Fwd: IS: JUST WOWZA- "Many students nodded in agreement." VIS-A-VIS How Harvard Business School Wrecked the World

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff () iconia com>
> Date: December 12, 2018 at 8:47:32 AM GMT+9
> To: Interesting Stuff list <is () iconia com>
> Subject: IS: JUST WOWZA- "Many students nodded in agreement." VIS-A-VIS How Harvard Business School Wrecked the World
>
> THE 5 Min. Forecast snippet below is EXCERPTED from yesterdays issue (N.B. the underlines in it are by yours truly)
>
> THEN, be sure to take in/not miss this Most Salient (related) WIRED article:
>
> The Empress Of Facebook: My Befuddling Dinner With Sheryl Sandberg
> https://www.wired.com/story/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-empress-befuddling-dinner/
>
>
> Sheryl Sandberg’s fall from grace should be no surprise…
>       
>
> December 10, 2018
>
> Sheryl Sandberg’s fall from grace should be no surprise
> The toxic culture of HBS — with emphasis on the BS
> Fatal combination: Amorality and faked certainty
> [OMITTED]
>
> Dave Gonigam
> Managing editor, The 5 Min. Forecast
> "Shame on you, Sheryl. I believed in you, I leaned in. You are a fraud. You were supposed to be the adult 
> supervision, but you are just another corrupt, corporate shill.”
>
> So wrote a woman named Carol Tiernan on the Facebook page of... Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.
>
> Only a year ago, Sandberg was still a  rock-star executive, feminist icon, best-selling author, the object of 2020 
> presidential speculation...
>
> ... until the halo got knocked off this year.
>
> As FB was rocked by scandal after scandal, Sandberg was frequently caught wrong-footed — keeping a stony silence for 
> days, then finally issuing butt-covering statements written by a roomful of lawyers. "Just another corrupt, corporate 
> shill," indeed.
>
> The scandals climaxed two weeks ago with the revelation Sandberg personally asked company staff to look into whether 
> the billionaire George Soros was shorting FB stock. That was after Soros called Facebook a “menace” at the World 
> Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last winter. (Ain’t it great when members of the power elite turn on each 
> other?)
>
> By itself, Sandberg’s request wasn’t so bad — were it not for the earlier revelation Facebook hired a consultant to 
> launch a slimy public-relations campaign aimed at discrediting otherliberal critics of FB by painting them as 
> sinister Soros-funded pawns. The campaign veered uncomfortably close to the anti-Semitic tropes aimed at Soros from 
> the sleazier corners of the internet.
>
> (To be clear, Sandberg’s fingerprints have not been found on that particular campaign. Well, not yet.)
>
> “Just another corrupt, corporate shill” could be another way of saying, “Just another product of Harvard Business 
> School.”
>
> Sandberg and the HBS culture that spawned her are the topic of a recent Vanity Fair piece by Duff McDonald. McDonald 
> literally wrote the book on HBS — The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism and the 
> Moral Failure of the MBA Elite.
>
> HBS is extremely proud of Sandberg, who earned her MBA there in 1995. For instance, plug her name into the website of 
> the Harvard Business Review and one of the first things that comes up is an article that gushes, “Sandberg 
> personifies Total Leadership by being authentic, acting with integrity and pursuing innovation.”
>
> That’s not much of an endorsement, McDonald writes: “The truth is Harvard Business School, like much of the MBA 
> universe in which Sandberg was reared, has always cared less about moral leadership than career advancement and 
> financial performance.
>
> “The roots of the problem can be found in the school’s vaunted ‘Case Method,’ a discussion-based pedagogy that asks 
> students to put themselves in the role of corporate Übermensch.”
>
> At the risk of oversimplifying, here’s the problem with the Case Method: In many business situations there can be 
> more than one right answer. “But to help students overcome the fear of sounding stupid and being remorselessly 
> critiqued,” writes McDonald, “they are reminded, in case after case — and with emphasis — that there are no right 
> answers.”
