Questioning wisdom, value of business school
By D.C. Denison, Globe Staff, 9/1/2002
hat is an MBA worth? When the Academy of Management, the world's largest organization devoted to research and education in the management field, addressed this question in its new journal, the surprising conclusion was ''not much.''

The lead article in the discussion, by Stanford University Graduate School of Business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer and Stanford doctoral student Christina T. Fong, was titled, provocatively, ''The End of Business Schools? Less Success than Meets the Eye.'' It argued, after an exhaustive review of business career-related data, that ''there is little evidence that mastery of the knowledge acquired in business schools enhances people's careers or that even attaining the MBA credential itself has much effect on graduates' salaries or career attainment.''

Another article in the journal, by Lex Donaldson, a professor at the Australian Graduate School of Management, mocked the current crop of academic management theories as irrelevant, even counterproductive. Elsewhere in the issue, two professors took business schools to task for their obsession with the rankings published by publications like Business Week.

The cumulative effect of the inaugural issue of ''Academy of Management Learning & Education'' was a sweeping attack on the institution that is the contemporary business school, a broadside given added credibility since it was published by an association with a membership base that consists primarily of business school professors.

What is the likely outcome of this dissatisfaction? According to Stanford's Pfeffer: again, not much.

Why? Among the ''seemingly insurmountable barriers'' to reform are a shortage of business school faculty, a growing pool of satisfied applicants, and most important, the fact that the current system works for the most elite business schools and the talented students who clamor to get into them. What's the motivation for change at Harvard Business School, or the MIT Sloan School, or Dartmouth's Tuck? These schools, and their students, are already reaping the benefits that come to those at the top of the heap.

There are a few factors, however, that could spark reforms in management education. One is the sheer glut of MBAs being loosed on the market. Every year, America's 350 accredited MBA programs launch 100,000 freshly minted MBAs into the work force. Many of these graduates are discovering that an MBA no longer sets them apart from the pack.

Cost is also an issue. Tuition alone at many top business schools is $30,000, a figure that balloons to $60,000 after room, board and expenses are added. And that's leaving out the ''opportunity costs'' of two years without a salary.

Maybe it's because of these last two developments that there appears to be some activity that points to possible future directions that management education might take, mostly at business schools and programs that operate below the top tier. So at the same time that critics are pointing out the cracks in the system, some radical approaches are being tried out.

The Duxx Graduate School of Business Leadership in Mexico, for example, now offers 35 courses divided into three core areas: business reasoning, social knowledge, and personal and interpersonal skills. The courses are taught by part-time faculty members who fly in and devote short periods of time to intense interactions with the students.

Even more adventurous is the International Masters in Practicing Management, founded by Henry Mintzberg of McGill University in Montreal. In this program, students attend two-week modules that are spread over 16 months and five continents. (There is no home campus.) The program, for practicing managers only, is focused on changing how students think, rather than teaching a set of analytical tools. Among the modules: ''Managing Self, the reflective mind-set,'' and ''Managing Organizations, the analytic mind-set.''

Mintzberg's aim, he has written, is to ''learn to ask the right questions, to reflect, and to avoid the traditional manager's trap of reacting to one crisis after another.''

Then there are the independent programs. Robert Dunham, a former Motorola vice president, conducts small two-year ''Action in Management'' courses by stringing together intensive weekend conferences in Boston and San Francisco. The program is ''designed to fill the gaps in the foundations of traditional management understanding,'' according to founder Dunham.

Compared to traditional MBA programs that are designed to deliver a straightforward credential, these adventurous programs seem radical, even flaky. Yet it's reassuring to know that in an era when business schools are thriving, sorting through an unprecedented number of applications, the business school industry appears to be evolving around the fringes, which is usually where innovation happens anyway.

D.C. Denison can be reached at denison@globe.com.
This story ran on page E2 of the Boston Globe on 9/1/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

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