Top Five Things You Won’t Learn in Business School

March 21st, 2008 by hragitator | Posted in Off Topic |

With a bevy of excellent business schools, both grad and undergrad, available and the potentially high stakes of getting accepted to a top tier school, you’d think that you’d learn everything you need to know there. This is not the case, though. Below are my top five things you’ll never learn in business school.

1. Your professors were usually wrong. After spending all those late night hours pouring over text books and enduring endless study groups, students come to think the teacher’s word is gospel. They will grade your test, so they do control your future. Don’t confuse this control for actual knowledge. B-school professors aren’t like chemists or physicists. They’re more like English Lit professors. You just have to make your opinion match theirs. Unfortunately, just like many English professors have never written a novel, many B-school professors have never worked in the business world. Don’t be surprised when you start working and find out most everything they taught you was worthless.
2. Employees care about their personal lives more than work. In B-school, all theories are based solely around how employees behave at work. Not bad, but it completely ignores that they spend the majority of their time away from work. Here are just some of the things that happen to employees that affect their work productivity: they get married, they get divorced, they get sick, a family member dies, they have children, they get into car accidents, they buy new houses and cars, they run up credit card debit, they fail to make child support payments, they get arrested for DUIs, they have affairs. If you want to be a good co-worker and boss, you’ll learn to recognize these things when they happen and show compassion and understanding. Don’t be a jerk because an employee isn’t working 110% all the time. Stuff happens outside of work - it’s called life. When you graduate from B-school, you’re trained like a marine to be a working machine, but that only lasts while your young and unmarried. Cool your jets a bit and people will like you better.
3. Companies are not run as a meritocracy. When studying in B-school, you get the impression that all companies will have a complex career path built for every position, and hard work and dedication can send a person as far as they want. You also learn that companies want to and will actually promote people based on their skills and abilities in order to create a competitive advantage. In reality, companies promote people for odd reasons and hold people back for even odder reasons. Here are some of the reasons I’ve seen people get hired or promoted: because of the color of their skin, because of their gender, because of what fraternity they belonged to, because the best person was too busy on an important project, because the company needed someone quickly and they were the best available, because the project was going to get axed and the company wanted to get rid of that employee, because that person’s family goes on vacation with the CEO, because that person sleeps with the CEO, because that person went to the same school as the CEO, because the best candidate is too good and would make the boss look bad in comparison. Life’s not fair, get used to it.
4. YOU will get laid off. In B-school, there is frequent talk of downsizing, rightsizing, and the like, but it’s always in the context of when the correct time to do these things are. As if you will be the one making that decision. The reality is that there just aren’t that many executive positions in a company, and you will probably never get to decide who does and doesn’t get fired. However, you probably will be laid off one day. Over the course of your 40 year career, there is a high chance that one of the companies you work for will go through a down time and you’ll get canned. B-schools don’t tell you how to deal with that, though.
5. Your company will screw you over at some point. In B-school, they give the impression that a company’s main goal is to keep it’s employee’s happy and productive. The truth is that they only want to keep you happy enough not to quit. Remember, this is business and the goal is to make money. Making you happy probably costs money. Here are some of the ways you might get screwed over: denied a promotion promised to you, denied a pay raise promised to you, denied a bonus promised to you, denied an office promised to you, moved from location to location so you can’t settle down, asked to do work far below your experience level, asked to do way more work than is humanly possible, get a lower performance rating than your incompetent peer, someone else given credit for work you did, asked to work overtime/holidays/weekends, asked to cancel vacation, miss child’s game/recital/birthday for work, make long, exhausting business trip for 1 hour waste of time meeting. I could go on, but I think you see my point. You will slowly become disillusioned with the beautiful, perfectly logical world your professors built for you.

There are, of course, more things that business school doesn’t teach you, but I think this is a good start. For those new graduates reading this, B-school is still a very good idea, just don’t believe everything they tell you.