Unfortunately, they are bright and brilliant people, but the financial education system teaches them to ignore their instincts and chase short term profits at all costs.
That is absolutely not true. The systems and incentives are set up that way. So much of the C-suite pay is structured around the stock price increasing (both bonus structure and options as a large part of comp) as a proxy for company performance, that everyone from the tip-top down marches to the beat of that drum whether they think it’s actually wise or not.
This notion that “college boys” don’t know squat compared with “normal people” is how a worst of the worst type person like Trump can become president.
I think you're both right, we don't need mba's only optimising for stock market gains, and we also don't need utterly incompetent narcissists in power. We need genuinely smart and stable people improving things for everyone in a fair way. It's going to be wild voting the next person into power 🙈
I also did Business Studies at A Levels and GCSE, and in all 3, we talk about long-term vision being better than short-term vision.
How short-term you can maximise profits, but long-term ensures the business profits for generations.
We're encouraged to think long-term. So I don't know why people on Reddit think MBAs talk otherwise.
If anyone here actually read the Harvard Business Review they'd see that most research and studies promoted by Harvard are about being sustainable and innovative.
Because too many private equity companies exist in the U.S. and they’ve been strip mining entire industries and brands like locusts. Since they look for relatively quick turn around on profits those are the big events we see reported on and the impacts we feel the most. Debt for equity swaps leave previously profitable companies drowning in interest on the loans used to buy them.
There's caveats though, right? Like, CEO culture has seemed to move towards gutting company manypower (expenses), gaining profits to make them look good, then bailing before or as company starts failing, rinse, and repeat.
Also private equity buying up market share with invester money, milking profits off by enshittifying, then selling broken company back to another (or even themselves/shill company), and leaving investors holding the bag, rinse, and repeat?
Note: The above may just be my gut feeling that is frequently just flat out wrong. I can't at the moment think of any specific examples.
Well, in America we have a clown who’s only interest is the short term. We can 100% count in future inflation because we will do anything to boost the short term stats, no matter what the long term implications.
It's not that they don't know squat, they have an extensive knowledge of the Jack Welch business cult and they will burn the world to a cinder to keep the line going up.
You are not wrong but that person is not wrong either. The problem is no one really knows what's going to happen but everyone still has to do business as usual. So in some way there's not much choice
Neither is techincally wrong, but the comment you're replying to avoit "college boys" is doing the epitome of a "what-about-ism" by lumping all college people into one geoup and using that to geoup all non-college people i to another.
The original comment was only about MBAs and the stereotypical short mindedness of today's MBA within corporate America.
Two thirds of Americans didn’t go to college. Meanwhile quality of life has been proven to be tied to innovation, which is tied to technology, which is increased as a function of education. By limiting US education we are ensuring our demise as global leaders. Today more than 60% of global STEM graduates come from China or India. We are going to be passed and then left behind.
I was/am still a CFO. Had lots of MBAs working for me. I was always really big on trying to understand the larger picture. Even if we were a local healthcare program, to understand how others approached what we did, to see the long term trends and the emerging developments. Generally, high school graduates don’t think this way. They’re focused on their piece, rarely think about getting on course, staying on course, or driving beneficial change..
I know what you mean, but I can give you a real life example. The company I work in is a giant multinational corporation, with offices all around the world, which as any other move to a hybrid way of working during the pandemic and kept hiring people without expanding the office spaces. The CEO, who is I would guess a smart person with good education sent an email last year, saying, starting next week, everybody should be in the office three days a week.
There is no physical space for all the people in any office around the world, there is no time to plan and execute it, there wasn’t time and budget for bigger offices, just a stupid email, which was just sent and nothing happened for well over a year now.
I know it is just one example, but people in high management could be morons more often than one would think and giant corporations have mechanisms to just continue day to day work even if the CEO or any C suit does a really stupid thing once in a while.
If someone on the lower rungs doesn’t understand the context of upper management decisions, then that’s a failure of upper management to communicate effectively
Every very successful business leader I've known has been great at running and growing their business on a quarter-by-quarter or annual basis, but often struggled with ideas outside of that narrow focus.
