Driven off the Road by M.B.A.s

Time ^ | 7/10/11 | Rana Foroohar

[LibWhacker]

Bob Lutz, the former Vice Chairman of General Motors, is the most famous also-ran in the auto business. In the course of his 47-year rampage through the industry, he's been within swiping range of the brass ring at Ford, BMW, Chrysler and, most recently, GM, but he's never landed the top gig. It's because he "made the cars too well," he says. It might also have something to do with the fact that Maximum Bob, who could double as a character on Mad Men, is less an éminence grise than a pithy self-promoter who has a tendency to go off corporate message. That said, his new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, has a message worth hearing. To get the U.S. economy growing again, Lutz says, we need to fire the M.B.A.s and let engineers run the show.

[Army Air Corps]

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[SatinDoll]

Fire the bean counters and let the engineers run the companies! That is so true. It has happened all across the United States, too, and not just in autos.

[ken21]

.

[Sequoyah101]

It has become less productive, a whole lot less fun and a helluva lot more useless paper and a whole helluva lot more time explaining what should be patently obvious to some dumb ass MBA or bean counter who some other dumb ass put in charge.

The only put the bean counters and MBAs in place because the engineers knew how valuable good people are an so wouldn’t let them go when some stupid fool decided to hire McKinsey or some other outfit to right size, down size or empower the company.

MBAs and bean counters are revenge by people who couldn’t get engineering degrees and didn’t like the command and control meted out by the WWII generation... poor babies.

[Sequoyah101]

And I forgot to mention lawyers but that is an even bigger, longer and more strongly worded rant.

Starve ‘em.

So glad to see Texas make the loser pay in civil law suits. Maybe it WILL starve the bastards out.

If I had a child who became a tort lawyer... somebody would have to leave. Corporate lawyers are close behind.

[Jeff Chandler]

the fact that Maximum Bob, who could double as a character on Mad Men

Or an Elmore Leonard novel?

[Lazlo in PA]

Lutz is a good man and dead on here. Just look at the garbage that ran these companies into the ground. Dopes who don't know how to change a tire. That is why the highways are littered with soulless plastic junk no one wants to drive. Lutz was the guy pushing for the V12 Cadillac a few years back to generate excitement and repair a damaged brand. He is the type of person who should be running these outfits.

[zipper]

The pendulum began to swing in the postwar era, when Harvard Business School grad Robert McNamara and his "whiz kids" became famous for using mathematical modeling, game theory and complex statistical analysis for the Army Air Corps, doing things like improving fuel-transport times and scheduling more-efficient bombing raids.

???

The Army Air Corps never made it to the end of WWII. They became the Army Air Force even before the war ended, and in 1947 became a separate branch of service, the Air Force.

McNamara & his whiz kids were Vietnam-era, certainly had nothing to do with the Army Air Corps (pronounced "corpse" if you're a marxist).

As for the whiz kids being the types that developed FedEx, wrong again. Fred Smith got a C minus on his paper outlining his hub-and-spoke idea for distributing packages overnight from one of those "whiz kid" type professors.

[Moonman62]

Our past four presidents have been Ivy Leaguers and W is an MBA. Maybe this guy has a point.

[tanuki]

MBA’s are the capitalist equivalent of the old Confucian scholar-bureaucrat. The similarities between the two are actually scary. Isolate a portion of human experience, study it, apply some type of scholastic reasoning to it and whatever it is a better way to do it can be imposed. All in the face of existing doctrine, empirical experience and even common sense. Worked out great for the 20-odd Chinese dynasties.

[Warlord]

No comment on bean counters, but the only thing greater than the conceit of an engineer is his lack of wit. See Schumpeter if you don’t believe!

[SatinDoll]

My Dad was an engineer. From my perspective, I’ve noticed they are boring but make good husbands.

[Warlord]

But Carter was an engineer. Look how well that worked out.

[SatinDoll]

Carter was a stores officer on a submarine. He wasn’t any engineer that I know of.

[irishjuggler]

The company off Highway 101 that best illustrates this point is, of course, Apple.

Does Time magazine have any fact checkers? Many Silicon Valley companies (Oracle, Google, etc.) have operations along Hwy 101, but Apple isn't one of them. It's on I-280.

[WestwardHo]

boring

That’s really funny! You just described by brother in law!

[OldMissileer]

No comment on bean counters, but the only thing greater than the conceit of an engineer is his lack of wit.

I am an engineer and though I disagree about the wit I do agree about the conceit.

So many engineers and physicists think they know everything. I spent many years working with some of the brightest in the world (not me, them) and very few lacked hubris. It was tough to work with many of them for that reason.

[conservativebuckeye]

Thank you for echoing my sentiments exactly.

[Portcall24]

You’re correct about Army Air Corps and the “whiz kids” were definitely Vietnam...but, as a Captain, he did conduct statistical analysis on bombing raids for LeMay during WWII, mostly in the Pacific theater. I could tell you what I think about the SOB but my momma taught not to speak harshly about the departed...thankfully.