MBAs v. Lawyers Quote Of The Day

Amazon.com Inc. is hiring 1,000 MBAs a year: 

Tech companies, once averse to hiring PowerPoint-loving B-school grads, have embraced them in the past few years. Ms. Park said business students understand Amazon’s customer-obsessed ethos and tend to be “risk oriented,” scrappy and analytical. 

One might question whether an MBA is likely to be "scrappier" than someone who didn't spend $100,000 on an MBA, or more "analytical" than a computer scientist, but certainly "risk oriented" is a standard descriptor. Going to business school is a fairly safe, conventional, keep-your-options-open career move, and so the stereotype is that MBAs tend to be fairly risk-averse. Not risk-averse like law students -- no one's as risk-averse as law students -- but, compared to a college dropout starting a company in her garage, you'd expect an MBA to be a bit more cautious, a bit less likely to "move fast and break things." And that is a big part of why tech companies were once averse to hiring them: If your goal is to disrupt the status quo, why hire someone who has spent her life trying to fit into it? 

But as "tech" has eaten the world, that mindset has changed, or at least diversified. Amazon is a disruptive force in many ways, but it is also a $464 billion market-cap company that is the dominant retailer of many products. There are plenty of startups in garages that still want to move fast and break things and disrupt the status quo, but Amazon is the status quo, and it doesn't necessarily want to break any of the things that have made it so gigantic and successful. So it brings in the MBAs.

From here.