Recent quotes:
You want to be the boss. You probably won’t be good at it. — Harvard Gazette
If you give a manager a team of workers who aren’t very capable, that team is going to do a poor job, and if the workers are all-stars, they will make the manager look good regardless. In other words, when a team succeeds, we don’t know how much credit or blame to assign to the manager compared to other members of the team. To solve that problem, we bring a bunch of people into a controlled lab setting, and we assign them a group task that they must do together. We randomly assign the role of manager to one of the three people on the team, and we ask them to lead their group in the task, and we see how well they do. Then we randomly assign each manager again to another group of workers. Each time, as a manager, you’re getting a different set of people, so we have a way to account for the quality of the workers you’re getting. And since we’re assigning workers, we can also identify who’s a good worker because we can see their performance with different managers.You want to be the boss. You probably won’t be good at it. — Harvard Gazette
We found that people with the greatest preference for being in charge are, on average, worse than randomly assigned managers. It’s hard to know exactly why because there are a lot of factors in play, but we show evidence in the paper that they are overconfident in their own capabilities, and they think they understand other people better than they do. We all know people like that.The MBA Myth and the Cult of the CEO | Institutional Investor
We found no statistically significant alphas — despite testing every possible school with a reasonable sample size. MBA programs simply do not produce CEOs who are better at running companies, if performance is measured by stock price return.Aspiring MBAs slide onto the rink
Ice hockey, an unpopular sport even among people who enjoy sports, is a veritable obsession at some elite business schools.Paul Graham – Lecture 3: Counterintuitive Parts of Startups, and How to Have Ideas | Genius
Q: Do you see any value in business school for people who want to pursue entrepreneurship? A: Basically no, it sounds undiplomatic, but business school was designed to teach people management. Management is a problem that you only have in a startup if you are efficiently successful. So really what you need to know early on to make a start up successful is developing products. You would be better off going to design school if you would want to go to some sort of school. Although frankly the way to learn how to do it is just to do it. One of the things I got wrong early on is that I advised people who were interested in starting a startup to go work for some other company for a few years before starting their own. Honestly the best way to learn on how to start a startup is just to just try to start it.
Business schools suffer from a bad case of Harvard and Stanford envy: they dream of having fancy buildings and star professors. But the cost of participating in the arms race is going up—Columbia Business School is spending $600m on a campus—and the supply of people who are willing to pay top-dollar for an MBA is falling. The number of people taking the GMAT, which regulates admission to many business schools, fell by 50,000 last year. The number of Americans taking the test has fallen particularly sharply, forcing mid-ranking schools to dig deeper into their admission pool or rely on recruiting Asians, who will increasingly have business schools of their own to choose from. The reason for the softening demand is that returns on investment are also falling. The Graduate Management Admission Council, which conducted a survey of graduates of American business schools, found that 8% of the class of 2012 did not have a job when they graduated.