Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Mintzberg asserts that conventional MBA classrooms overemphasize the science of management while ignoring its art and denigrating its craft, leaving a distorted impression of its practice. We need to get back to a more engaging style of management, to build stronger organizations, not bloated share prices. This calls for another approach to management education, whereby practicing managers learn from their own experience. We need to build the art and the craft back into management education, and into management itself." "Mintzberg examines what is wrong with our current system. Conventional MBA programs are mostly for young people with little or no experience. These are the wrong people. Programs to train them emphasize analysis and technique. These are the wrong ways. They leave graduates with the false impression that they have been trained as managers, which has had a corrupting effect on the practice of management as well as on our organizations and societies. These are the wrong consequences." Mintzberg describes a very different approach to management education, which encourages practicing managers to learn from their own experience. No one can create a manager in a classroom. But existing managers can significantly improve their practice in a thoughtful classroom that makes use of that experience.

SYNOPSIS

Mintzberg (management studies, McGill U., Montreal) has long been outspoken in his criticism of the disconnect between conventional MBA programs and real world management. In 1996, he was instrumental in forming a collaborative educational partnership with several educators and their institutions from around the world, the International Masters Program in Practicing Management (IMPM), as an alternative approach to the field. In this text, Mintzberg continues to articulate his ongoing concerns about what is wrong with management education and practice, and how it could be changed. For developers, educators, managers, MBA applicants, students, and graduates. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Two decades ago, Mintzberg, a professor at McGill University who was then teaching MBAs at MIT, discovered a profound "disconnect between the practice of management... and what went on in classrooms." Since that time, he has dedicated himself to the problems of management and management education, both of which he believes are "deeply troubled," and the latter of which has become the wrong that he, with help from colleagues around the world, must right. Using words like "arrogance," "mindless" and "exploitation," Mintzberg outlines just what is wrong with MBAs (the people and the degrees) and why the degree he's developed is rooted in the real world and, as such, is far more relevant and valuable to students, companies and the business world at large. Strong economies are based on good management, not on good business schools, Mintzberg believes, and because the top companies employ the top MBAs and the top MBAs (not to mention the mediocre and bottom-level degree-holders) are, or so he says, the products of an out-of-touch and unrealistic graduate program, then the effects of this miseducation can be felt far beyond the classroom walls. Mintzberg's argument is clearly researched and set forth in a progressively logical and even convincing way. Managers and manager wannabes will be intrigued and can certainly learn a thing or two as long as they, as Mintzberg himself urges in his teachings, consider the source of the education. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

Every decade almost 1 million MBAs graduate into the economy. After two years of classes they expect to manage people who have many times the amount of knowledge gained through intensive personal experience. Those without the credentials are increasingly relegated to the "slow track" and subjected to the leadership of those who do not have the legitimacy to lead. The MBA was first introduced in 1908 and went through its last serious overhaul in the late 1950s. It is time for a change.

The current system ensures that the wrong people will get educated in the wrong way with the wrong consequences. There is a better way. Professor Henry Mintzberg has designed a program, the International Masters in Practicing Management, that addresses many of the problems associated with traditional programs that profess to develop managers, but instead produce analysts ready to apply one-size-fits-all techniques no matter the context. By integrating reflective, analytical, worldly, collaborative, and action mindsets, this philosophy will not only improve managers, but also their organizations and society.

Wrong People
Conventional MBA programs do not work because they pretend to create managers out of people with no experience or expressed leadership. Leadership is a natural quality, and teaching it to someone who has never managed is like teaching psychology to someone who has never met another human being.

More art than science, when management is mixed with craft or experience, it becomes a practice. Inexperienced students cannot appreciate the practice of management, so they focus on the science, or analysis, that is the basis of most MBA programs. Management is treated like a profession that can be learned without experience and then applied in every situation. Management is actually a facilitating activity that depends on the immediate context.

Wrong Training
Once you have the wrong people, there is no right way to develop them. Business students receive a false sense of management and propagate it in organizations. The ill-conceived pedagogy becomes so entrenched that even when the right people are sent to executive MBA programs, they learn the wrong things.

Much of decision making involves soft skills to identify problems, consider options, and set up holistic solutions. Professors either can't or don't want to teach soft skills, and young students aren't ready to learn them. The business school programs focus on what they can do - evaluate choices - a very narrow view of management. Students are encouraged to analyze by learning generally applicable techniques, but not by taking responsibility for specific situations.

Wrong Consequences
Though business school programs claim to teach business discipline and understanding, they often focus more on fitting in and competition. Getting into the best school and networking reign over management, while learning to increase shareholder value triumphs over customer needs and product quality. Despite expanding classes in ethics, MBA graduates are becoming less and less concerned with the topic. School gives the students confidence, but not enough competence.