Gawker: valleywag, harvard business school

Valleygrrl

Alaska Miller — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:40:00 EDT

While you can't legally say Harvard MBAs are the reason to blame for our economy tanking or your company imploding, you can slyly hint at it. Especially if you've got Ray Soifer's papers on the long-studied effect of Harvard Business School graduates to point to. Today's featured commenter, Valleygrrl, most likely didn't go to HBS, but she's going to tell you the real live experience of working in the field:

are you kidding? When the management is made up mostly of HBS grads, it's time to run for the hills. Why?

1. 3 words: death by powerpoint

2. They don't want to do any real work, they think of themselves as CEO and simple tasks are beneath them.

3. They are political animals, creating a culture of anger and hostility. They would stab their own mother to get ahead.

Like lions on the savannah, too much population density leads to in fighting and eventually, murder.

Harvard MBAs the most toxic investment on Wall Street

Owen Thomas — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:00:00 EDT

Ray Soifer, a top-rated banking analyst based in Arizona, has an explanation for the crisis gripping the stock market: Blame Harvard! Soifer has long studied the proportion of Harvard MBAs who pursue careers in finance; when more than 3 in 10 head for Wall Street, it's time for investors to sell, he says. The implication: Harvard MBAs, in aggregate, subtract value. Alas, his study comes out once a year, so it's no use to short-term investors. But we'd love to know what Soifer would find if he studied the correlation of Harvard MBAs heading to the Valley with venture-capital returns. The results would be edifying — especially for investors in Facebook, whose Harvard dropout CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is currently guided by COO Sheryl Sandberg, Harvard Business School '95. (Photo by Harvard Business School)

What's a Harvard b-school degree good for?

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:20:00 EDT

The Valley's full of Harvard MBAs, but how much did Harvard Business School graduates learn at Cambridge? "Zero!" Accel's Jim Breyer tells BoomTown's Kara Swisher in this clip, full of similar answers from other Harvard wished-they-were-dropouts. "But," Breyers says, "I made some great friends." One of them, or one like one of them: Greylock's James Slavet, who answers the same question from Swisher with a Cambridge-learned eloquence: "Uh …"