… in the Wall Street Journal today about the wee problem of ethically challenged MBA graduates. Scathing Online Schoolmarm has rarely seen deader writing, and she’s seen a lot of writing.
We need to better prepare our students for leadership. This requires creating a deeper understanding of the difficult decisions they will face, often under enormous pressure. We must make them aware that these decisions will challenge their values, and that, consequently, they need to clarify the values they stand for. We need to make sure they engage in a continuing dialogue with classmates, faculty and alumni, and learn to hold themselves and their peers accountable for the commitments they make.
This writing has You Can Safely Ignore Me written all over it. It’s empty. Vapid. Void. It’s written in response to a real problem, not an empty one: People with fancy MBA’s go out and Ponzi the country to death. But this writing, which pretends to be a real response to it, is entirely unreal, a cloudy succession of clichés: deeper understanding, difficult decision, challenge their values, clarify the values, engage in a continuing dialogue, hold themselves accountable… It’s ALL clichés. All of it.
The writers don’t even say what they’re going to do, how they’re going to teach MBA students to avoid Ponziing us. Something about “small group structures” and “generating a deeper dialogue”…
Lazy, cynical, bullshit.
August 24th, 2010 at 8:50AM
Pretty awful. And I’d hazard a guess that the classes taught by these three are also pretty cliche-ridden.
August 24th, 2010 at 11:43AM
Now if only “think outside the box” had been shoehorned in too… Kevin
August 24th, 2010 at 6:15PM
Maybe it’s not cynicism, maybe it’s an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.