Warren Bennis and James O’Toole are the latest big-name business professors to stride into the public square and flagellate themselves. Following, among others, Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer, McGill’s Henry Mintzberg and the late Sumantra Ghoshal of the London Business School, they’ve written an indictment of management education, arguing that “business schools are on the wrong track.”
In “How Business Schools Lost Their Way,” a long article in the current Harvard Business Review, Bennis and O’Toole charge b-schools with having “succumbed to physics envy and the scientism it spawns.” Yearning to be taken seriously as “an academic discipline like chemistry or geology,” management education has “adopted a model of science that uses abstract financial and economic analysis, statistical multiple regressions, and laboratory psychology.” Little of the research “is grounded in actual business practices.” In striving for academic respectability, in other words, b-schools have succeeded only in diminishing their relevance.
It’s a valid criticism. Even by the standards of the social sciences, “management” is an awfully squishy field, and attempts to prove otherwise are at best quixotic and at worst self-destructive. (It’s no coincidence that the great academic treatises on business management have tended to come from economists and psychologists rather than management scholars.) Bennis and O’Toole are certainly correct in saying that the research coming out of business schools tends to be far removed from the challenges faced by real managers. Back when I was an editor at HBR, I spent a lot of time plowing through turgid academic papers trying to turn up nuggets of practical wisdom. They were dispiritingly rare.
But having made an important and tough point, the authors go soft. Rather than being an academic discipline, they write, “business is a profession, akin to medicine and the law, and business schools are professional schools—or should be.” This amounts to little more than replacing one elitist delusion with another. Business is not at all a “profession” the way law or medicine is. Managers are not distinguished by their deep understanding of a shared, specialized and rigorously defined body of knowledge, as lawyers and doctors are. Think of it this way: You wouldn’t want an untrained amateur to operate on your heart or defend you in a trial, but you’d happily hire a bright, effective, energetic man or woman to be a manager in your company, even if that person didn’t have an M.B.A. or other formal business training.
Let’s face it: Good management is, roughly, 30% common sense, 30% analytical acumen, 30% personal charm, 8% ruthlessness and 2% specialized knowledge. You’re not going to get management education on the right track unless you’re willing to be honest about what management is.
How B Schools lost their way HBR article update
My personal opinion is that B schools need to become more practical in the research they perform and the lessons they teach. As MBA students, we want to have a well balanced education that covers the main theories but also gives us practical implicat…
The discontent expressed about the efficacy of educating managers stems from the disconnect between academia and what it is really like in the business world. Bennis, O’Toole, Pfeffer, Ghoshal, Mintzberg are the great contrarian minds in management. That these titans of management research are calling for a fundamental change [in management education] seems to me a good jumping-off point. In my experience, the less experienced professors flaunt how smart they are in front of their students and colleagues, while the more experienced professors tend to bring out the best in their students and fellow scholars. Leaders develop other leaders around them.
I beg to differ with Carr’s observation that in real-life management specialized knowledge accounts for only 2%. Look at the leaders at Intel, Samsung, Siemens, IBM, GE, Novartis, and also many smaller but technology-focused companies. We find highly educated Ph.D’s leading the way. The era unfolding before us calls for triumphant geeks.
This is probably one of the most accurate observations in this entire BLOG. The percentages of a successful manager are not entirely accurate, but the base is. Management is the science of people and money. Which are pretty close to the same thing when you figure out that your human capitol is expressible in dollars. I have worked for the best and the worst. And the common difference was “Who personalized my dedication and effort to succeed?”
You cannot teach that in OCS, BS, or any other alphabetical institute of higher learning. You have it, and you learn to expand or sharpen it.
Leadership is the basis of management. Convincing your people to be loyal to you and to help you succeed is the key. Without it, you are truly lost.
Hi Nick,
I agree with you fully on your opinions.
Today B-schools have become ‘money generating’ machines.
1) they charge high fees and generate money for themselves
2) they create a brand and place their students in leading corporates making money for their students. More often than not, companies visit B-schools because of their alumnus pressure.
Actually today a lot of engineers are entering management just for the sake of ‘money’. Such a waste of technical talent. I know many engineer turned MBAs who later repented having done an MBA because they had to leave their ‘core competency’ (which was engineering) for a social science field like management.
Do MBAs actually create value?
-Most of the work they do is devise strategies (based on secondary research) on entering new markets, or make some wonderful powerpoint presentations (dressed in blazers, wearing tie and holding laptop)…..in marketing
-They erode a lot of value. MBAs are the greatest value eroders of all time.
Only one place where they add value is finance in equity research (which any chartered accountant can do)
Regards
KIRAN
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