The folks that took down Wall Street were mostly physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. MBAs have been largely marginalized in many hedge funds and proprietary trading desks (unless you have both an MBA and a quantitative degree, in which case you're golden), in favor of people that can value (or not, I guess) esoteric securities with sophisticated mathematical models.

Kinda an interesting change, to see lots of innocent MBAs lose their jobs because of the fuckups of a bunch of egotistical math geeks. Normally it's the other way around.

After having to deal with the MBAs that nearly took his company from him, no?

No to what? I guess my point is that the best background to have is one that's interdisciplinary. Philip did a lot of stuff at aD that wasn't engineering, but really sort of like sales - evangelism, recruiting, etc.

The fact that I have a B.A., B. Sc., MBA and ABD have nothing to do with my contention. Of course, it's also better not to be old ;-)

The no was just to get confirmation of what I said. I read about it somewhere a while back but wasn't too sure if it was biased. My point was that it wasn't just walking away with the 8M and that he had to fight tooth and nail for it.

I agree that the interdisciplinary background is best to have but it's even more important to go out into the real world and use those skills. Philip was able to learn how to deal with MBAs by dealing with MBAs - might have been even better than getting an MBA.

Maybe the purpose of the MBA is to just get you accepted by the other MBA types which are in the higher level positions.