Disrupting MBAs
By If there’s one group that it’s not too easy to feel bad for, it’s the business community, but the corporate all-in to maximize profit at the top is now affecting MBAs as the Uberization of the lower and mid-range business workers is now taking place.
In a brick-and-beam former warehouse in Boston’s Fort Point Channel neighborhood, Rob Biederman and Patrick Petitti are building an online network that could change how white-collar work gets done.
In the same way Uber built a network of drivers, and Craigslist can help you find someone willing to paint your back porch tomorrow, the company that Biederman and Petitti cofounded, HourlyNerd, has attracted 22,000 independent consultants with MBA degrees from 45 top universities, all willing to do projects for clients that range from the corner clothing boutique to conglomerates like General Electric.
Business owners can understand the allure of paying someone a few thousand bucks to analyze three different locations for a new shop. But anyone who sits in front of a computer every day, analyzing data and assembling PowerPoint presentations, is probably justified in fretting about what this could mean for their job.
And these online expert networks could evolve into potent competition for some of the best-known management consulting firms, like McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group. The traditional consultants are a bit like the livery companies that were the only game in town before Uber arrived: high-touch and expensive, but don’t try to call them 10 minutes before you need them to show up.
The outsourced, temped, franchised, subcontracted, independent contractor economy is frequently justified and celebrated when it hurts working class people. Getting rid of or disempowering taxi drivers and hotel cleaners and Toyota employees and McDonald’s workers is all good when profit is at stake. But there is no reason that this can’t go far up the corporate ladder. Much of pharmacy work, legal work, and financial workers can be sent overseas. Other work can be temped or contracted in other ways. This is just one example. The emphasis on “disruption” and corporate profit over steady jobs is not only a real threat to the middle class, not to mention the working class, but it is actually destroying it as we speak.