Hack:
There's no Mastery in Master of Business Administration - Fixing the Foundations of Management

By Stephen Remedios Stephen Remedios

- Freelance Coach & Executive Trainer at The Stephen Remedios Company

November 1, 2011 at 6:40pm

Management Education

business school

Recruitment & Selection

Summary

There's a crisis in management, and that's because everyone is fighting fires with the same old methods. It is like being on a treadmill that you can't get off. The process of skilling the people involved in management has to change.

Moonshots

Focus the work of management on a higher purpose

Amplify imagination

Capture the advantages of diversity

Problem

Let's face it, there's a serious dearth of innovation in the world today. Most of the problems that have been around for the last 10 years haven't gone away. There are new ones in the newspaper every day and there aren't too many fixes. That's not because people aren't trying harder. I would argue that most everyone is working harder than they have ever worked before, burning the midnight oil, but with little success.

The problem isn't about what leaders already know, it's about them having stopped learning in the holistic sense of the word. Sure they put out fires at the office every day, but its the same thing over and over again. Unfortunately, those quick fixes aren't working very effectively any longer.

The model for corporate leadership has increasingly become a species called 'MBAmo Erectus'. A whirlwind 2 years in an Ivy League college and young executives are wearing pin stripes and an Armani suit and calling the shots. The problem is that there are too many of the same kind of people making the same decisions. There aren't enough people that Steve Jobs would call the 'crazy ones'.

The MBA has become the qualification of choice for people keen to make a corporate career. While it might have begun as an earnest attempt to skill green horns in the discipline of management, the dynamics of the demand for talent have taken it in another direction altogether. The duration of courses are becoming shorter, and the fees are getting higher! In truth, a management education has become an expensive ticket that gives you a million dollar interview opportunity. The stringent entry barriers and multiple hurdles ensure that the quality going in is the best. With a few fancy electives thrown in during the duration of the course, the finished product is ready to wow interviewers during the placement season.

Management lives in the people that practice this discipline. There's little hope for a brighter future if we don't fix the content and messages that we are giving these young impressionable minds. The time has come to rethink the education and skills that we provide young people that enter the profession of Management.

Solution

There are no easy solutions to a problem that is so entrenched, that people don't know when it began. My sense is that it began the day big money came to recruitment week.

Management education has to become about Mastery, the constant pursuit of excellence. It has to become more holistic to include a much wider range of subjects. It must challenge students to reflect on the current state of the world and where it is headed if we don't step in and do something about it.

So here are 5 hacks that I would push for:

1. The duration of the course has to be longer. To become a Master of anything, one has to put in the hours of practice. Ask any world-class tennis player what they spend most of their time doing. Practice. Practice. Practice. Two years inside a classroom with a couple of months interning is hardly any practice at all. A couple of years practicing management in the workplace would add tremendous perspective to their classroom learning. It is also probably one of the factors behind the rise in popularity of a part time MBA that one does while working.

2. Overhaul the curriculum to include more disciplines. Increasingly complex problems that beset the world today require an inter-disciplinary approach to resolve. Linearity is a thing of the past. Throw in courses on design, collaboration in the animal kingdom, poverty, global warming, chaos theory, art, music etc.

3. Cap starting salaries. Choices are driven by incentives and a handsome sign on bonus will drive most budding Einstein’s to pursue a career in investment banking over the social sector.

4. Charge companies 10X of what they currently pay to visit and recruit. The money Ivy Leagues save corporates by assembling the best talent available across the country is significant, so they will keep paying! Use that money to make teaching one of the highest paying professions.

5. Don't teach solutions. A business education has a significant number of assessments in order to be able to grade or calibrate student performance. As a result most graduate carry a solution mindset for the rest of their lives. The end result is that young minds don't ask enough questions. We need people to ask big questions if we want big change.

If these were to be implemented, we would begin to see a more grounded, capable, mature and skilled set of people entering management every year. Not only would they be more competent, they would also push for change of the right kind rather than fall into rank and perpetuate what we currently have.

Practical Impact

This hack calls for a dramatic change in the attitude toward a management education. It calls for an immersion in many disciplines so that practitioners start to see connections, develop perspectives and think beyond a pay packet at the end of two years. It needs for employers to desist from buying talent at ever increasing prices and instead focus on drawing people with a shared vision to them.

It calls for students of management to spend a longer time skilling themselves in order for them to be able to contribute meaningfully, rather than just marching to the tune of a corporate behemoth.

The outcome of the hacks I have suggested would be a radical shift in the quality and competence of the people joining the profession of management. Over a period of time, the very moral fabric of management would change from one of unabashed capitalism to a more inclusive socialism.

First Steps

To start, an organization would need to stop visiting B School campuses and doing the usual run of the mill recruitment. It would also mean dropping salaries and reaching out to a much wider audience of schools and programs. The recruitment practices of top paying companies are what drive the smartest best students to abandon their passions and pursue hefty pay packets.

A quick and dirty experiment would be to spend more time, energy and effort in the recruitment process to get the right people in the right jobs, rather than just to get the best and put their ample intelligence to use on whatever problem they are currently grappling with.

