“When You Get That Wealthy, You Start to Buy Your Own #Bullshit”: The Miseducation of Sheryl Sandberg | Vanity Fair
▻https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/sheryl-sandberg-harvard-business-school-leadership
... it starts all the way back in 1977, when Sandberg was just eight years old and the U.S. economy was still recovering from the longest and deepest recession since the end of World War II. That’s the year that #Harvard #Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik wrote an article entitled, “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” in America’s most influential business journal, Harvard Business Review. For years, Zaleznik argued, the country had been over-managed and under-led. The article helped spawn the annual multi-billion-dollar exercise in nonsense known as the #Leadership Industry, with Harvard as ground zero. The article gave Harvard Business School a new raison d’être in light of the fact that the product it had been selling for decades—managers—was suddenly no longer in vogue. Henceforth, it would be molding leaders.
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The truth is, Harvard Business School, like much of the #M.B.A. universe in which Sandberg was reared, has always cared less about moral leadership than career advancement and financial performance.
The roots of the problem can be found in the Harvard Business School’s vaunted “Case Method,” a discussion-based pedagogy that asks students to put themselves in the role of corporate #Übermensch. At the start of each class, one unlucky soul is put in the hot seat, presented with a “what would you do” scenario, and then subjected to the ruthless interrogation of their peers. Graded on a curve, the intramural #competition can be intense—M.B.A.s are super-competitive, after all.
Let’s be clear about this: in business, as in life, there isn’t always one correct answer. So the teaching of a decision-making philosophy that is deliberate and systematic, but still open-minded, is hardly controversial on its face. But to help students overcome the fear of sounding stupid and being remorselessly critiqued, they are reminded, in case after case—and with emphasis—that there are no right answers. And that has had the unfortunate effect of opening up a chasm of moral equivalence in too many of their graduates.
