Sack Your MBAs, Embrace the Rat Race – How to Survive a Double Dip: Books (eddt.) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-09/sack-your-mbas-embrace-the-rat-race-how-to-survive-a-double-dip-books.html U.S. labor isn’t working, to borrow Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, and many investors are bracing for a double-dip recession. With about one out of every six American workers unemployed or underemployed, what to do? Learn to love the rat race, advises hedge-fund veteran Todd Buchholz. Sack the MBA-educated bean counters, says auto executive Bob Lutz. Manage the Mafia way, counsels Louis Ferrante, a tough guy turned motivational speaker. Survival, Mojitos His conclusion: Competition and happiness are so interconnected that we can’t have one without the other, no matter how much we long to go on vacation or even, heaven forbid, retire. “Happiness is not a peaceful, frictionless bliss,” he says. “That would be mixing up happiness with dozing off to sleep.” Like it or not, thousands of years of evolution have burned competitiveness into our DNA, driving humans to develop lifesaving vaccines as well as bank-killing financial instruments. Though we yearn to return to the Garden of Eden, our minds and bodies are designed to maximize survival, not to ensure happiness. We’re programmed to overcome poverty and fight off predators, not guzzle mojitos while channel surfing. Happy Momentum Our frontal lobes, for example, are time machines that allow us to imagine and plan for the future. Programmed to think about tomorrow, we tend to feel happy when our lives have forward momentum, Buchholz says. Especially if the momentum leaves the Joneses eating our dust. GM’s Flaw That comment would make a fitting epigraph for Lutz’s book, “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters.” Yes, union demands contributed to GM’s ignominious skid into bankruptcy protection. Government meddling didn’t help, either. Then there’s the murderous cost advantage Japanese and European carmakers hold: Their health-care expenditures are nonexistent or minimal thanks to universal medical coverage funded by taxes on society as a whole, as Lutz reminds us. Yet GM’s fatal flaw was more insidious, Lutz suggests. The outfit that spawned both sleek Camaros and tinny Vegas became mired, he says, in “the deliberate intellectualizing of a very simple task: creating and selling a meaningfully superior product or service to the public.” GM’s product-development system, it turns out, was giving powerful senior executives, not designers, the final say on how a car would look, he says. The execs were understandably preoccupied with quantifiable objectives, such as assembly time, warranty costs, percentage of reused parts and speed of execution. This MBA-driven process, however well intentioned, produced “perfect mediocrity.” ‘Mob Rules’ If number crunchers are choking your enterprise, take tips from what Ferrante calls “the longest-running corporation in history,” the Mafia. A self-professed former associate of the Gambino family, he presents 88 management lessons in “Mob Rules: What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman.” His topics range from confidence building (“why a mobster makes his son pull the trigger”) to networking (“it’s good to go to a funeral as long as it’s not yours”). What we get is common sense dressed up as parables about executions and how to avoid ending up in a car trunk. “Rush” is published by Hudson Street (304 pages, $29.95). “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters” (241 pages, $26.95) and “Mob Rules” (248 pages, $25.95) are both from Portfolio/Penguin. To buy these books in North America, click here for “Rush,” here for “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters” and here for “Mob Rules.”
I read this too. On Monday night, after making a killing shorting BAC I called up my Dad and had a good long talk about my career plans. Right now I’m planning on applying for grad-school, just sort of to take a vacation from my current job. In any case, the opportunity costs of not working are looking less and less high. I’m thinking I should just move somewhere cheap & sunny, skip the MBA, and just f’en relax for a decade or two. What’s the point of being aspirational in the career ladder when we are up against this? My alternative is start my own business, which I can do anytime, MBA or no MBA.
> I’m thinking I > should just move somewhere cheap & sunny, skip the > MBA, and just f’en relax for a decade or two. > What’s the point of being aspirational in the > career ladder when we are up against this? Become a dive master/jet ski renter in Florida.
Muff Diving Master
lol.
ChickenTikka Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > In any case, the opportunity costs of not working > are looking less and less high. This is incorrect. More than 50% of the total value of your work is the experience you get just doing your job. (The remainder is more tangible, i.e. your comp+benefits.) A couple of years down the line, when the market’s turned around and people start making big bucks again, the people with years of experience will be the ones commanding the $$. Work experience >> CFA / MBA.
