How to Fix MBAs? No Easy Answers

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  1

  marcuhlig

  04/13/09 | Report as spam

  RE: How to Fix MBAs? No Easy Answers

  I think the problem are not the business schools, the problem is our attitude in general.
  
  But business schools can help to overcome this issue where everybody (and not just the top level executive) constantly tries to maximize his/her personal benefit in any given situation.
  
  More education on social responsibility and corporate social responsibility is needed.
  
  I had the pleasure of discussing with Dr. McManus on numerous occasions in the past, and I greatly appreciate him sharing his insights. I hope I will read more about him on BNET in the future.

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  2

  learnapplychange

  04/13/09 | Report as spam

  RE: How to Fix MBAs? No Easy Answers

  No easy answers alright. But we can't give up on the idea of what "ought to be." Novak's ideas of what the corporation is in existence to accomplish in society can be instructive to MBA curricula. Companies should:
  
  1. Satisfy the customer needs first (wow, big news there).
  2. Make a reasonable profit on investment resources (but with a longer term picture in mind and limited WS demands).
  3. Never forget that they must always create new wealth.
  4. Create new jobs ( and I would add not implement layoffs at profitable companies, just because Wall Street says so).
  5. Defeat the culture of envy in the world.
  6. Promote invention, ingenuity, and innovation (and not simply in the financial services industry).
  7. Realize that it (private sector organizations) are an important part of the Democracy experiment in creating and sustaining the middle class, an important bulwark against religious and political tyranny.
  
  Chris
  http://www.learnapplychange.com
  
  

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  3

  Stacy Blackman

  04/14/09 | Report as spam

  RE: How to Fix MBAs? No Easy Answers

  Chris,
  I like this idea of "what ought to be". It's so simple yet true. In general in life, we are not where we ought to be. We are constantly moving and as we are only humans running the companies, we often fall down. But it is nice to have a set of goals to shoot for.
  Thanks.

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  4

  learnapplychange

  04/14/09 | Report as spam

  RE: How to Fix MBAs? No Easy Answers

  Hi Stacy,
  
  Thanks for your comments. I think we have to continue to strive now that we're here in this sometimes ugly, but improving world. If not, we'll end up as Hobbes so famously said in a "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" life.
  
  Chris:)

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  BobL5454

  04/20/09 | Report as spam

  RE: How to Fix MBAs? No Easy Answers

  I think it's ludicrous to imply this current situation was created by and the fault of whomever has an MBA. The solution isn't going to come from "fixing" MBA programs, the correct solution has more to do with fixing people's attitudes.
  
  Everyone's looking for an easy answer and many people are very willing to point the finger to push the blame elsewhere. The current economic crisis was not created only by those people holding an MBA. Too many people - MBA or not, have been caught up in their own self-created image of worth, which led many to not do what was right to begin with. If more people in general considered "paying it forward" (as little as 5 or 10% of their time), the WHOLE world would be much better.
  
  In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens wrote "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," which is exactly what we're faced with now. We need everyone to take their combined wisdom and begin anew, learning from the current turmoil we're in and helping to create a cleaner, fresher and much more widespread sharing in good fortune.
  
  I think it's ludicrous to imply that this current situation was created by and the fault of whomever has an MBA. The solution isn't going to come from "fixing" MBA programs, the correct solution has more to do with fixing people's attitudes.

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  Hagen Ziemer

  04/22/09 | Report as spam

  Do we have an MBA problem?

  In General
  The problem is less one of the educational system; its the
  companies system to receive income as an employee. There
  are companies that already changed the bonus system. M&S
  for example uses On Target Performance (OTP) and Above
  Target Performance (ATP) to reward managers. APT is only
  paid, if the next periods are at least OTP and then usually in
  form of a pension.
  
  The recent case
  The financial crisis (e.g. USA) is caused by a system failure in
  evaluating properties. The US market did not consider a
  critical mass. In order to avoid security caused crisis,
  securities have to be monitored. A large security is also
  education (e.g. a student loan). If no-one monitors how
  many students are required by the market in a certain area,
  then the same system failure will appear in a similar form.
  Therefore, market risks in the banking sector need to be
  improved; maybe by a supervisory committee for market
  risk in banking portfolios is being needed. The committee
  develops a risk measure which has to be multiplied by the risk
  banks evaluated themselves.
  
  Finally: The 'MBA' problem can only be solved by companies
  and government regulation (supervisory committee). The
  educational part only contributes partially to the one problem
  or ultimate result of the capitalistic system: Profit
  Maximization (PM). Thus, PM will always seek for failures in
  the systems. Constantly optimizing all systems might be the
  final answer.
  
  

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  bill howe

  04/23/09 | Report as spam

  RE: How to Fix MBAs? No Easy Answers

  Well done, Dr. McManus, for guiding us into what can be -- and should be -- a fruitful area for discussion. I'll offer a few comments for that discussion:
  
  1) Many MBA programs accept students who are already success-oriented high achievers eager to climb the corporate ladder. Thus, students may be prone to "outsmarting" others (They've been trained in outsmarting from kindergarten on), creating wealth, and finding success-as-material possessions. Our entire educational system is based upon individualistic, competitive norms rooted deep in the American way of life -- e.g., put students in rows with "teacher-centered" instruction and have them compete against each other rather than work in teams/groups and learn to collaborate; measure success in terms of each individual student's GPA. Business schools simply tend to replicate and work with what they inherit -- a highly competitive, anachronistic educational system wherein highly competitive students strive to outdo each other. It's what Bowles and Gintis noted many years ago in "Schooling for a Capitalist Society." If there is enough blame to go around, as McManus suggests, let's make sure it extends back to the beginnings of American life and American education -- to Emerson, for example, and to Horace Mann.
  
