I loved this old post about Jeffrey Peffer’s work from his book the Knowing-Doing Gap. Here’s a snippet:
The truth is that business school is all about talking, not doing. And what’s one of the top jobs that B-school students take when they graduate? Management consulting! I’ve always found the job market to be perplexing for this reason: You can be a plant manager — actually have what it takes to run a plant — and make $80,000 to $100,000 a year. Or you can talk about plant management and make twice that. Why do people get paid more for talking about things than they do for actually doing them? The message from the job market is that it’s more important and more valuable to be clever than it is to have the ability to make something happen.