justin88 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > ChickenTikka Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > In any case, the opportunity costs of not > working > > are looking less and less high. > > This is incorrect. More than 50% of the total > value of your work is the experience you get just > doing your job. (The remainder is more tangible, > i.e. your comp+benefits.) > > A couple of years down the line, when the market’s > turned around and people start making big bucks > again, the people with years of experience will be > the ones commanding the $$. > > Work experience >> CFA / MBA. Lol. This same shit was said in 2008. Most of this board is probably unemployed or not working in finance. People don’t realize that we don’t live in the same world we did in 2006. Finance isn’t what it used to be. A lot of people went to business school because they heard about the 6-7 figure salaries that the industry makes. By the time you hear that, it’s already too late, the industry has already peaked. Same that happened with IT in 2000. Finance will never be the same as it was. Very few people will get the jobs they used to, and even fewer will be ‘commanding the $$’. You’re betting on a unicorn in a donkey race. Chikka, if you can support yourself and live in a tropical paradise, go for it man. There is absolutely no reason to join a failing rat race if you dont have to. You’ll be banging local chicks and drinking pina coladas in some third world paradise while most of us here will making a million cold calls trying to sell shares in a junior company we know is garbage just to get that year end bonus.
libor.plus1 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > justin88 Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > ChickenTikka Wrote: > > > -------------------------------------------------- > > > ----- > > > In any case, the opportunity costs of not > > working > > > are looking less and less high. > > > > This is incorrect. More than 50% of the total > > value of your work is the experience you get > just > > doing your job. (The remainder is more > tangible, > > i.e. your comp+benefits.) > > > > A couple of years down the line, when the > market’s > > turned around and people start making big bucks > > again, the people with years of experience will > be > > the ones commanding the $$. > > > > Work experience >> CFA / MBA. > > > Lol. > > This same shit was said in 2008. Most of this > board is probably unemployed or not working in > finance. People don’t realize that we don’t live > in the same world we did in 2006. Finance isn’t > what it used to be. A lot of people went to > business school because they heard about the 6-7 > figure salaries that the industry makes. By the > time you hear that, it’s already too late, the > industry has already peaked. Same that happened > with IT in 2000. > > Finance will never be the same as it was. Very few > people will get the jobs they used to, and even > fewer will be ‘commanding the $$’. You’re betting > on a unicorn in a donkey race. > > Chikka, if you can support yourself and live in a > tropical paradise, go for it man. There is > absolutely no reason to join a failing rat race if > you dont have to. You’ll be banging local chicks > and drinking pina coladas in some third world > paradise while most of us here will making a > million cold calls trying to sell shares in a > junior company we know is garbage just to get that > year end bonus. IT is exploding right now 
justin88 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > ChickenTikka Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > In any case, the opportunity costs of not > working > > are looking less and less high. > > This is incorrect. More than 50% of the total > value of your work is the experience you get just > doing your job. (The remainder is more tangible, > i.e. your comp+benefits.) > > A couple of years down the line, when the market’s > turned around and people start making big bucks > again, the people with years of experience will be > the ones commanding the $$. > > Work experience >> CFA / MBA. justin is definitely right, although I would polarize it a bit and say that the value of the experience as a portion of the total value of the job could be anywhere between 20% and 80%, depending on the job and time horizon. If you’re working in SS ER, for example, where you (probably) aren’t learning much of value, then it’s closer to 20%. If you are working with elite investors and getting an inside view of how this business really works, it could be at least 80%, possibly even higher if you measure it as your lifetime NPV over the span of your entire career. The key word is long-term – it takes a long time to get good at this business. I’ve heard it takes at least 5 years of really solid work experience to get good, although I’ve been at a top tier hedge fund for almost 3 years and I’m guessing it will take me a lot longer than that (not including time wasted studying for the CFA and working in SS ER). If you put in the time though, it’s definitely realistic to achieve at least an 8 figure net worth and possibly a lot higher – I personally know roughly a dozen guys in the 9 figure range who got there over maybe a 20 year period, and one that did it in under a decade right out of college. Not quite as sexy as founding the next lame internet company such as Twitter or GroupOn and making a billion, but it’s hard to complain about being more than set for life by your mid-30s or early 40s if you do it right. You have to genuinely enjoy the work though, otherwise it’s a waste. Life is too short not to enjoy whatever you are doing.
Hey bromion good to see you on this forum again. I’d sent you an e-mail a while back regarding internship stuff and ended up at a hedge fund, which has been a pretty good experience so far. Love to keep in touch re: full-time recruiting. Is there a better address I can reach you at so I can update you on what I’ve been working on and also seek any advice you can offer re: full-time positioning? Many thanks
Hi numi, congratulations on the internship, that sounds great. bromion15@gmail.com is the only address I give out in public, but all my accounts are synced through gmail (we switched our domain at work to gmail – Google really is unstoppable) so I should be more timely about responding to emails. I guess I don’t have a ton of advice for full-time recruiting right now off the top of my head, except to say be proactive, which I’m sure you already know. The banks are expected to lay off ~100,000 people this year, and while they’re not all front office people (probably not even close), that certainly isn’t making it less competitive. You’re probably already in the best recruiting channel in the world, so do your best at your internship in case that turns into a full-time offer and keep your options open – basically, keep doing what you’re doing (seems to be working!). But certainly feel free to drop me a line anytime.