Managing Leadership^®

It has long been remarked that there is an oddly converse correlation between economic cycles and enrollment in MBA programs. When business is down, the business schools start filling up with managers seeking to pad their credentials. And so as we enter the current global crisis we can probably expect a boom in MBAs within a year or two – just in time to hop the next economic train through town.

But will they be driving the coming boom, as so many imagine, or setting up the following bust?

Increasingly, academics themselves are joining the ranks of those critical of the MBA degree. The most famous of them is Henry Mintzberg, a business professor himself, and author of “Managers not MBAs” (see review here). Mintzberg is concerned not only that such programs educate people in the wrong things, but that they promote the harmful impression of producing trained managers ready for positions of authority and responsibility, into which they should be placed over the heads of people who have put in the work learning the job.

The late Professor Sumantra Ghosal, of the London Business School, shared these concerns, and was specific about their scope. He chided management academics for allowing “physics envy” to develop into a caricature of science that produced pretentious theories that were actually, in his view, quite simply void of real knowledge.

In particular, he criticized certain concepts – still widely popular – developed by certain Harvard professors, that he argued were based on models of essentially negatively mechanical managerial behaviors. He feared that these models were not only false, but that they had the effect of producing the very negatively mechanical behaviors, and the consequences attendant on them, that they posited. As evidence, he ruefully noted the large numbers of executive graduates of such management-school educations that played prominent roles in the major business scandals of a decade ago.

Yet another academic, Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, of Stanford, suggests that these two don’t know the half of it. He largely agrees with the source, nature, and shape of the problem, but is concerned that it might be behind a more systemically widespread undermining of managerial energy and integrity than we know. He has pointed to evidence of this in the form of an apparently positive correlation between MBAs in senior management and certain types of regulatory violations.

Undoubtedly, there are other sides to this story. Who knows, for example, how many MBAs from similar programs are in companies that are succeeding by dint of sheer hard work, intelligently planned and ethically executed? But then, who knows whether or to what extent such behavior originates in the degree or in the degree-holder?

So, when you hire a manager, perhaps you should ask more than just about educational background: Ask the candidate’s own views about the role of management in business and society, and of the part he or she expects to play in the real world, in your organization, among your staff.

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Today’s tip: For a current working student’s explanation of what he expects is going to be the value for him of an MBA, please see this introduction to an upcoming series on the topic in Business Week.

For a strong discussion of the broader question of whether business is more or less prone to ethical problems than society in general, you will want to see these essays, published on their jointly-authored blog, by Judge Richard Posner and Professor Gary Becker.

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