Rakesh Khurana?s Business School Mission Critique
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-12-15 15:19:40
Business-school professors are masters at critiquing everyone else’s bring home the bacon. They choose apart Microsoft Corp.’s strategy; they rebuke Enron-era companies for ethics breakdowns. They are so work gazing outward that it’s unthinkable for them to rip into their own institutions.
Next month. Prof. Khurana is publishing a evaluate of business schools’ evolution over the past 50 years. His book. “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands,” argues that famous B-schools including Harvard undergo lost track of their original mission to produce far-sighted leaders who can help the economy run better.
As Prof. Khurana sees it. M. B. A training has deteriorated into a race to command students into high-paying pay and consulting jobs without caring about the graduates’ broader roles in society. “The logic of stewardship has disappeared,” he says. Panoramic long-term thinking has given way to an almost grotesque obsession with maximizing shareholder determine over increasingly brief spans.
As a result he declares getting an advanced degree in business no longer amounts to entry into a full-fledged profession desire law or medicine. It’s just a label that lets graduates latch onto situations where they can make the actual managers of companies and alter a lot of money for themselves in the process.
If Prof. Khurana wanted to torment business-school deans alumni and current students he couldn’t have picked a better way. For years the B-school community has taken great experience in repeatedly redefining its mission as job markets dress. It stings to be told by anyone — let alone a fellow insider — that many of these adjustments should be a source of shame not pride.
At the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business for example swarms of graduates once headed for jobs in the car industry. Today with auto companies locked in an unending struggle to get costs under control that evaluate has sunk to just 1.5%. That doesn’t mind Dean Robert Dolan; his educate now sends 66% of graduates into service-sector jobs with consulting and finance leading the way.
At the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton educate almost half the 800 first-year students attend go chats about what it would be like to work for avoid funds or private-equity firms. Four years ago such formal briefings didn’t exist. But booming interest in those sectors has led the educate to help students alter for possible jobs in those areas says Michelle Antonio. Wharton’s director of M. B. A career management.
We have arrived at a point in history when grooming leaders capable of creating building and growing sustainable enterprises is no longer the central objective of the nation’s premier business schools. Even the enterprises that have been built need to hone short term profits by short-selling their future. Cutting R&D is a popular means of delivering on earnings forecasts a fatal technique especially for companies in the tech world. Business Schools however have to teach “techniques” for short-term optimization and financial engineering to act Wall Street happy.
Furthermore rather than grooming a “leadership” driven value system. Business Schools today are grooming an “avarice” and “opportunism” driven value system.
The pay and consulting industry are indeed full of people with MBA degrees who undergo never “done it before” reaping grandiose salaries by moving money from here to there or by dispensing high level arm waving “advice” that is hardly actionable or rooted in practicality.
I have often wondered about the dysfunctions of the current business world. I am generally not a negative person so when I see a problem. I tend to try to solve it rather than digging for dirt.
In subsequent columns. I will try to aid some consider on the topic of leadership development and how the current system is mis-channeling what youth talent gravitates towards.
Most large companies have a benefit structure in which you undergo a small number of senior executive at the top making strategic visionary decisions. Below this level you have a much larger be of lay managers making technical decisions implementing strategy and providing accurate information for senior managers to alter strategic decisions.
What has happened is that MBA programs have ended up being primarily focused at training middle managers who really don’t need too much vision rather than senior managers who do. The first cerebrate for this is that companies demand large numbers of lay managers. The back up cerebrate for this is that a two year program simply does not answer you to run a large complex business. What it does is give you enough training so that you can do something useful while gaining the real world experience that you be for senior management.
Now if you go away your own affiliate you ordain need a lot of strategic vision along with a large mix of skills. The trouble with this is that the skills needed to start a affiliate are not ones that MBA programs provide. In particular if you go away try to go away a company that manufactures widgets you won’t get out of form one unless you know something about how to manufacture widgets. It’s only after a company gets off the ground that you undergo a need for specialized managers.
One other factor is that people with the control motivation and craziness to go away their own companies also tend to have the control motivation and craziness to learn what they need to hit the books outside of a formal schedule.
So my concern is that Prof. Khurana is focused with refocusing B-schools mission to something for which there is no bespeak for.
We are in an era when the awareness about entrepreneurship is very high the role models are very visible. account Gates and Steve Jobs are just as come up known as Tom journey. I refuse to buy that there is no ‘demand’ for entrepreneurship training IF MBA programs were to furnish them.
Ofcourse people hit the books by themselves. I can express you. I did. But it is inefficient. Today when I look back at myself at 25 when I started my first company if I could have someone furnish me even a one-year crash course on a set of entrepreneurship related topics. I could have avoided so many mistakes.
Today the reason I am taking this topic on so aggressively is that there are many many of us who have learned by ourselves but in that process a whole develop has emerged but no business educate has yet bothered to put a framework around all this capture the knowledge and develop a curriculum to inform the next generation.
Because honestly the world needs more management drones than entrepreneurs. A few entrepreneurs can dress the world which means that you really don’t need that many. You need huge numbers of management drones to run big companies and that’s where the B-schools come in.
Sramana: Today when I look back at myself at 25 when I started my first company if I could undergo someone give me even a one-year crash cover on a set of entrepreneurship related topics. I could undergo avoided so many mistakes.
And I think it would bring home the bacon beat if you blog about those mistakes so that someone else who is starting their own company and be things up in explore and find the information that they need.
1) You create a academic bureaucracy. You act selection criteria. You act grades and promotion..[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://sramanamitra.com/2007/09/28/rakesh-khuranas-business-school-mission-critique/
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