enthalpy

Tuesday, December 29, 2009


Great article on why we can't, as a nation, make anything anymore. Great in the fact that I had this exact discussion with my dad (hi, dad!) over Christmas. Managers don't know how to make anything anymore, they just know how to "manage." Managing people may be the same no matter where you go, but making ketchup and jet engines might, oh I don't know, require a different skill set. Well read this.
In some sense, it’s the result of broad historical and economic forces. Up until World War I, the archetypal manufacturing CEO was production oriented—usually an engineer or inventor of some kind. Even as late as the 1930s, business school curriculums focused mostly on production. Khurana notes that many schools during this era had mini-factories on campus to train future managers.
And now they don't. A "manager" can go from a steak knife factory to an aircraft factory to a roller skate factory without ever learning how to cut metal. Fuck your MBA, guess who is learning this? They speak Chinese.



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