Have you ever taken an MBA course? It's so weird for you to refer to "MBA-style corporations" considering that "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton M. Christensen has literally been a core text in most MBA programs for decades. If anything, Intel has become an anti MBA-style corporation.
"MBA-style corporations" does not mean that they have read the innovators dilemma.
An MBA-style corporation is one that is lost in a vast trove of metrics. They focus too much on the birds-eye view dashboard style of work - ultimately forgetting that it is less important to meet metrics and more important to keep innovating.
The metric-driven production is well suited for warehouses and factories where every unit is the same as the other. Because every unit is the same your business can focus on eeking optimizations visible via metrics.
But technology is not like that at all. Every unit of production is so different from one another. You cannot have a top heavy company that is just focusing on metrics. You need the top to be intelligently engaged with market, customers, systems, and employees.
Put in another words, if your company's primary focus is margin management, shareholder return, and squeezing production (MBA-school style), your company will have a very very hard time innovating.
Case in point - Intel - which has haemorrhaged itself with years of focus on buybacks and dividends and unit production - but not studying the market, studying modern tech, and innovation.
I think the issue with MBA-led companies is that you have people with an MBA that have very little direct experience. The MBA itself is useful, but detached from the experience of the industry and organization leads to misguided thinking.
That is correct. MBA degree can be useful. But just hiring an MBA who doesn't have an appreciation and skill in the ___domain is just going to do what they can - counting metrics.
https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/10706-PDF-ENG