Get an MBA – Masters in Business Attention
Back around the 1920’s, Universities rose to the challenge of the new industrialized era by starting to churn out MBA faster than you can say assembly line. For nearly a hundred years, MBA’s have ruled the corporate roost, strutting their knowledge of organizational behavior, finance, operations and in general how the real world of real business really worked.
Now, for most people who live, play, find mates, make dates and above all work on the Internet, the usual MBA fare is about as appealing as courses on applied hieroglyphics, mule train operations and case studies of rise of Enron.
When are these colleges and universities going to get with the times and start teaching what we need? Do away with the old MBA: what we need is a Masters in Business Attention degree program:
Here’s some of the courses I’d shell out money to take online:
- Attention Investing 101. The fundamentals of investing attention in an economy predicated on never ending supply abundance of choice. Students will learn proven strategies for investing attention, including how to apply the Dunbar limit to social networks, the transitive marginal costs of spam and best strategies for balancing an attention portfolio.
- Organizational Behavior of blogs (a.k.a. “Herding cats for fun and profit”). Students will learn new and exciting ways of creating blog buzz, instigating blog swarm attacks, and the proper care and feeding of business bloggers.
- Controlled Web Surfing. In this class, students will be taught the secret of not spending most of their working day bouncing from site to site. (Note: since electroshock therapy is used, students under the age of 21 will need a note from their parents.)
- Information Technology Management. How to manage a neverending barrage of security/anti-virus updates to allow at least a quarter of your time for actual work. (Note: Students using Apple computers do not need to take this class.)
One last note on a serious note before I go partake in a cultlike activity stand in line to get my copy of Apple Leopard: Our schools – from Kindergarten to Master’s Degree – need to get with the times and start teaching the skills we in the Digital World need.
WRITER'S BIOGRAPHY
BobWalsh
Bob Walsh runs a consulting firm for microISVs and startup software companies at 47hats.com, authored Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality and Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them and is currently working on a secret project.
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Comments
Luke says on November 2nd, 2007 at 9:29 am
Are you kidding me? You are obviously highly uninformed, and completely ambiguous as to your harsh and angry comments about MBA’s. You are a generalist with a chip on the shoulder – who then proceeds to “shell out” a bunch of cliche’ fluffed up analysis.
V.S. says on November 2nd, 2007 at 9:34 pm
The problem with saying that our schools ought to be teaching “digital skills” is that they change so quickly that what we teach our first graders is bound to be obselete before they finish high school. I graduated eleven years ago from a high school with an excellent computer program and there is very very little that is still directly applicable. I mean, unless it’s still useful to install F-Prot and InVircible and tack it all together with batch files, maybe write an app or two in TurboPascal and so forth. Admittedly, the experience with Linux turned out to be most useful, but even that has changed significantly from those early Slackware floppy sets.
I don’t think that the school I graduated from can be faulted for this. It’s just an inherent challenge of a quickly changing environment. The solution is more complicated than teaching for today’s environment. It requires teaching problem solving, logic and more general concepts (what is computer security? What is a virus?) — I haven’t seen TurboPascal in a decade, but the applied logic I learned and structured programming experience I gained from learning it made learning and working with Perl, MatLab and other completely unrelated languages much easier. But this sort of curriculum is much harder to write and implement than one that just explains how it works right now.
Peter Fitzgerald says on November 6th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I believe part of the point here is that we need different skills for living in the digital world, not necessarily that we need “digital skills”. As V.S. appropriately pointed out, the idea that we can teach a specific technical skill and not have it become obsolete tomorrow is a fallacy. However I disagree that it’s more difficult to write a curriculum to teach ways of thinking and interacting with technology that are generally applicable. Based on V.S.’s experience, it sounds like the course succeeded in doing just that.
Pamela says on May 31st, 2009 at 10:48 am
Hey, wasn’t it MBA CEO’s who destroyed the auto industry, eBay and helped to bring down our economy altogether? It will be interesting to see just how long it takes our country’s universities to wake up and begin including some practical knowledge and strategies for long-term success in their programs. These days it seems all about artificially inflating the stock asfastaspossible – while ignoring the future.