Want to save aviation? (And what's left of american manufacturing....)
Shut down the top ten MBA schools in the U.S.
Huck, I don't know exactly what the situation is in the US, but I'd put forward the view that the solution is not to shut down the MBA schools. Rather expand them and send more people from the operational disciplines there for additional training.
The problem lies with a mindset that sees technical / operational and business disciplines as completely separate entities. As a junior engineer I became acutely aware how the business climate affected the major manufacturer that employed me. We saw profits being affected by political events and financing decisions, irrespective of how hard or smart we worked. Determined to understand more about the business, I went and did an MBA. When I tried to return to the industry I received a very cold shoulder - the HR departments made it absolutely and explicitly clear that they did not like people who cross-qualified between technical and business fields. Two comments made by interviewers come to mind:
-"Engineers should stick to engineering, and leave business to people who know what they are doing"; and
-"By having a technical and a business qualification you've made yourself unemployable in this industry"
In MBA-speak this is the classic "silo mentality".
My personal view is that if I was in charge of training new engineers or commercial pilots, I'd make sure they all had a solid grounding in the business of aviation.