Simon Johnson: belief

Transcript context

…Now, I’m quite sure the position of MIT is secure in our future, but what’s the future of the MBA more generally, beneath, say, the top 10 or 20 schools? Will we still have MBAs in 20 years? Will anyone go and pay all that money? It’s a great question. I think a big part of what went right in the era of Henry Ford was the so-called engineer managers, the people who created the new tasks, the people who designed companies, the people who built these organizations. I think they got a little bit of a bad name later, Tyler. It’s like middle management. Perhaps that was deserved. Perhaps things became too bureaucratic. But I do think that people who come from engineering or people who like engineering and people who want to be managers — they want to organize things and make things more productive — I do think that’s a very important group of people. That’s the people who I spend most of my time with in the classroom. I push them to think about this issue of what’s the social angle? What’s the task creation? Why does that matter? If you’re just focused on automation and displacing workers, what are the consequences of that? I have to say, these people are extremely engaged in that conversation, Tyler. Of course, that’s just the classroom conversation. What will they do in their careers 10, 20, 30 years from now remains to be seen. I hope I get to see it. My intuition is that I would rather hire people with technical training and no MBA than hire people with the MBA, maybe even now. Again, not Harvard, not MIT, where a lot of it’s selection and networking. But in terms of what you actually learn, it seems to me the other backgrounds are more valuable.…

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