EH - 89 : MBA

William Fisher details the ten premises of business administration and looks at the president's performance as CEO of America, Inc. Dr. Lenny has never really looked at life through MBA-POV, having advanced in fiscal matters by learning cost accounting from dad in junior high and ignoring all else. In the 90's, security meant investing and life insurance, so rather than scratch my head, Dr. Lenny did a MLM thru Primerica/CitiCorp and learned some interesting micro-economics. Then he stumbled into mises and rothbard and the austrian folks and so i see a world that makes integral sense dynamically - but it is just not the world we live in today.

So i wish to object to some of the premises in the article - on economic terms rather than political terms, altho the two are interwoven in the time/space arena. I will paraphrase Mr. Fisher - please object if you feel i misinterpret.

1. Have a coherent vision of your organization. What is coherent vision? light has coherent and incoherent components and the mixing of two lights creates perterbations on one - as seen in diffraction patterns. One must always have both coherent and incoherent vision to see - why do MBAs eliminate 50% of the system from the start?
2. Hire people who are smarter than you are and listen to them for building the vision. Who is smarter or dummer than others? We all have different talents and some of these talents do not require intelligence to be the scale of measure.
3. Listen to people who may not agree with your vision. No argument here.
4. Understand your stakeholders, pay attention to their views and keep them informed about how you're doing. Perhaps the last clause should be what your doing rather than how your doing. If there was a bit more transparency in business practice - rather than secrecy pseudo-justified by costs and competitive advantage - then perhaps built in obsolescence could be build out of the system, creating more real productivity.
5. Understand your competitors and the environments that you both operate in. Absolutely!
6. Give your strategists lots of latitude but subject them to frequent reality checks. What is today's reality economically? What does this country produce, beyond debt and more paperwork? Accountability in a hierarchy just assumes given reality and that is why the economic foundation rests on an organization called the federal reserve, which is not federal and has no real reserve. Ahem.
7. Establish benchmarks to measure progress. As long as the benchmarks measure doable achievements that monitoring learning capacity, i am for this. But benchmarks are always proxies and proxy cannot measure the real progress, because innovation doesn't work that way. The assumption that if you spend eight hours in the cubicle working, you will get eight hours of productive work done is utter and complete nonsense. Yet they all punch their time clocks. And this isn't even the 'real working class', who has the 'actual work' to do - which requires little thought and much mechanical ability. Really? Everybody thinks all the time. Stop telling people to be mechanical and not think. Oh - business cannot profit if we are not all lemmings? nonsense. Build thinking into everybodies tasks, but don't ask people to think beyond their thoughts. This will confuse some people - let's not dissect this statement now - but i will defend in in another post sometime. (the thinking beyond thoughts clause - everything else is fair game).
8. Develop alternative realistic scenarios. Yup
9. Be willing to admit errors, even if this means altering the vision. We are constantly in error, based on our factual base and the knowledge of which facts we happen to believe at the point in time we are presented with them. The vision base needs constant alteration, because it morphs as reality morphs. This goes back to my reasoning in answer one. Always let the vision morph - because it will anyway. When you know facts that you thought were true are not, and change your reasoning, or when you find new information that presupposes prior interpretation, then leveling with the reality and coming 'clean' to that reality need to be done transparently based on economic, ecologic and social considerations.
10. Maintain the integrity of the organization and its goals through sound internal accounting and ethical guidelines. Accounting is all economic, ethics is all social. Where is the moral, the ecologic intergrity in this? The idea of sustainability, as the word was meant, means operation in a closed loop system, regenerating waste into productive use. The co-opted term sustainability means piling on the bandwagon of pointing fingers and crying for major change for everybody else, while continuing conspicuous consumption for profit until it's all gone.

I would like to thank Mr. Fisher for the lesson in theory of the firm - micro-economics. Hopefully, my criticism here will be seen as constructive and not destructive. I also believe that in some cases my criticism is totally unjustified and based on a narrow POV that can be broadened by listening to less smarter people, the antithesis of MBA premise #2.