7things meme #7
Feb. 20th, 2012 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petronia7- most surprising/counterintuitive thing you learned in business school
A lot of what I learned in business school was either 1) acquiring/practicing hard skills like writing business plans and making presentations, or 2) confirmation of stuff I'd always darkly suspected. XD Examples of the latter:
The thing I learned that I didn't expect (very early on): not only how much leeway for interpretation you have in accounting, but to what extent there really isn't an objective truth to the exercise. It's like the law, in that sense. Furthermore, just as with legalistic debates, the abstractions of eg. what may or may not count as capital expenditure can have hugely unpredictable (and hugely noxious) systemic impact on the workings of an organization. If a company is doing something that looks completely baffling from the outside and won't stop, the chances are it can be traced to an accounting rule or a poorly designed reward system. I keep saying this but the most different thing about Apple wasn't Steve Jobs; it's the fact that no one in the company has profit-loss responsibility except the CFO.
The important thing I got out of it, which I wasn't taught in class per se (also pretty early on): a new way of looking at the world. Vast tracts of the daily-life universe that previously just sort of sat there now contained information (feel free to picture that BBC Sherlock thing where bits of text pop up everywhere, because that is exactly what it was like). I became acutely aware that every plastic widget, gum wrapper, or supermarket queuing area in our late capitalist-consumerist society has had someone behind it, usually multiple someones: real, live, breathing human beings, who were paid money to think about why this thing should look/act/be the way it looks/acts/is. The most disposable of detritus is the artifact of an intelligent species. I actually find that immensely inspiring.
A lot of what I learned in business school was either 1) acquiring/practicing hard skills like writing business plans and making presentations, or 2) confirmation of stuff I'd always darkly suspected. XD Examples of the latter:
- Most if not all of the decisions made in high finance and investment banking are based on numbers that to a scientist would qualify as "completely made up".
- Consulting is the organizational equivalent of talk therapy.
- The field of marketing takes known human cognitive biases into account on a fundamental design level. The field of economics does not. Unfortunately, marketers don't understand math, so it's kind of like comparing a country of blind men to a country of men who don't realize their left leg is six inches shorter than their right, and are wondering why they keep walking in circles.
- Entrepreneurs are nutters and it is no wonder most of them lose control of their companies.
The thing I learned that I didn't expect (very early on): not only how much leeway for interpretation you have in accounting, but to what extent there really isn't an objective truth to the exercise. It's like the law, in that sense. Furthermore, just as with legalistic debates, the abstractions of eg. what may or may not count as capital expenditure can have hugely unpredictable (and hugely noxious) systemic impact on the workings of an organization. If a company is doing something that looks completely baffling from the outside and won't stop, the chances are it can be traced to an accounting rule or a poorly designed reward system. I keep saying this but the most different thing about Apple wasn't Steve Jobs; it's the fact that no one in the company has profit-loss responsibility except the CFO.
The important thing I got out of it, which I wasn't taught in class per se (also pretty early on): a new way of looking at the world. Vast tracts of the daily-life universe that previously just sort of sat there now contained information (feel free to picture that BBC Sherlock thing where bits of text pop up everywhere, because that is exactly what it was like). I became acutely aware that every plastic widget, gum wrapper, or supermarket queuing area in our late capitalist-consumerist society has had someone behind it, usually multiple someones: real, live, breathing human beings, who were paid money to think about why this thing should look/act/be the way it looks/acts/is. The most disposable of detritus is the artifact of an intelligent species. I actually find that immensely inspiring.
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Date: 2012-02-20 10:26 pm (UTC)2. the accounting thing is really eye-opening to me! Huh.
3. I had a similar realization wrt your last point after spending a few months seriously reading stuff about apparel manufacturing. After reading that I suddenly realized just how vast the world of manufacturing/consuming is and OMG SOMEONE DESIGNED THAT HIDEOUS SWEATER BECAUSE THERE WAS A MARKET FOR IT. It sounds alarmingly navel-gazing but that really did change how I looked at Things XD
3.5 ... do you suppose Delany went to business school? I'm getting flashbacks to that prestigious job1. XD
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Date: 2012-02-21 04:18 am (UTC)If I didn't know better, I'd say an archeologist wrote that.
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Date: 2012-02-21 08:01 am (UTC)yeahhh, in my quest to gain familial acceptance re: ART SCHOOL, i had to explain that last fact to many many people many many times, though the gist of it was less, "look how actually amazing it is that human beings design so much shit!" and more, "look how many design jobs this equals!"
one of the most eye-opening and alarming things about taking courses in product design to me was finding out just HOW LITTLE product designers know about engineering and how often things get made... without... actually... passing them by... a real... engineer.... xD;;;
i.e. with some products, you've got what basically amounts to a bunch of stressed out ~artists~ making shit up that looks like it should work and/or make sense but doesn't actually. xD;
like what is 99% of ergonomic design really except for designers applying french curves to everything willy-nilly.
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Date: 2012-02-21 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-24 10:19 am (UTC)"I became acutely aware that every plastic widget, gum wrapper, or supermarket queuing area in our late capitalist-consumerist society has had someone behind it, usually multiple someones: real, live, breathing human beings, who were paid money to think about why this thing should look/act/be the way it looks/acts/is."
Well, yes, many little choices, many many decisions — though I'm sure a good deal of the choices are made while sleep walking, people not all that aware they could be doing something different, unaware of the range of possibilities.
I barely know what happens in economics, but I thought that taking psychology, cognitive biases, actual human behavior into account was the growing trend. Economists still try to use simplified models, but at least some economists play around with the behavioral assumptions their models make, to see which assumptions match actual events.
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Date: 2012-02-24 05:18 pm (UTC)