Elitism’s fragility is its strength. It is protected by the moat of money. The world’s most adventurous outlier billionaire Elon Musk blasted MBA education as limiting an individual’s “… ability to think creatively and give customers what they really need.” In the super-hive of financial markets, they are the worker bees who make honey (money) as top executives with pedigree and degree from Ivy League institutions. These ominously overrated overlords operate wealth creation in market-led economies as stewards of top-heavy management structures.
They invariably hold glamorous MBA degrees. They are masters of jaded jargon, which can be decoded only by their ilk. Even highly trained statisticians cannot decipher their mysterious number crunching. Musk, a Stanford dropout, doesn’t hold an MBA. In his opinion, “there might be too many M.B.A.s running companies.” “There’s the M.B.A.- ization of America, which I think is maybe not that great. There should be more focus on the product or service itself, less time on board meetings, less time on financials.” He shrugged, “I hire people in spite of an M.B.A., not because of one.”
His co-business promoter Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who started PayPal Holdings Inc, advised: “Never ever hire an M.B.A.; they will ruin your company.” The versatile tycoon was addressing business barons who spend huge on hiring MBAs. Over the last few decades, MBAs have infiltrated every aspect of the administrative universe from managing enterprises to advising the state on how to run hospitals, airports, education and infrastructure projects. From New York to New Delhi, a MBA degree from any one of the top ten US business schools is a password to access the highest power centres in any democratic economy.
While the US produces almost 100,000 MBAs annually, India’s 5,500 business colleges, including the 20 Indian Institutes of Management, churn out over 350,000 of their desi brethren. Since they can’t influence or join the government directly at the junior level, top multinational global strategy and management consulting firms have opened shop since the economic reforms of 1991.
Take PricewaterHouse, Mackinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain& Company, Accenture, Deloitte, EY, KPMG et al. They wield inordinately insidious influence over policy making that ensures that all their dominance in advising state governments, Union Ministries, state owned banks and universities. Their obvious objective seems to be dismantling the state machinery and creating business for private enterprise at Goliath cost.
They do PowerPoint presentations for power, and prepare tender documents. In some cases, the fee paid to the foreign company is higher than the total tender value. In a few states, rookie MBA graduates are attached to the District Magistrates to collect information about a DM’s nature and amount of work in order to prepare an administrative restructuring plan. Some even manufactured malafide models to many highly rated banks and corporates, which went bust because of their advice. Their predilection for hiring relatives, progeny of senior civil servants and politicians are free from scrutiny.
Historically, MBAs are hypnotised by lucre. Harvard Business School, the first academic institution to teach business science in 1908, was just a former trade school. Since then, it has become the top moolah minting model. Now, the US has over 500 business schools, which teach the philosophy of maximisation of profit for employers. There is hardly a blue chip company in any of the world’s 200 odd countries where an MBA from Harvard, Yale, Wharton, Hass, MIT, Kellogg or Columbia doesn’t occupy the top perch.
They are taught to follow the Stakeholder Theory of management that deals with the ethics and morals of managing a business. But top economists hold different opinions about who falls in the category of stakeholders. It was Milton Friedman who set the tone by explaining that the Stakeholder Theory means that a company is beholden to its shareholders and must make a profit for them alone. Another set of economists led by Edward Freeman propagated a new definition that maintained every business house must ensure maximum economic welfare of other stakeholders like employees, environmentalists, vendors, government agencies and regional aspirations.
Freeman seems to have lost decisively to Friedman. The MBAs only mandate is to use and implement business practices that multiply profits of such shareholders. MBAs have culturally captured the global ecosystem. In India, the craze for Harvard and other business schools began in 1991. Since reforms were aimed at opening the markets, India lacked an Indian model to unlock its controlled economy. Foreign advisors and experts from America and other Western nations were hired to advise the government.
As consultancy became a lucrative business, business owners and senior bureaucrats started sending their kids to the US and the UK to earn expensive MBA degrees. According to an informal study by intelligence agencies, top civil, defence and police officers have sent their brood abroad to expensive colleges during the past three decades. Most of them now work for international agencies, investment firms and consultancy companies in India and abroad.
Most top business schools were given liberal financial support by big Indian corporates to get their nominees admitted. This nexus has led to massive inequitable distribution of wealth in almost all countries. But India is the worst victim of MBA-isation. According to a latest study, India’s richest one per cent hold more than four times the wealth of 953 million people who constitute the bottom 70 per cent, while the total wealth of all Indian billionaires exceed the Union Budget.
This calamitous clout of the Money Bakers Association (MBAs) aka Boston Brahmins are Guardians of the Greed Galaxy who flattens the masses and inflate the ruling classes. As India looks to become a $5 trillion economy, it must heed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s template of ‘Harvard to Hard Work’ to create an alternate genre of MBAs —Masters of Better Administration of national resources.
Prabhu Chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
Follow him on Twitter @PrabhuChawla