My grandfather was a practical man who had little use for formal education. He earned his bachelor’s degree in agricultural science from the University of Washington. “I didn’t go to the graduation,” he liked to say. “They mailed me the diploma in a tube!” He ended up running a successful chemical wholesale company, half of which dealt in plastics, while the other half dealt in chemical fertilizer (ammonium nitrate, not the kind you collect from animals.)
Once, back in the 1980’s, he was pressured into a hiring a young family member who had just graduated with her MBA. She came in full of ideas she had learned in her MBA school. Despite my grandfather’s obvious success, she wanted to make changes, to bring the company up-to-date with the latest business school practices. My grandfather looked at her and said the following:
“You are going to go out and buy a pair of boots. You’re going to get in your car and spend the next two years driving to farms, selling fertilizer to farmers. Once you do that–once you understand my business–you can come back here and tell me what you learned in business school.”
Needless to say, she quit shortly after that conversation. My grandfather made a bucket of money selling the plastics half of his company to Eastman Kodak, and the fertilizer side to Norsk Hydro. If you’re wondering why I still work at Cisco, well, he blew the money on Ferraris and five-star hotels before dying suddenly without leaving a will. Such is life. Hey, it was his money.
The rise of the MBA is part of the rise of the larger class of “managers” and “management”. The business world is not unique in this respect–we see it across all domains of life. Take my old high school, for example. When I matriculated there, over 35 years ago, it was a quirky, hippie school in a house. We called our teachers by their first names and had circus classes. The education, however, was surprisingly good, and the “head of school” taught us courses on Shakespeare.
Recently they hired their latest “head of school”, a man with a doctorate in “education” who apparently has never taught a class. Looking at his resume, I see that he’s a professional manager, an education bureaucrat. Before getting his doctorate, in fact, he worked as a “management and strategy consultant” (Uh oh). The board probably considers this necessary given that the school is now institutional, with a massive new gleaming (but soulless) building, and even a massive athletic facility. (When I went there, there was no athletic requirement at all, and the few sports teams we had borrowed the run-down gym from a local church.) That may be the case, but I’m not sure exactly what this man knows, since he seems to actually be an expert at nothing. He reminds me of the odious Gorgias from Plato’s dialogue, a sophist who thinks he can talk about any subject whatsoever. Socrates grills him. Shipbuilders produce ships; cobblers produce shoes; what do you produce? After thinking about it he tells Socrates he produces “persuasion”. He is confident he can produce “persuasion” on any subject at all. (Although I can guarantee that new “head of school” has never read a page of Plato.)
The name for such people is “dilettante”. Dilettantes are people who don’t really know a subject, yet nonetheless profess expertise based on their superficial knowledge. The idea of a management class is an endorsement of pure dilettantism. These are people who don’t really know any subject in depth, but who feel confident by virtual of their (often worthless) credentials to be put in charge of anything and everything. Like Gorgias, they don’t need expertise, because they are convinced of their own superiority. They are not meant to lead by virtue of domain knowledge, of which they have none. In fact, they are meant to lead (so they think) specifically because they lack domain knowledge. This makes them superior to those who do, and often deeply suspicious of people who actually know something in depth.
Managerial classes often emerge in complex societies as people who are unable to acquire actual domain-specific knowledge find that they can thrive instead managing the complexity itself. Ancient China, for example, had a huge bureaucratic class which dealt with the management of an extensive empire. To a certain degree, such a managerial class is needed in large multinational corporations, especially given the complexity of corporate finance, government regulations, and accounting requirements. Buying, say, networking equipment, from a large corporation comes with some major advantages. When I worked in TAC, I was always astounded that we could get parts to almost anywhere in the world in 4 hours. ISP had a POP in the mountains of Peru? No problem, Cisco had the exact card needed for the RMA and could send someone up there on a scooter to deliver it. In fact, one could argue if the managerial classes have some domain expertise, it is in things like logistics, accounting, finance, and (bleh) marketing.
