Have you ever asked yourself why management education exists?
Presumably, we know why law school exists (even the most curmudgeonly among
us would admit the first year, and perhaps a fair portion of the second year,
are an experience unlike any other, which, if one is willing to submit,
changes the way one thinks). But
why MBA school?
I’ve actually asked myself this question, and I’d like to think I have a little
bit of personal history to inform it.
One of the primary reasons I chose to major in economics as an undergraduate,
aside from its being a superb department at Princeton, was that I realized
if I didn’t embark on a formal course of study in economics I wouldn’t “pick
it up along the way.” The same, probably more emphatically,
could be said about the relationship between law school and “thinking like
a lawyer.”
Once launched out into the Real World, of course, I learned that the MBA credential
had market value, if not, as a cynical friend of mine once opined, intrinsic
value. But I chose to embark on the MBA degree program at NYU’s Stern
School of Business (the evening sessions, which I could accommodate within
the exigencies of my day job as a securities lawyer at Morgan Stanley/Dean
Witter), and, with the exception of a final group project that fell victim
to a preposterously dysfunctional group, I completed the coursework for the
degree.
So what do I think?
With apologies in advance to all the MBA’s in the crowd, I’m tempted to repeat
the opening question.
Immediate caveats:
- If you haven’t otherwise been exposed to finance or accounting, or if you
find them alien languages, any respectable MBA program will remedy that,
and they do provide, of course, the shared language of business. - A few other core courses do instruct you in things you probably wouldn’t
“pick up as you go along,” such as statistics and operations theory (there’s
a reason banks have one line for all tellers and not one line for each
teller). - But in terms of the vast run of courses in such topics as strategy, leadership,
personnel management, human resources, and marketing, my experience was that
they added up to repeated and almost incessant statements of the obvious. You
doubt me? How about this for a gem, from my marketing professor: “Make
it easy for customers to do business with you.” I’m not making
this up. I couldn’t.
These thoughts are occasioned by the release of The
Management Myth: Why
the “Experts” Keep Getting It Wrong, which was reviewed in
the WSJ yesterday. The author, Matthew Stewart, has expanded upon an
article he
published three years ago in The Atlantic also called “The Management
Myth,” which opens with how he spent his time after seven years in the consulting
business, which he entered (improbably) without an MBA but with a Ph.D in
philosophy–19th Century German philosophy (Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche):
After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of
things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted
to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business
school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes
on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not
once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead,
I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather
be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the
mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business
career: Why does management education exist?
We needn’t follow all of Stewart’s perambulations to take his point: Much
of what’s taught in MBA-school is faddish at best. Who
can remember what intellectual content, if any, went into these catchphrases
(just a few of those Stewart lists)?:
- Information-based organizations
- Intellectual holding companies
- Learning organizations
- Perpetually creative organizations
- R-I-P. Rip, shred, tear, mutilate, destroy that hierarchy
- Intrapreneuring
- Integrative organizations
- Re-engineering
- Total quality management
You get the idea.
But–I hasten to add–this is damning the B-school academy for some sins of which they may not be entirely guilty, as many of these concepts
have been promiscuously appropriated by best-selling authors and monetized
by way of the lecture circuit.
No, I actually think there’s something more interesting going on.
What I have in mind was encapsulated in a recent Harvard Business Review colloquy
called “Are You Ready to
Manage in an Irrational World?”
