MBAs, as used to segregate people in a bureaucracy, are a good idea. Your company has a pretty good idea that you have heard of accounting and it's theory, marketing as a profession, and the business and it's place in law and society having done an MBA. Yes, to many people, this is 'common sense' but with thousands of people working for you 'common' is very hard to come by. MBA degrees fill a function, to get everyone the same vocab, ideas, and implementations of those things. It leads to group think by design, it has to. You simply cannot have 500 people working together with different definitions or fuzzy ideas of what accounting actually does. It would be chaos.
MBAs are a symptom of bureaucracy, not a cause of it. Group Think as well, you have to have standard definitions, processes, and procedures. The issue is when you loose sight of that need and create orthodoxy.
So your saying MBA's teach zero skills save for vocabulary necessary to enforce bureaucratic segregation? I guess you can say the same thing about law.
I don't see the same thing happening at my company though. Concepts discussed at the management level are usually communicated in a way any layman can understand.
No, the skills are a part of the vocab too, so to speak. Accounting, for example, has definitions as well as methods. If your department uses MatLab then trying to get the other department that only uses Excel is going to be hard. It's not just 'software' issues either. The ethos, the rounding of fractions of a cent, knowing when to run an internal audit, how to deal with Janet's crappy way of writing 9 and 4, all those little tricks and 'common sense' things need to be sussed out in a huge bureaucracy. Multiply this over hundreds of different fields of work, states and nations and you see why a training course that is not just 1 weekend long is needed.
MBAs, as used to segregate people in a bureaucracy, are a good idea. Your company has a pretty good idea that you have heard of accounting and it's theory, marketing as a profession, and the business and it's place in law and society having done an MBA. Yes, to many people, this is 'common sense' but with thousands of people working for you 'common' is very hard to come by. MBA degrees fill a function, to get everyone the same vocab, ideas, and implementations of those things. It leads to group think by design, it has to. You simply cannot have 500 people working together with different definitions or fuzzy ideas of what accounting actually does. It would be chaos.
MBAs are a symptom of bureaucracy, not a cause of it. Group Think as well, you have to have standard definitions, processes, and procedures. The issue is when you loose sight of that need and create orthodoxy.