“They didn’t really ever create value for the company. They shifted value. They extracted value from the workers and communities and gave it to the shareholders.” — Chris Marquis
You would expect the man publicly calling for the abolition of business schools to be a Bolshevik. But he is, in fact, the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School. It’s a little like an angry cleric proposing the demolition of the traditional church. As the Martin Luther of the Business School world, Chris Marquis pinned his argument in the New York Times on 18 October. Its headline proclaims that “it’s time to shut them down”. But he means abolish. Kill the B-School, Marquis says.
His charge isn’t that MBAs are useless. It is that they are playing the game of bait and switch. Students arrive at B-School saying they want to change the world and, fourteen weeks later, their altruistic ambitions have narrowed to getting a corporate job and making money. Nobody lied to them. The system simply has its own indestructible logic. Faculty won’t change what they teach, and even if they did, the recruiting office is paid to slot people into the highest-salaried job it can find, because that is what the rankings reward.
And so, Marquis argues, we have created an economic culture of B-School-trained chief executives focusing on dividends and so cutting labor benefits and community investment. Rather than being created, value is moved from the workforce and community into the share price. It’s an MBA world and we are all poorer for it.
His fix is constitutional rather than curricular. He would replace the business school with what he calls a school for organizing. But what to organize? He’d like to see a new kind of economy mirroring companies like Patagonia (owned by a trust) or Mondragon (owned by its eighty thousand workers). A quarter of Denmark’s biggest firms are owned by foundations, he reminds us, and in Europe a public-interest director with a veto is unremarkable. So maybe we should just replace the MBA with a trip to Denmark. A bloodless way to kill the B-School.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Chris Marquis is the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School, on sabbatical this term and moving to a chaired professorship in international business at Cornell in January. He spent a decade at Harvard Business School and a year and a half at the Kennedy School. He is the author of The Profiteers and Mao and Markets.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:31 — A business professor calls for abolishing business schools
02:56 — Hypocrisy, or structural reality?
05:44 — He wrote abolish, not shut down
09:30 — The Harvard exercise, and what fourteen weeks did to it
11:43 — Medicine has health, law has justice, business has profit
13:37 — Gordon Gekko, Ivan Boesky, and a speech at Berkeley
16:40 — What happens when an MBA becomes chief executive
19:22 — Mondragon, Denmark, and foundation ownership
20:17 — Thiel’s flying cars, and why American capital funds apps
28:13 — Google, the NSF, and Sergey Brin’s billionaire tax fight
33:56 — Does AI make the MBA pointless?
39:10 — The ship of Theseus, and replacing every plank
45:29 — Anthropic, the public benefit corporation and the golden share
47:48 — Closing