  2) Up until recently, our conception of (and practice of) leadership -- that goal to which so many MBA students aspire -- has been based on elitist, individualistic notions, bolstered by positional authority, power over (as opposed to power with), and "industrial" paradigm models of management and compliance. Moreover, though we now have numerous efforts by scholars and practitioners to assert a new kind of leadership, the old, cumbersome individual-focused notion of leadership persists in most organizational contexts. MBA students, of course, were embedded in this old notion long before they entered business school.
  
  I'm suggesting, then, that we need significant change in our educational system (I'm talking K-12 as well as higher education) and in our notion of leadership, which would mean significant change in who and what we are in the United States. It might, for example, mean a move from "rugged individualism" to interaction that is cooperative and collaborative. We are, as Gert Hofstede and others have pointed out, a highly individualistic culture in the United States -- something that will almost certainly have to change as we are increasingly compelled to interact through teams, flattened organizations, networks, and of course the extensive, worldwide network of the internet.
  
  But such cultural change is huge and will require decades of de-institutionalizing what we still take for granted as accepted structures, norms, and practices. What can we work on in the near future? A few ideas:
  
  1) Change how we frame and delver education, from elementary schools through doctoral programs. Students, as Alexander Astin has demonstrated, learn more from each other than they do from the teacher/professor. Let's finally re-structure education so that it is interactive, based upon cooperation and collaboration, and focused in part upon service to each other and to the community. This means re-thinking physical arrangements of the classroom, re-thinking instructional strategies, re-thinking learning strategies, and re-thinking the content of the curricula.
  
  2) Infusing our schooling with what is increasingly shortchanged as budgets become constrained -- humanistic studies. This means literature, ethics, philosophy, history, and the arts, for example. Students from elementary school on up can learn much about values, ethics, human interaction, meaning making, imagination, beauty, and truth through such studies, which would be important to understanding and interacting with what is most important in our organizations -- the human resources. With budget cuts, however, our educational system is promoting math and science at the expense of the humanities and the arts.
  
  3) Rvising our language (and the thinking based upon language) so that we move away from "leadership," which is all too heavy with seemingly anachronistic, elitist notions toward "social responsibility," "mutual responsibility," and "service."
  
  4) Ensuring that all of our schooling -- from elementary schooling on up -- includes the kind of global perspectives that will soften our individualistic, competitive, highly assertive bent with the more communitarian, cooperative, and humble perspectives inherent in the cultures of other nations and regions of the world.
  
  Those alone would be huge, and they alone are difficult enough to implement. But we must begin somewhere. In any case, I don't see business schools as the problem or the solution. They are simply one piece of the larger American pie.
  
  Thanks, Dr. McManus, for opening the discussion.
  
  Bill Howe
  

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  tlmatula

  04/24/09 | Report as spam

  RE: How to Fix MBAs? No Easy Answers

  Bill, I agree that the values of students are already set before the reach business schools and one of the challenges for faculty once they reach business school is that they are far more interested in competition for grades then in learning. Often they shop schools and select programs not based on what they will learn but based on the contacts they will make and the ?points? they will get from having a degree from that school in their career. This excessive focus on ?winning? at all costs is the root not only of the current meltdown but also most of the ethical issues we see in both in business schools and in business itself .
  
  How to correct it is a challenge. Perhaps one way to change it would be to change how students are selected by business schools. Instead of using their performance on tests like the GMAT and undergraduate GPA the focus could be shifted to their life experience, community service and character. Unfortunately these are much more challenging to measure.
  
  In the business school curriculum the focused could also be changed from the current model which is heavy in quantitative decision making to a greater focus on qualitative decision making and learning how to look beyond the numbers. One factor in the current crisis appears to be that many managers blindly followed the numbers in making their decisions and by doing so ignored the cliff their firms were racing to in the bubble economy.
  
  

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  lbs1978

  05/26/09 | Report as spam

  RE: How to Fix MBAs? No Easy Answers

  I agree with others who said that it is ridiculous to blame our current economic issues on MBA's just because there is probably a high percentage of these individuals in power at the time of the meltdown. I have an MBA, not from a fancy Ivy league school but from University of Phoenix which is not quite the same as some of these top business schools. I feel it is not the schools, the instructors, or the curriculum. The real issue seems to be the selfish, get to the top no matter what, uncaring attitudes many of our corporate leadership types. They don't care about anything or anyone as long as they get to the top. I can't honestly believe this is being taught in any of these top business schools but it is part of our society where people think they have to always one up their neighbor, their co-workers and have all of the marbles to be the best. Some of this is just a lack of decent morals and ethics on the part of corporate America.

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  steveo@...

  06/10/09 | Report as spam

  I wonder.

  Do the same people who thing the problem is always with business, think the solution is always with government?

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  steveo@...

  06/10/09 | Report as spam

  Phooey.

  The government created the housing bubble by letting the Fed sustain below-market interest rates for an extended period of time. And then they created a market in sub-prime mortgages.
  
  Now the bubble is bursting, and MBA's get the blame.
  
  Do you think our politicians are going through the same amount of introspection?

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  12

  AZkjp

  07/20/09 | Report as spam

  RE: How to Fix MBAs? No Easy Answers

  Absolutely agree, Steve.
  
  Politicians ignored the warnings, their constituents paid the price, and media (including BNET, unfortunately) and elitist scholar types who profit from change for change's sake, point the finger everywhere else but at themselves for refusing to identify the government and it's corrupt politicians as the true reasons for our economic mess.
  
  Ethics and competition are not mutually exclusive. Economic growth/support/livelihood and Socialism are. History has spoken, and this result in indisputable.
  
  The unholy trinity of scholarly elitists, the press, and corrupt politicians makes professional wrestling look like the Olympics.