MBAs and the Management Myth: An Interview with Matthew Stewart
In his new book The Management Myth, author Matthew Stewart takes a critical look at the management industry, from the business gurus who write best-selling books to the consulting industry to a subject near to me and to many of you, MBA programs.
What exactly is the management myth? As Stewart explained during our recent interview, it's "the idea that there is a body of technological expertise, something like engineering, that is called management, that you can package up, put into a textbook and transmit to students. There are some techniques and crafts associated with management, but the idea that there's a single body of knowledge that you can turn into formal expertise is false. "
Problems with MBAs
Stewart sees a problem with the sheer number of MBA degrees, about 140,000, awarded each year. "It makes sense to have a certain number of people study business-related subjects, but now it's a universal credential for doing business at a certain level. We have a serious problem with credentialism getting out of hand," he says.
While Stewart believes that highly specialized studies in areas such as process-oriented, operations research can be useful training for managers, it's the case-study oriented, generalist programs such as Harvard Business School that are less useful. Stewart says this is a problem of content:
In order to produce generalist courses, business school professors have been forced to invent subjects called strategy, called organizational behavior and so on. They're pretty much pseudo-sciences, and when you use them as a basis for instruction, you're really teaching people how to master arcane jargon that has minimal connection to the real world, as opposed to teaching them to really think.Fixing the MBA
Stewart would like to see MBA programs focus not only on business but on broader subjects that would be useful for developing knowledge and critical thinking, such as political theory or evolutionary biology. At the same time, he believes greater specialization is key. "Forget all this nonsense about general case studies and teach how logistics operations work in a complicated supply organization. Give them a real specialization as opposed to a phony one," says Stewart.
While MBAs can be useful, Stewart stresses they aren't necessary for becoming a good manager:
What do you need to succeed in business? You need the ability to think critically and communicate, and those things you can get just as easily out of a philosophy degree. In business, experience is the big teacher. We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make someone into an effective manager by putting them through a few courses in business school.Next week, I'll share some of Stewart's views on the consulting industry. Until then, what do you think about Stewart's ideas regarding MBAs?