No Different From Educating Teachers

MBA's: Is it possible to teach how to do business... what a deal is... how to consummate a deal... how to manage resources... the need to understand customer needs?

Fortunately, experience is not a prerequisite to serve in top executive positions in today's corporate America. Go to a good university, get an MBA from one of the right schools in the business of connecting people, get a consulting job, and within a few years you move on to the executive level of corporate America.

Margaret Whitman, exemplary executive

Obviously not. Over the last 30 years universities have expanded the art of teaching out of the realm of academia. Universities added a business -- the business of teaching business -- to their curricula. However, they failed to place wise, experienced businessmen in their classrooms to instruct, identify, explain, and relate real-life experiences and anecdotes.

Certainly B-schools create technically well-trained accountants, computer engineers, financial whizzes and other technocrats. But these skills can -- and always had been -- learned quickly by smart, conscientious employees with strong work ethics while on their jobs. Learning on the job, these employees applied technical skills, learned specifics of how their company and industry operated, and implemented improvements. These employees provided paybacks to their employers. They invested time and effort cooperating with coworkers. In time, if worthy, these employees might get raises. If worthy some would get promoted from entry levels so low that they are unimaginable to today's MBAs.

The skills that make sense to teach in B-schools cannot be taught in classrooms. Those skills include how to manage, how to control people and projects, and how to appropriately and dynamically structure an organization to achieve optimum productivity. These skills develop automatically in the effective business person who has obtained a well-rounded education. He innately integrates his education with perceived objectives to obtain results.

Consider the value of two years on the job, career-oriented hard work. Measure those benefits against two years of MBA classroom work. The meaningful gains are primarily for the institution that is in the B-school business.

The result of 30 years loading up major corporations' top management with overly-empowered technocrats is the Enron-Tyco phenomenon. Here MBA technocrats are handed unbridled management powers and paid psychologically overwhelming salaries. The MBAs know greatness is expected of them within short periods of time. They have both technical training and power to influence boards and CEOs into acceding toward schemes. This produces potentially lethal management teams willing to invent accounting, product, or merger & acquisition-based schemes. Or, they may use Wall Street's weak-minded breed of greedy analysts to promote contrived and manipulated financial statements to entice stockholders into joining them for the implausible rise.

MBA degrees in hand, yet they are the same under-educated, arrogant juveniles they were before purchasing their MBA degrees. Thousands of MBA-empowered, yet totally inexperienced and having little concern for learning experiences, they have flooded business' corridors over the recent decades. Their lack of analytical skills and zero concern for, and comprehension of deal making, management, and analysis result in today's decayed, still sliding businesses. The slide is not just in business ethics. It manifests itself in the common lack of operational expertise demonstrated in many businesses.

Business is populated with management that knows -- that is, believes -- that business involves perversely twisted management decisions, obviated accounting, and is only concerned with immediate outcomes. These managements rarely linger contemplating long-term results before jumping to the climax.

Lest you disagree, consider this: MBA candidates would have to be taught what in order to go into business? Obviously the answer is technical skills relevant to their industry and operational and management skills. But today crooked dealings, arrogance, and high momentum rule. Today's MBA-instructed managements demonstrate their belief that the overall practice of business is little more than chaos with a crooked flavor and avoidance of principle.

Teaching in the traditional sense requires intense concern for students and for the need to impart values surrounding the art of the subject and its content. Today's teachers and the institutions that pay them are not concerned with the academic ritual of knowledge or the products of their life's work. It is no wonder the teaching profession is populated with uncaring incompetence and produces ill-educated drones willing to commit fraud and unconcerned with long-term consequences. Plea bargains and new employers take care of the long term.

Today's B-schools' products rule corporations and small businesses that are surviving on the momentum of a bygone era's capitalism.

When was the last time you had dealings with a well-run company? When is the last time you worked for a competent boss? And your coworkers are how good at cooperating and improving your company?