Thursday, April 19, 2007

Rant: Cart Before the Horse & New Verbs

An email from the Big Picture School today congratulates the class on "transitioning from students to up-and-coming executives". A couple of thoughts come to mind. First, had the program spent more time teaching me how to do be an analyst and less time on how to be an "executive", I'd be more confident about starting work next month. Second, when did "transition" become a verb?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Transition is an intransitive verb as well as a noun.

Skeelo said...

That's actually one of my biggest beefs with MBA programs (and I say that as a guy who will likely do one within the next few years). I work for a consulting company and I come across CV's daily and meet with people who have their MBA's but don't have a clue how to do actual business analysis or develop operational strategies. It's maddening. And with half of them the ultiamtely say "but I have my MBA" (again, I am knocking the people, not the MBA)

David said...

I agree, but I think some MBA programs are partly to blame. While M&A strategy cases are lots of fun to talk about in class, a little more practice at building profit plans and performing customer segmentation would be useful.

To some extent, I think that professors find teaching the fundamentals boring. Our strategy cases were essentially all M&A, but the chances of any of us making a go/no-go decision on an M&A in the next few years are close to nil.