[轉貼]為何很多CEO不是MBA? An explaination

[modern]

为何佷多CEO不是MBA? An explanation!


Many famous CEOs are not MBAs, for example, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, etc. However, focusing on the successful entrepreneurs is very misleading. Here is a thought experiment:

a: you get $200,000 a year

b: you get on $100,000 a year plus a white noise with a standard deviation of $200,000 noise. (normal distribution)

You will find that most people will choose choice a. and people with less choice would have to choose choice b.

However, if you look at the group of people with annual income above $300,000, there will be none in the first group but 16% in the second group. Consequently, if we only focus on the tail of extremely successful people (annual income>$300,000), then, we would have reached the wrong conclusion that group b people is better than group a.

That is why we should look at the overall pay of group a and b.

What is the message about MBA education? Suppose that MBA graduates are more talented and market knows that, then these MBA students would be able to pick jobs. This means that the jobs they pick tend to be high pay and low risk. The leftover jobs with low pay and high risk will be held by non-MBAs. However, if you look at the very successful group of people 10 years later, you would find that many very succesfful people have no MBA degree and the proportion of non MBAs in the very successful group can even exceed 50%. They are successful not because they are better but because they are worse and have to take chances. It just happened to work for some of the less talented people with no MBA degrees.

That is why we need to report the mean and median of the whole group when assessing the success of a program. Focusing on the tails of very successful group can be very misleading. As architect Pei I-Ming said once, success has a lot to do with luck.

That is why so many discussions about the value of MBA education are misleading as they focus on the tails of the whole distribution. In that case, why these kinds of discussion are repeated in the press? For that I offer two explanations:

1: Most reporters in China has very limited logic and statistical training and tend to focus on sensational staff.

2: Press has a tendency to provide a surpise to readers. That means extreme views tend to get more eyeballs then common sense. Thus views got published in the press has already gone through a biased filter and does not reflect the consensus in the society.

[knobhill18]

good point
thanks for sharing

[asicschu]

原來是這樣喔...
tks for sharing...