RE: CEOs and Business Schools
You will have to be more precise about what "relatively few" of top
CEOs means before I will bet with you, but you are wrong. Every survey
shows that increasing fractions of CEOs have MBAs and that many of
them come as undergraduates from the most selective private universities -- specifically Yale and Princeton.
The process by which students are admitted to the most selective business schools today requires very high level academic achievement, essentially GPA, a high GMAT score, and several years of successful business experience. The average pay on entry to Harvard is significantly higher than the average new hire salary for graduates of MBA programs 10 more more places down the ladder. It is clear that consulting firms (e.g. McKinsey &
Arthur Andersen) and investment banks groom their prize graduates of the
Ivy league for future leadership and channel them into the select business
schools, whence they hire them back and push them into the top ranks.
This process leaves no opportunity for brilliant technical people who want to rise in management while continuing to manage or do technology. Usually, on the West Coast, tech firms (like Intel) pay all costs for such comers to attend MBA programs (especially Berkeley and Stanford in the North, UCLA and USC in the South), on a part-time basis if possible (which it increasingly isn't) or in a full-time executive MBA program.
Dr. Grove, of course, is a member of the adjunct faculty of Stanford's Graduate School of Business Administration and has written , among others, two books on management (High Output Management and Only the Paranoid Survive) which I use as texts in my classes. Grad students who want to make it in hitech are
well advised to take his course in management of technology.
David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard's GSBA is, I believe, the youngest member of Intel's board of directors, and has written a brilliant book on management of information technology.
No one would claim that an ordinary MBA would be well prepared to manage or start a hitech company, but a graduate engineer, with an MBA from Stanford, MIT, or Harvard and several years experience in R&D and marketing would
be well prepared to rise to the top. |
