We're Not A Gang - We're A Club!

To often, the general public places MBA graduates into the same category as sociopaths like motorcycle gangs, inner-city gangs, and Mexican drug gangs, but with a far greater ability to cause widespread destruction and mayhem. In short, we are the jackals feasting on the maggot-ridden portfolios of humble home-town investors; we are the puppetmasters and everyone else is a sucker on the midway, spending $5.00 to knock down the milk bottles for a $0.50 stuffed animal.

This is a vicious and fallacious misconception, because we are being taught that, in some cases, Art deserves more respect than Shareholder Value, and that winning the admiration of a clique of in-bred aesthetes is more important than making piles of ugly, ugly money.

The case in point concerns one Isaac Mizrahi, a fashion designer who, after failing on the Paris Haute Couture market, was relegated to delivering off-the-rack apparel to Target, a seedy American retailer catering to the unwashed masses across our uncouth country. Our professors have the courage to hold Mr. Mizrahi in disregard for his inability to create stunning, one-of-a-kind unwearable fashions as seen above; to teach that his mass-market appeal is inversely proportional to his artistic value and that his value as an artist is far more important than his skill at crafting a business out of his vision.

As the new generation of MBA students, we hold Mizrahi in contempt for the fact that he generated $1.0 billion in name-branded sales for Target; we snicker at his effeminate yet successful attempts to appear on television (in his own series), in movies, and on radio; we look down at his pathetic transformation as a Broadway costume designer (for which he won a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Costume Design), and we chastise him for being selected as the creative director for Liz Claiborne Brand, a $5 billion apparel and accessories empire.

There is more to success than creating immense shareholder value and there is more to life than turning your name into a multi-billion dollar worldwide brand. We are not jackals - we like pretty things too. Welcome to the future of business schooling...

Welcome to the Zen MBA!