[Buckeye McFrog]

this is absolutely classical Business School Thinking (the stuff they teach you when you take an MBA). It is all based on the short-term, quick hit, maximize our near-term value.
Companies were not run like this for the first 200 yrs of our Republic until MBA programs started popping up like mushrooms.

[null and void]

...toadstools.

[Redleg Duke]

Back in the late 70s, right after I earned my MBA and got back into engineering, I tried unsuccessfully to convince my company, a battery manufacturer, that we needed to vertically integrate by making our own battery cans and sleeves, but the bean-counters had the company president convinced it was cheaper in the short-term to keep a half a dozen other companies in business instead.

I don't know if that company is still manufacturing batteries in the US. I rather doubt it.

[petro45acp]

meadow muffins

[truthguy]

Companies were not run like this for the first 200 yrs of our Republic until MBA programs started popping up like mushrooms.

Yes, and Bob Lutz of GM talks at length about this in his latest book. MBAs are typically very short term thinkers. What they are mostly concerned about is advancing their careers and building up their own personal wealth. And they have been damn good at it. But they have destroyed company after company. If the business professors at Harvard or Stanford (and all the other top MBA factories) really knew how to more effectively run companies they would be running these companies and making a lot more money.

I known quite a few MBAs over the years and I haven't met a single one who had any passion for product development, engineering excellence, innovation, or quality manufacturing. There are undeniably some but I haven't run across them.

The ascendancy of the MBA in American Business tracks perfectly with the economic decline of our manufacturing. There are a lot of other reasons and they are mostly concerned with governmental policies and perhaps they are probably greater factors than the MBA but in my opinion MBAs have been a huge negative in American Business.

[Travis McGee]

In the Korean War, the Chinese Army did a pretty good job of banging our troops up while using whistles, bugles and flares for commo.

It’s painful to contemplate going against them now that they have nearly reached technical parity at least at the troop level.

[Little Ray]

It doesn't help that the regulatory landscape is so chaotic that management can't make any long term plans.

[DannyTN]

"Companies were not run like this for the first 200 yrs of our Republic until MBA programs started popping up like mushrooms."

When our country started out, protective tariff income was 100% of Federal Revenues. \

One can see the story here in the average tariff the last column, and in the % of Federal Revenues, third column.