Universities Weblog

Yes, according to a new article in Harvard Business Review. The authors, professors at Southern Cal's business school, suggest that M.B.A. programs focus too much on theory and quantitative analysis, and hire professors interested only in pursuing research on their narrow specialties. These profs, they argue, have little or no management experience and fail to educate students about real-world situations they'll face as business leaders.

Here's a bit from the Chronicle of Higher Education's coverage:

"We cannot imagine a professor of surgery who has never seen a patient or a piano teacher who doesn't play the instrument, and yet today's business schools are packed with intelligent, highly skilled faculty with little or no managerial experience," the two professors write. "As a result, they can't identify the most important problems facing executives and don't know how to analyze the indirect and long-term implications of complex business decisions."

While business deans pay lip service to making their courses more relevant, particularly when they are trying to raise money, their institutions continue to promote and award tenure to faculty members with narrow, scientific specialties, the authors contend.

"By allowing the scientific-research model to drive out all others, business schools are institutionalizing their own irrelevance," the authors write.

Most business problems cannot be solved neatly by applying hypothetical models or formulas, they say. "When applied to business—essentially a human activity in which judgments are made with messy, incomplete, and incoherent data—statistical and methodological wizardry can blind rather than illuminate."The authors also recommend that business schools model their curricula on that of law and medical schools, and treat their discipline as a profession, not an academic department. But is management a profession, a discipline, a vocation, or all of the above? Does it represent a uniform body of knowledge like law and medicine, or math and biology? Can B-schools (at least many of the leading ones) step away from their emphasis on research and focus instead on the "softer" aspects of leadership such as ethics and communication skills?

What do you think?

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