If these business leaders were not able to spot the flaws in the businesses they were running, one has to look into the matter of what business and management schools had been teaching them.

The schools promoted a quasi-scientific approach to business, sermonizing that everything could be nailed down in a textbook, and encouraged students to believe that running a company could be mastered by anyone. The entire private-equity industry is founded on that principle. And also, all the intellectual tools that led us into the financial meltdown were largely invented within academia. Complex models for pricing risk created the market for the options and derivatives contracts that have caused so much trouble in the past year.

I have consistently spoken to friends about the fact that none of the "best" colleges or graduate programs are taking the blame for the fact that 90% of the business and political leaders who screwed this all up went thru their programs. I really think someone should publish a book of the top 10 schools that educated the people who were most responsible for this mess.

I have worked for 2 solid companies which have been acquired by young businessmen. They come in ,change everything with with their new business ideas(rarely asking advice from the tenured workers, firing many of them) and run the companies right into the ground. They receive their own bonuses right on time. One year, the executive bonus for one of the new owners added up to the equivalent of all of our Christmas bonuses combined, which we did not receive(800 people). When confronted about it, he had nothing to say.

You hear a lot about how "liberal" colleges are indoctrinating the youth of the country by the Right but nothing about the MBA programs that promote all manner of vacuous theories about "market forces" and "capitalism".

rat, excellent insight.
Good clip! Publicity for ideas like these is exactly how universities feel pressure to start developing new thoughts on them.

ooh - capitalism. Just the thing that provides these twerps with the opportunity to go to college in the first place.

Poor state of things if you have to have MONEY to get to University!! That is something that is available for all where I live, I am pleased to say )

@brightlight4

Send some of those graduates over here to knock some sense into ours.