>
> From there... it’s only a small leap to the attitude there’s no right or wrong.
>
> The most revealing anecdote in McDonald’s article is told by John LeBoutillier, the former congressman and longtime 
> Newsmax columnist. He was HBS classmates during the 1970s with Jeffrey Skilling — who went on to oversee the epic 
> late-1990s fraud known as Enron. (Skilling was released to a halfway house earlier this year).
>
> In class one day, the students discussed what they would do if they were the CEO of a company and they discovered the 
> firm was making a product that might kill its customers. “I’d keep making and selling the product,” LeBoutillier 
> recalls Skilling saying. “My job as a businessman is to be a profit center and to maximize return to the 
> shareholders. It’s the government’s job to step in if a product is dangerous.”
>
> Many students nodded in agreement.
>
> Let those words sink in: “It’s the government’s job to step in if a product is dangerous.”
>
> To Skilling, to HBS grads as a whole, to American MBA culture in general… it’s an alien concept that companies — much 
> less individual executives! — bear responsibility for their actions.
>
> That’s how HBS alum Sheryl Sandberg is fine with indiscriminately hoovering up your data and allowing them to become 
> vulnerable to a massive breach. It’s the government’s job to clean up any mess afterward.
>
> And it’s how HBS alum Jamie Dimon is A-OK taking huge risks with JPMorgan Chase’s balance sheet. If those risks blow 
> up, the government will use taxpayer money to bail him out.
>
> But it’s even worse than that… because HBS melds that amorality with the aura of expert certainty.
>
> It comes back to a passage we’ve cited before from the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop 
> Talking by Susan Cain (highly recommended by Agora Financial contributor James Altucher).
>
> Cain attended an HBS information session, where students learn how to be successful classroom participants. “Speak 
> with conviction,” is the message Cain came away with. “Even if you believe something only 55%, say it as if you 
> believe it 100%."
>
> Within HBS culture, Cain observes, “If a student talks often and forcefully, then he’s a player; if he doesn’t, he’s 
> on the margins.”
>
> HBS students “look like people who expect to be in charge... I have the feeling that if you asked one of them for 
> driving directions, he’d greet you with a can-do smile and throw himself into the task of helping you to your 
> destination — whether or not he knew the way.”
>
> How far down the hole we’ve fallen, observes the clinical psychologist Bruce Levine: “Our society once routinely 
> called people ‘bull**** artists’ if they spoke with total certainty without any basis for such certainty so as to 
> persuade others and get attention for themselves.
>
> “Nowadays, bull**** training is called ‘leadership training’ and unashamedly taught at ‘elite institutions’ and at 
> expensive leadership seminars.”
>
> But the approach undoubtedly “works.” It’s how HBS alum Robert McNamara, as U.S. defense secretary, successfully sold 
> the Kennedy and Johnson administrations on ever-deeper involvement in the Vietnam War. (He was shown the door a few 
> weeks after the Tet Offensive in 1968 — immediately landing as president of the World Bank!)
>
> And... it’s how HBS alum George W. Bush successfully sold the Iraq War to both the elite media and millions of 
> everyday Americans.
>
> Whether in government or business, HBS’ culture of fostering both certainty and amorality yields toxic results.
>
> McDonald’s Vanity Fair piece featured some choice quotations from a source he describes as “a prominent female CEO of 
> a New York-based firm.”
>
> Discussing Sandberg and Facebook, she said, “They’re in Silicon Valley, surrounded by their white liberal friends, 
> peddling their version of how great for society they are because they’ve been connecting people.”
>
> And at the same time, “When you get that wealthy, you start to buy your own bull****.”
>
> Substitute “powerful” for “wealthy” and the same thing applies just as well to our political elites.
>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow () iconia com
> living as The Truth is True
> http://geoff.livejournal.com  



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