Feet of clay

Two Jeffs stirring the pot this week:

An MBA not the cat’s meow after all?

“There are now so many schools churning out graduates, but demand for MBAs has stayed constant or fallen…”

Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a paper called “The End of Business Schools? Less Success Than Meets the Eye” where he postulates that getting an MBA may not be as valuable as first thought. Anyone remember that FedEx commercial where the newly-minted junior executive has to fill out package slips his first day on the job? “But I’m an MBA!” he protests. “Ohhhh,” his manager realizes. “Then I better show you how to do it.”

“No one disputes that an MBA from a highly prestigious school such as Harvard, Wharton, Chicago, or Stanford can lead to high pay, partly because of the great contacts students make there. Still, Pfeffer cites study after study strongly suggesting that this is because those schools are so hard to get into (and so costly once you get there), only the best and brightest fast-trackers have a shot. In other words, they are people who most likely would have succeeded whether they went to B-school or not.”

Microsoft not the bee’s knees after all?

“The Web