No Pulp Fiction Allowed
With vacation season upon us, it's time to consider what good read to pack before heading out to your favorite beach or resort. I have the perfect antidote for all those mindless pulp fiction novels that fly off the shelves this time of year: two books on what's wrong with business education. Quite a lot, it turns out in this centennial year of the MBA. Keeping the degree fresh and relevant — and worth the large price tag — actually makes for interesting reading.
My favorite is HBS professor Rakesh Khurana's sweeping critique of American business education, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands (Princeton Press, 2007). Khurana charts the origins and development of MBA programs, beginning with Harvard in 1908. The narrative plot thickens as he describes in compelling detail how corporate managers in the 1970s and 1980s went from heroes to goats as academics at leading universities crafted theories blaming managers for the nation's economic malaise. The ideas stuck, and managers became, and remain, "hired hands" reduced to working for stockholders — and their own financial self-interest — at the expense of all other stakeholders. It's a mess Khurana thinks can be fixed by a return to the professional idealism that once infused MBA programs.
That, of course, would take real leadership, something that all top MBA program profess to teach but none do, McGill's Henry Mintzberg argues in Managers Not MBAs (Berrett-Koehler, 2005). "Trying to teach management to someone who has never managed [the typical MBA student] is like trying to teach psychology to someone who has never met another human being," says Mintzberg. In the first half of his book, he sharpens his claws on HBS professor Michael Porter, arguing that Porter teaches analysis, not strategy. And he finds fault with the HBS case method of instruction, contending that it teaches skills largely irrelevant to what managers actually do. Mintzberg devotes the second half of his book to a description of what works in management education, much of which is going on in European business schools with one-year MBAs and management training for midcareer executives.
What's your take on the MBA? Do critics like Khurana and Mintzberg score points, or are they just blowing smoke?