The problem is that the managerial classes rarely confine themselves to their areas of expertise. I would consider myself a subject-matter expert in networking, but I would never dream to attempt managing a team or a division at a retailer. I simply lack that expertise. Dilettantes, however, believe they can manage anything. This is why I’ve seen these management-types jump from a consumer software company to a storage company to a networking company to a retail company. They get put in charge of highly complex and technical product lines because other dilettantes in higher positions trust them more than those who actually have spent decades acquiring domain expertise. A dilettante might not have any knowledge of how to configure a static route, or even what one is. And yet he could end up in charge of a routing product line. He may not know networking, but he knows “product”. In fact, in his mind, domain-expert networking people have made things way too complex by requiring people to configure things like static routes. “Hey, I’ve got a great idea,” thinks Mr. Dilettante. “This routing stuff they keep talking about is, like, sooooo complicated. I’m gonna build a new product that doesn’t need routing! Networks without routing! We’ll call it routing-free routing!”
Lest anyone think this is a criticism of my present employer and try to get me fired, I would point out I am referring to a broader trend across the industry and even the entire culture. I’ve seen variants of this in every corporation I’ve worked for, even companies like Juniper that had a reputation for being less MBA-dominated. (In fact, I saw it a LOT there.) Indeed, this affliction pretty much defines the entire “analyst” class. These people have a massive influence on corporate strategy and product decisions, and yet only a handful of them have actual experience in their field of “expertise”. There are a couple networking analysts here or there who have been network engineers, but most are simple dilettantes, claiming expertise of a thing they barely understand.
How can this be solved, and what should companies do to combat the problem of dilettantism? In the first place, listen to my grandfather, may he rest in peace. He didn’t say don’t tell me what you learned in B-school. He said learn my business, and then tell me what you learned. Corporations that hire people with generic studies and experience in areas like “management”, “product”, and “strategy” should require them to undergo intensive training on domain in which they will be working. Requiring technical certification and even short rotations into technical roles would give them an appreciation for what they are actually managing or strategizing. While not a substitute for the years of experience of a “practitioner”, it could at least provide more than a passing familiarity.
Nota bene: I’m not optimistic that such a plan would be well-received by the business-types. Remember, they specifically believe that their lack of domain knowledge is why they are superior. I’ve seen attempts to implement this sort of thing fail.
Second, remember that MBA programs do communicate some domain-specific knowledge, in areas like finance, and take full advantage of this. This means that business-school grads are the most qualified to lead in these areas. In addition, these sorts of functions are needed even in technical business units, so people with domain-specific business knowledge are well-deployed dealing with things like pricing and licensing.
In the corporate world, however, this is often not how it works. Instead, the MBA’s are put in charge of product lines entirely and they see the technical people as service people to the business people. I would argue it should be the opposite. Technical people should be in charge of products and the business people should be service people for the technical team.
Unfortunately, this is not how you see yourself if you managed to get into b-school at Yale or Wharton or Stanford or wherever. (I myself have a masters degree, but from a decidedly less prestigious university, so I don’t suffer from any delusions.) Because you went to Wharton, and you studied “product”, you are qualified to lead any product. Because you studied “strategy”, you can do strategy for any business, from software to satellites to paperclips. The people who worked night and day and went deeply into debt to get a diploma from Stanford don’t want to be service people to those of us went and got CCIE’s and then spent nights in wiring closets hooking up networking gear. In a sense, I don’t blame them.
My goal here is not to offend anyone, but occasionally when I write something like this, assuming nobody reads this blog, some exec comes up to me in the breakroom and says, “about that blog post the other day…” It’s probably why I’ve not advanced to their ranks. That and I didn’t go to Wharton. However, I’m not picking on anyone specifically, nor am I even picking on my own employer. As I said from the beginning, dilettantism is a broader social trend. And, as I said, I do believe the MBA is a useful degree, if we consider it as a domain-specific degree instead of a broad one.
And, who knows, I’ve spent enough time away from the trenches of networking that maybe I am now considered to be a dilettante. The good news is I didn’t need to pay Wharton $300k to earn it.