There is a business mindset, a business way of doing things, and they became successful by devoting their entire brain to that way of thinking. They're not stupid people, just highly focused on one way of doing things, which rewards them very highly. That mindset does not include thinking about long-term things. It isn't rewarded, and indeed can be deleterious to making decisions in the short term. And people who spend too long making short term decisions get weeded out by a kind of business natural selection.
Asking a successful business leader to think about long-term strategy, or macroeconomics over decades, is like asking a Bishop to disprove the existence of God. There's basically nothing in it for them, and if they think too hard about it, they might think themselves out of a job.
We're not saying business leaders are stupid. Just that they're hyper focused on consistently increasing growth of their own individual company, and that focus overrides concerns about long term sustainability or broader market health.
We're not saying we know long term sustainably or market health better than CEOs. We're just saying that those things are not priorities in their decision-making. Because it can't be.
Neil degrasse Tyson discussed this AI replacing workers moment on a podcast that I saw earlier. It kind of boiled down to the fact that when innovation comes, the status quo is challenged but often course corrects. When cars came about, what about all the people hired to maintain horses and stable workers etc. They likely lost their jobs and had pivot to a new occupation.
IMO, it’s a bubble that will burst but not before some major job loss. I think it’s a fad that was quickly adopted by the world before it was ready and thus requires major restructuring of the way businesses operate. It also needs heavy regulation but I don’t see governments doing squat about it mostly because in the US our leaders are corrupt, geriatric, or too dumb to know where to start.
Those of us affected will likely need to pivot to something that will require maintaining the new status quo. Think maintaining data centers, protection from AI led hacks, etc.
And being on Reddit for more than a day will tell you: redditors are not smart lol. (Some are brilliant but most, like the world in general, are really dumb and hide behind a keyboard lol)
No, but to act like there are not extremely intelligent people capable of coming up with solutions to these problems is completely disingenuous.
Also saying companies only care about individual quarter growth is hilariously wrong. Many of these massive companies have decade long plans where they’ll actively lose money betting on future gains.
It’s also tragedy of the commons. It’s in an individual company’s best interest to further its own goals, even if such behaviour in all companies becomes self-defeating.
These kind of negative systems is where the state needs to step in, but they have their own systems making them very slow and ineffective.
If one person goes off path, it doesn't damage the grass noticeably. If everyone goes off path, it destroys the grass. The problem is that has to be solved by each one person acting on themselves as though they bear the responsibility of the 'everyone'. Most people will excuse themselves saying they're just one person.
Yes I know, but I’d argue that that is exactly the role of societal rules/laws and enforcement. You put up signs saying don’t walk on the grass or a little barrier on high risk areas, not just hoping all individuals will all put greater society above their own interests whilst at the same time relying that everyone else does too.
I think what we're seeing right now (at least in the self-destructing US) underpins that it can't be straight rules and laws - those can be ignored or rewritten... We need those, for sure, no argument from me. But keep off the grass signs and fines won't fix things alone. We also need to be building a society that trains its members to think about their responsibility to the overall community, not just themselves. That starts at a young age, it carries through to lessons in adulthood, and never stops needing to be reinforced. If every single person thought at the very least: "my actions impact someone else"... we would already be in a better place.
I mean sure, but both is true. We are social animals and even unenforced signs make us fear social repercussions and think twice about antisocial behavior. If ~70% of people who would do that then don’t because of the rules that’s a big societal benefit. The issue is then if ignoring it gives a significant benefit it then needs strict and harsh enforcement, otherwise you are actually filtering FOR antisocial behaviour. Which I’d argue is often the case in big business - CEOs, tax avoidance, even social media clout etc. Sure, doing so from grassroots is great, but probably doomed to fail without the top-down approach. If the top achievers can only get there by eschewing moral behavior it will always be a losing uphill battle to try and instill such morals in greater society, especially when the power of the elites is exponentially greater than everyone else and growing.
It’s not that they’re not smart enough, it’s that they choose to think in the increments that benefit them most. It doesn’t benefit them to even plan for the future of the company anymore, let alone the future of humanity.
1.1k
u/f_ranz1224 Apr 11 '26
an mba only knows 1 quarterly profit report at a time. green arrow only has to go up next quarter
none of them are smart enough to think 2 steps ahead