The original article posited, among other things, that:
Have you noticed that we are being bombarded by a flood of work by neuroscientists
[…] because each of us harbors our own perceptions of reality, “It
and behavioral economists, aided by such things as clever research design,
the use of improved technologies for measuring brain activity, and the admission
by Alan Greenspan that markets acted in ways he had not anticipated? The
work shares several common counter-intuitive conclusions that: (1) human
behavior is much less rational than has been assumed, (2) this renders much
of conventional teaching in fields such as economics and management obsolete,
and (3) it makes suspect much of what we do as managers.
turns out that most of what we thought we knew about management is probably
wrong.” Reactions to our efforts as managers reflect what each individual
receives in relation to what he or she perceives and expects. Because this
is highly subjective, the argument goes, generalizations (many of them currently
taught in conventional courses) about how to manage are practically useless. […] Things become much more complex in the world of irrationality. Much
of traditional economics becomes outmoded when complex relationships based
on often counter-intuitive behaviors are taken into account. Instead of a management
philosophy centered around the manager as the play-caller, assigning tasks
and motivating people to carry them out, we are told by the neuroscientists
that the new management job is one of facilitating more of a customized, do-it-yourself
process centered around each newly-energized employee, one centered on questions
(often leading) rather than direction.
Among the 97 reader comments this provoked (before they were closed) were:
“Managers must be rational when it comes to planning, financing,
operating and measuring business performance…. Irrational thinking is needed
when you think about the question, ‘What’s next?’ ”“We’ve seen people and companies reject new technology [and new ideas]….
Is (it) irrational … (to) place a higher value on their current solution
than they do on a future uncertain benefit(?)”“It (irrational behavior) makes suspect much of what we do as managers.[…] Workers will become increasingly self-managed and the manager’s role will
require the ability to facilitate dialogue, clarify roles and responsibilities,
gain alignment, drive to consensus, and enable peer coaching and feedback.”
We have now experienced a near surfeit of books elaborating on these intellectual
models which are (worthy, and highly overdue) successors to the uber-rational Homo
Economicus, that utility-maximizing human calculator that was always a
fiction driven by the requirements of Ph.D students in economics to provide
elegant solutions to their equation-laden constructs. Among those books
are The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Nudge, and the 4-Hour Week, and among
the usual suspects in terms of authors are Malcolm Gladwell, Nassim Nicholas
Taleb, Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein, and many others.
But I would prefer to leave the last word not to those who laud business school or those who denounce it, much less to those aspiring to land at the top of best-selling business book lists, but to the famous Roman Stoic philosopher,
Seneca (4 BC — 65 AD), who, in “On the Shortness of Life,” had a few things to say about how we manage our lives (ellipsis
omitted).
It is a general complaint among mankind that Nature is niggardly: our
allotted span is brief, and the term granted to us flies by with such dizzy
speed that all but a few exhaust it just when they are beginning to live
It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much. Life
is long enough and our allotted portion generous enough for our most ambitious
projects if we invest it all carefully. But when it is squandered through
luxury and indifference, and spent for no good end, we realize it has gone
before we were aware it was going.So it is: the life we receive
is not short but we make it so; we are not ill provided but use what we have
wastefully. Kingly riches are dissipated in an instant if they fall
into the hands of a bad master, but even moderate wealth increases with use
in the hands of a careful steward; just so does our life provide ample scope
if it is well managed.Some follow no plan consistently but are precipitated into one new scheme
after another by a fickleness which is rambling and unstable and dissatisfied
with itself; some have no objective at all at which to aim but are overtaken
by fate as they gape and yawn.Do you suppose I am referring to wretches whose failings are acknowledged? Look
at the men whose felicity is the cynosure of all eyes; they are smothered
by their prosperity. How many have found riches a bane! How many
have paid with blood for their eloquence and their daily straining to display
their talent! How many are deprived of liberty by a besieging
mob of clients! Run through the whole list from top to bottom: This
man wants a friend at court, that man serves his turn; this man is the defendent;
that man his lawyer; and the other the judge; but no one presses his claim
to himself, everyone is used up for the sake of someone else.
Perhaps to put this in more modern terms, are you as a manager–of your
career, your department, your firm–living fully right-brain and left-brain?
Have you gotten past the biz-speak lingo and are you honestly, sincerely, truthfully,
engaged with what you do? Are you, as well, thinking as but not only
thinking as a lawyer?
If Seneca were to come to dinner tonight, what would you say to him?
