For the past three weeks I was on hiatus, as many b-school students were for the holidays. Out of my desires to find a summer internship and to learn about innovation in the discipline's flagship metro area, I flew to the Bay Area to meet with companies, Kelley School alums, friends, and strangers.
Several of the company visits were arranged by my colleagues in the Kelley Marketing Club as a Bay Area trek. One of the stops on the trek was Google, a world-renowned hotbed of entrepreneurial thinking. My first sight upon entering the visitor's lobby in Building 43 was a bit unexpected: roughly one million b-school students in suits. The dichotomy of suits shaking hands with Googlers in jeans was striking. I mean, really, you thought it was a good idea to dress seventeen levels above the people you're meeting? However, it turns out my shock at seeing a bunch of suits at Google was somewhat controversial, as I found out from a fellow Kelley student who was feeling self-conscious in her business-casual attire.
"What do you wear to an interview in Silicon Valley?" she asked me.
"I would say business casual at the most, since most people here go to work in jeans," I replied.
She gave me a look. "But don't we have to wear suits to interviews? I mean, we're MBAs."
No, that doesn't fly here. During my three-month stint in San Francisco and my numerous visits to the Valley, I have found that the perceptions of the term "MBA" range from "respected business leader" to "former coder who couldn't make it" to "out of touch ivory tower dweller." I recently had a conversation with the founder of a tech startup at a coffee shop in San Francisco. After I told him that I was an MBA student, his first question to me was, "Do they make you do anything at your school?"
And this attitude isn't just limited to startups. A former coworker of mine often lamented that product managers just shot down all the ideas of engineers, killing their entrepreneurial spirit. True, business school is great at teaching students about the multitudes of things that don't work. Admittedly, when I mull over Harvard Business Review cases, more often than not I am tempted to answer with "liquidate the business, this will just fail and waste money." No wonder MBAs are not universally regarded highly, to put it mildly, in a Valley culture that rewards those who try, fail, and confidently pick themselves up to try again. But it's hard to blame business leaders for adopting such a risk-aversion. Engineers are told to fail fast, to learn from their mistakes, and that at some point along the line they will develop something that customers will be happy with; a great engineer understands the value of iteration and feedback. By contrast, when a middle- or upper-level manager oversees a failed project, she is quite often the subject of a "with mixed emotions" email to the group.
What does this mean for promoting an innovative culture? What can an MBA do to foster such a culture in such an environment as the Silicon Valley tech scene? Well, it starts with accepting the "risk-aversion" learned in business school as "prudence." It is prudent to not bet the farm on an idea or a product created in a vacuum, of course. But as we can learn from Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, it is also prudent to put resources behind seemingly non-sensical product lines that have the potential to cannibalize sales from other product lines. The keys in that situation are to develop the new products in autonomous (in a practical sense) organizations, and have them find or develop new markets for their new products, not attempt to satisfy the needs of the company's current customers. Dismissing the development of such disruptive products is not only bad for creating an entrepreneurial culture, it can also be dangerous to the business itself by opening the door to disruption from startups, a malady seen time and time again in Christensen's study of the computer disk drive industry.
Put succinctly, an MBA can gain credibility by promoting innovation within an engineering-focused organization while at the same time remaining prudent, as she is taught to be in business school. The key to Silicon Valley opening its arms to MBAs lies in that very concept.
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