Credits

Ken Ito

Indian School of Business

XIM, Bhubaneshwar

IIM Lucknow

G Sriram

Deepak Vankataramani

Aswath Venkataraman

Geeta Royuuru

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November 16, 2011 at 5:39pm

Priscilla McCarthy

I am a student in a part-time MBA program. I agree with your suggestion that the popularity of part-time programs may be is in part due to the fact that “A couple of years practicing management in the workplace would add tremendous perspective to their classroom learning.” Simultaneous studying and working means that one gets immediate practice of the management theories by being able to take what is learned in the classroom and applying it the next day at one’s job. This is underscored for us in our program, as explicitly making connections between what we’re learning in the classroom and what we’re doing in our jobs is part of how we are graded in our management course.

I do, however, disagree with some of your other solutions. For example, I can’t help thinking that despite the fact that there are instances such as Steve Jobs getting great value from his college calligraphy course, that I am better off learning economics, finance, etc before I am learning about music and animals. At the end of the day, as a manager, my job is in large part to manage people and money, and so I think that these priorities are perfectly in line with many of the traditional business school subjects. An alternative option would be to have guest lectures in nontraditional business school subjects or the ability to audit such classes in other schools in the same university for free. I also disagree that business schools focus too much on solutions. I have never seen a case study which describes either the solution or what the actual subject of the case ended up doing. We are taught to layout the problem and dissect the nuances of the issues and circumstances surrounding the problem, and if we come to a solution after all of that, I’m not so sure that is a bad thing. Finally, I’m also not clear on what is entirely problematic with the fact that “A business education has a significant number of assessments in order to be able to grade or calibrate student performance,” as I think it is reasonable to test learning of quantitative subjects (of which in business school there are many) by having students take assessments.

November 13, 2011 at 3:23pm

Your ideas raise very good points that I considered before I decided to apply for an “accelerated” MBA (a part time program that will allow me to continue to work and graduate in less than two years). As a young working professional with a few years of experience under my belt, I considered the following:

• I wanted to accelerate my career path and opportunities, and it seemed like getting an MBA was answer
• I didn’t want to become “stale” in the sense that my job could not offer me more extensive training that can enhance my personal brand
• My peers were also getting MBA’s and I didn’t want to be left behind

Prior to taking on my huge student loans, I also struggled with the question that will 2 years of MBA classes really springboard me into a “higher” position with a better title and a higher salary? In the next two years, will I be able to make better management decisions if given the opportunity? And like you said, will I face the problem of competing with numerous MBA grads with the same exact skill set as me and how will I overcome that? But the idealized benefits of “having an MBA” outweighed the possibilities of inadequate answers to my uncertainty.

I’m seeing an interesting issue when conversing with my peers currently working in corporate jobs like myself. Many of us 20-somethings are asking the question “what am I doing with my life?” because of the mundaneness of our current jobs, but are unwilling to give up the safety net of a good paycheck to venture out of the comfort zone. I struggled with the same question and the solution to my question was to pursue an MBA – because I think that will open up more opportunities for me rather than being stagnant at my current situation. Sadly, it is a vicious cycle.

February 12, 2012 at 9:40pm

Mohd Shahnawaz

I had the same question but when ever I attend MBA session I feel my heart telling me it is not the answer.

November 5, 2011 at 6:44am

Bala Subramanian

Stephen,
I would like to clarify that any field of human endeavor,be it management or anything else, need to evolve and adopt. We need to distinguish between educating humans and educating humanity. The former is an individualized endeavor while the latter is a collective endeavor. Our MBA programs like all the rest is directed to the education of individuals. Humanity is yet to develop a collective educational function. A collective educational function will require a new and a different infrastructure altogether from what we have created and use for individual human education. A collective educational system needs to have a permanency that is longer than a human-life or that of an empire-era (such as the Roman era, or the Egyptian period). We need an infrastructure that will hold ( not just in books) all wisdom to practice it by everyone at the time of its need, even without, human skills development to practice that wisdom. Only when humanity is able to call upon and use such wisdom ( as we do when we call an app on our ipad or iphone) for ALL our needs can we successfully claim to have achieved life,liberty and happiness for everyone. If this goal seems impossible or unlikely to be attained, then, who could we blame but the inertia for not doing what needs to be done? I hope this distinction, individual Vs collective, ALL Vs a few, NOW- when needed Vs Occasional and temporary Vs permanent is clear when we recommend/consider solutions.

Bala

November 2, 2011 at 10:12pm

Gautam Mahanti

Can't agree more with you on this Steve, and if there is one solution which I would like to pick it has to be overhauling the curriculum. Modern management is less than a century old science, the foundations of which got laid during the period of the wars. The whole emphasis is on left brain thinking trying to get more out of less. Logic has completely overtaken intuition pushing humans into being more like robotic creatures than divine beings. Which probably explains some of the best entrepreneurs and innovators are the ones who either drop out of college early.

November 2, 2011 at 9:51am

Anna Smith

Stephen - I agree. I never got my Master's, but when I graduated with a bachelor's degree in biz admin I had learned how I *should* act as a manager - and that proved to not be very useful when I became unit manager of a restaurant. Learning about leadership/management and being a leader/manager are two different things...