In this superb Australian public radio documentary, “MBA: Mostly bloody awful,” the idea of “scientific management” and “professional management” is subjected to an extremely critical look and comes up wanting. Focusing on the Harvard Business School and the circumstances that gave rise to it (America: “a corporation founded by a corporation”; “scientific” Taylorism and its focus on quantifying the unquantifiable, the fad to quantification in management, such as Meyers-Briggs). It looks at the difference between MBAs and real entrepreneurs, looking at all those successful founders who didn’t get MBAs (Gates, Jobs, Bezos, etc), and at the pants-wetting insecurity on display in the number of times the word “leader” and its associated terms appear in the bumpf for management programs (“every leader needs to have a bunch of followers — do we want a world of followers?”). This is extremely meaty stuff, funny and engrossing and refreshing at once. Definitely worth the listen.
(via Justine Larbalestier)