers) with them. We're about to see that rapidly accelerate with increasing use of robotics, AI, and other advanced automation.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/08/1530233/digital-revolution-will-kill-jobs-inflame-social-unrest-says-gartner?sdsrc=popbyskid [slashdot.org]
Here is a list I put together of about 50 things one can do about that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html [pdfernhout.net]
A "basic income" (monthly social security payments for all from birth) is the simplest and probably most effective one of those for a democratic capitalistic society:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/11/17/american_basic_income_an_end_to_poverty.html [slate.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/switzerlands-proposal-to-pay-people-for-being-alive.html [nytimes.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-for-the-luddites.html [nytimes.com]
The opposite position though:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/10/04/1222228/the-luddites-are-almost-always-wrong-why-tech-doesnt-kill-jobs [slashdot.org]