MBAs Part of Problem

Columnist James Flanigan’s misgivings about the ability of U.S. managers to be competitive (“Workers Now Competitive, but Managers?” April 3) reminded me of an experience I had at the Harvard Business School some 25 years ago. The school had advertised a two-day seminar for New England businessmen called, as I remember it, “Control Problems of the Executive.”

By the end of the first day, I was wondering what kind of a weird world the Harvard MBA was being raised in. The professors made no bones of the fact that they regarded the factory floor as the least important part of a business. The business office was the place where the company made or lost money. One of them stated that he could save more money with a calculator in a week than a factory manager could in a year with all his new machines and production ideas.

Of course, at that time, the Harvard MBA was everybody’s fair-haired boy and the school’s curriculum was widely imitated. With this kind of nonsense passing for a business education, is it any wonder that American business has gotten completely off the track and become hopelessly uncompetitive?

JAMES B. STAMPS

Seal Beach