Myths about MBAs

MYTH about MBA's Traditional MBA, which gives the impression of turning young people into managers is very dysfuctional. Rather B-Schools should concentrate on the business function and not teach any management. People learn management by focussing on their own experience and learning from it. Traditional MBA gives the impression that anybody can manage if he has received the education. This is incorrect. Schools are driven by a strategy developed in the 50's , which is based on business functions and rooted in the disciplines of economics,psychology with a heavy emphasis on research.Hence mixing business and management function is wrong. The credibility of the above arguemt is further buttresed by a forthcoming article to be published posthumously in the Academy of Management Learning and education, Sumantra Ghoshal argues that many of the worst excesses of recent management practices have their roots in aset of ideas that have emerged from B-school academics over the past 30 years. He believed that a desire of B-Schools to make the study of business a science, "a kind of Physics" has led them increasingly to base their management theories on some of the most dismal assumptions and techniques developed by economists , particularly by the " Chicago School" and its intellectual leader Milton Friedman" (whose monetarism I unabashedly champion). These include include supposedly simplistic models of individual human behavior( rational, self-interested,utility maximising and the notion that the firm should maximize the shareholder value). These assumptions, in this view, were badly flawed. But they were simple enough to allure B-school academics to develop grand theories of management supported by elegant mathematical models and empirical analyses that appeared scientific, and thus earned their subject academic respectability, but were, in fact, a pretence of knowledge where there was none. He was particularly critical of Management theories associated with two prominent HBS professors, whose development of 'agency theory' has encouraged B-Schools to teach students and managers cannot be trusted to do their job, and Michael Porter, whose 'five forces framework' has been presented to suggest that companies must compete not only with their competitors but also with their suppliers, customers, enployees and regulators. A particularly worrying feature of these theories , he feels, is that they have no role for human intentionality or choice. Hence students have been freed "from any sense of moral responsibility".