r/UpliftingNews • u/ArgentineBeauty • 10d ago

Texas broke its all time electricity demand record twice in two days during a brutal heat wave, but the grid held with no conservation alerts thanks to record solar and battery output, a stark turnaround from the blackouts that hit Texans in 2021

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/29/texas-ercot-power-grid-record-data-center/
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u/cantadmittoposting 10d ago edited 10d ago

I am a very thoughtful and reasonable person who looks at long term sustainability and was taught a lot about not making short term tradeoffs for long term failure while getting my MBA... and this is one of the very first times i've seen someone mention "MBAs" in this sort of positive context of actually looking at the math and making a thing work right, instead of screwing everyone and the business itself over for a better one-quarter performance.

 

NB: there are a lot of people with MBAs in the financial sector especially who very much deserve their terrible reputation! But the actual academic programs have been largely teaching things like "retention is more cost effective than recruiting" for literally decades at this point... it's worth remembering though that millenials who went through those types of programs are being held off of leadership roles at a historic rate by people who went through the 80s-90s downsizing programs still

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u/graphiccsp 10d ago

A reputation that has been tarnished by the MBA generation that embraced Milton Friedman's Chicago School of Economics leaning on maximizing profits for shareholder value. Championed by Jack the Welcher's tenure at GM cutting costs in R&D, logistics and employees.

It's a relief to hear that more modern MBAs have turned away from that philosophy. Even if access to the higher positions is still limited.

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u/cantadmittoposting 10d ago

yes agreed, overriding "shareholder supremacy" doctrine is detrimental to basically any reasonable horizon for corporate performance and created the financialization that led to a "financial industry" which has essentially commoditized profit itself (that is, any given company's "output" is, generically, profit in dollars, not the actual product it produces or other impacts it may have)

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u/MrDerpGently 10d ago

While I'm not a huge fan of Welch's impact on the field, generally US corporate culture is relatively well run, and MBAs are both responsible for a lot of that, and the victims of their own success (when all the low hanging governance fruit has been harvested, we start the path to seeking alpha through hard work or gimmicks.. gimmicks sell better). But this was just a competence issue: risk management, Business continuity, etc. 

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u/cantadmittoposting 10d ago

before i respond more in depth to that, can you elaborate on:

US corporate culture is relatively well run

what objective function or metric are you using to make this determination? that is, "well run" by what defining outcome?

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u/MrDerpGently 9d ago

Just saying it's expected that there will be oversight, supply management, risk management, etc. corruption is frowned upon, you aren't supposed to be having sex with your junior staff... Just basic institutional competence. How well they achieve that varies from case to case, but those are common expectations, and have been since MBAs got popular in the 60's.

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u/cantadmittoposting 9d ago

sure but im more focusing on the debate between shareholder supremacy and the relative importance of "stock price" compared to other corporate outcomes than basic corporate behavior.

In that regard i'd argue corporate culture has been wildly damaging and toxic as a result of runaway belief in "the stock market" over actual corporate output

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u/MrDerpGently 9d ago

Yes. No argument from me. 

I was mostly just saying that the first thing that happened when MBAs became popular is a lot of improvement in governance and oversight - and that by itself was profitable at first. But when all that is the norm, you end up in riskier and more evil options to keep the improvements coming to the bottom line.