Compound Thinking

What’s wrong with MBAs?

I know it’s popular for programmers to bash Managers, and MBAs. And I don’t want to jump on the bandwagon –especially since I’m also a manager.

But I know that the image of the pointy haired boss is pretty thoroughly ingrained in our culture, and popular mythology exists to explain a shared experience.

Clearly there are a lot of bad managers with MBA’s from prestigious institutions out there.

Henry Mintzberg does more to explain how this happened — and what we might be able to do about it — than anybody else I’ve read recently.

The central argument of Managers not MBAs is that Management as taught by MBA programs is a failure, because they:

• choose the wrong people,
• educate them in the wrong way
• and produce the wrong results.

In other words, the selection process and educational format of most MBA programs actively undermines the practice of good management. MBA’s are a self-selected group of people who “want to get ahead in business,” and the entire program teaches them to compete rather than cooperate.

The result is that graduates of MBA programs have a pretty dismal record at actually starting, expanding, or maintaining stable, productive, businesses.

Mintzberg doesn’t blame MBA holders — they were taught strategy, and accounting, and analysis, but never management.

In particular, MBA programs never taught them the meaning of good management, or the skills they would need to actually grow and manage teams of real people. They aren’t even pointed in the right direction, the structure of MBA programs reward the kind of people who like to compete. And years of “case study” exercises have made them into the kind of people who make snap decisions based on limited data.

MBA graduates generally aren’t the kind of people dedicated to helping other people achieve greatness.

Instead, they want to achieve greatness on their own — which can be a worthy goal. It’s just a terrible goal for a manager. Good managers are relentlessly focused on helping the people they work for perform at their best.

I don’t believe an MBA degree is just a liability.

The MBA’s I know have learned useful terminology, analytical skills, and the training they recieved in in economics, accounting, and business law can be a huge help in the right moment.

An MBA can prove to be an net asset to a manager, but only if you unlearn some skills they teach you (snap judgments, and me-first competitiveness) and make it a point to learn the “soft” skills that are infinitely more important.

The second half of Mintzberg’s book is his proposal for creating better educational institutions, which can identify the right candidates, train them with the right skills in the right way, and ultimately produce much better results than current MBA programs. The broad outline of that plan seems right. But most managers need something they can use to get better at their jobs right now, without spending a lot of money.

• Never stop learning from the people on your team – they are on the front lines learning every day, if you’re not working to learn from them, your loosing potentially critical information.
• Always believe that there is more to their job than making money. Greatness comes from productive passion, and greed doesn’t inspire passion or loyalty.
• Elevate the people who actually produce value — These people actually do the work, and they know infinitely more about the nature of that work than MBA trained managers, so they should be respected, valued, and included (or put in charge) of improvement processes.

Good managers care about people, not head-count, and they strive to make their job a meaningful contribution to a shared vision.

Hopefully I’ll have time to write more about good management tomorrow.