What was that line from the Monster.com ad from a few years ago? "I want to claw my way up to middle management" :-/ I thought I was too much of a jerk to ever be replaced, said Joe Morphy, an unemployed manager. I figured they could never find anybody who combined my total indifference to employees well-being with my astonishingly high level of dishonesty. But they found some guy in Asia willing to be a bigger asshole than me for one-tenth of my salary. The crappy manager has been a fixture of the American corporate landscape for many years. Executive MBA programs and a smarmy business culture produced a class of managers capable of doing great damage even when under tight time constraints. Analysts have long believed that no other nation had the expertise and drive to achieve implosions on the scale of Enron or WorldCom. But, many developing nations think they can achieve US levels of awfulness if they focus their resources properly. Professor Rajiv Mehta of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore boasts his school is as out of touch and unrealistic as the best MBA programs in America. Many of the faculty cut their teeth on driving US high tech companies into the ground. Management incompetence is a skill like any other, says Mehta. It can be taught and fostered to the point where a high level of expertise is attained. BB Spot: Lousy Managers Are Next Outsourcing Trend |