The Blogerati are having fun with Mitt Romney ‘s misuse of the phrase “null set” (and, oh yes, his egregious indifference to the truth about the war) (e.g., link). They seem to be treating it as a failure of math knowledge, and I concede it does offer an interesting insight as to what it takes to be valedictorian at Brigham Young.
But I offer a different perspective. It seems to me the root of this problem lies not in the math department but in the business school. The first-tier B-schools are littered with scholars who sprinkle fancy jargon over an audience that couldn’t care less. Some of the scholarship is quite extraordinarily good—pay B school wages and you can hire some first-rate talent. But it has nothing to do with the agenda of the students, who are just Hell bent on finding the shortest route to the Maserati dealership. Couple this with a second problem: you go to B school, you study marketing. And the purpose of marketing education is to develop your touch for the level of acceptable falsehood. You learn, not that truth is relative, but that truths are, and that over a great range of possible assertions, truth just isn’t very important. Blah blah zero sum game blah blah blah Nash equilibrium, blah blah null set, doesn’t matter whether you know what they means or not, the function is only decorative.
That may explain a lot about my own feelings of creepiness around Romney—who, I have to admit, would probably make a lot less cataclysmic president then most of the others in the Republican Pony Show. It would also explain why he is so easily blindsided on the matter of his capacity to do a political triple lutz on just about any issue whenever he finds it convenient. It’s not that he is too dumb to know when he is uttering falsehoods. It’s just that he is too tone-deaf to care.
1 comment:
Err, ah...pardon this small cranky voice for begging to differ.
I have been around MBAs, and most especially Ivy League and Stanford MBA's for roughly 40 years now. (I am not one of them myself.)
Point: Top tier ad agencies used to be jampacked with young ivy MBAs on the account management side.
That stopped about 25 years ago, when the agency commissions system fell apart (and with it, staff salaries), conglomerates started swallowing up agencies, and newly minted MBAs discovered they could make, oh ten times the income to start and perhaps a thousand times the income or better after a few yearson Wall Street. The rush to Morgan Stanley and KKR began. The gush into ad agencies is these days barely a trickle.
These days, the only MBAs you're likely to find at an ad agency are either sitting in a elephants' graveyard suite for senior executives emeritus, or are the Chief Financial Officer of the conglomerate that owns the agency - visiting to audit the books. squeeze the staff for more profits or demand more job cuts. The filthy bean-counting bastards!
Things may be a wee bit different on the client marketing side, but my guess is, the best and the brightest in B School today consider marketing courses a place to take catnaps. Where they stay on their toes is in classes involving financial derivatives, options trading, and corporate valuations.
Besides, marketing these days is really not about advertising, which is in a state of chaos and distress anyway, compared to the way things used to be.
Marketing today is about something called CRM -- customer relationship management -- which I suspect has mainly to do with why you get lost in pushbotton hell when you try to call a company about almost anything at all.
Grrr!
Crankily yours,
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