Download Do Business Schools Prepare Good Managers Podcast 7.1 MB 20:18 Min

More Information on this Topic from our Sponsor

Support for MBA Podcaster comes from Penn State University’s iMBA. Penn State’s iMBA program is an online MBA program that prepares you for the real life challenges you will face in business. Whatever your professional background, you can learn to solve problems, create strategies, and communicate across all functional areas of business to effectively address the issues facing today’s organizations. While many MBA programs aim to develop a skill in one chosen specialty, the goal of the Penn State iMBA is to transform you into a business leader, allowing you to operate at a strategic level and evaluate problems from multiple perspectives. The Penn State iMBA offers flexibility, interaction, and collaborative business in a flexible online environment. Join Penn State iMBA; put an internationally recognized and AACSB accredited MBA degree on your resume without having to move or sacrificing your current salary or career. Contact John Fizel, the iMBA Director, at 814-898-6323 or email John at imba@psu.edu.

Transcription:

You’ve got your eye on becoming a manager and you’re pouring time and money into a MBA program or you’re considering it and you’re wondering if that’s a good move. Do business schools prepare good managers? That’s the question that we’ll explore today. I’m Diana Jordan with MBA Podcaster and in this show we will hear from a student, a professor, a recruiter and an author to guide you to the right answer for you.

If you ask experts in the field you’ll hear strong opinions on whether a MBA successfully prepares people to become successful managers. We have guests from both camps on our show so you can weigh both sides and make the right decision for yourself.

Cleghorn Professor of Management studies at McGill University, Henry Mintzberg leads the attack, “Trying to teach management to somebody who has never managed is trying to teach swimming to someone who has never been in the water. The theory is fine but it doesn’t prepare you for what is coming.” George Atkinson is a Senior Client Partner based in the Chicago office of Korn/Ferry International, “What makes a good leader is someone who knows their place and knows how to manage the resources around them because nobody can be an expert in everything.” Lili Yeo recently earned her MBA at IMD in Switzerland and is now Account Manager of Ziba Design in Portland, Oregon, “You get from basically a 15,000 foot view back to about a 5,000 foot view pretty quickly.” And finally, author of Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, Penelope Trunk argues that a high degree of emotional intelligence can be a degree from Harvard Business School, “The MBA is becoming a more and more limited ticket. It’s still a ticket to a play but in a much more limited sense than they used to be.”

If you want to enhance your qualifications to land a high paying managerial job the MBA may seem to be the way to go. But there are strong opinions on this topic. Let’s pose the key question to Professor Henry Mintzberg; do business schools prepare good managers? “No. No. Very simply, no. I think they could if they woke up to sort of other ways of doing things but what most of them doing now in the United States, I think in Britain some of them are doing quite well, but the way most of them are doing it in the United States, the short answer is no, the long answer is no. They’re fine for learning the business functions like marketing and finance and all that, but they do not train managers.” That is a very interesting and somewhat daunting concept I would think for some MBA students who pour thousands of dollars into an education. With that said, what kind of advice do you have for students or potential students? “I think people should earn their managerial stripes, they should prove that they are capable of managing by joining an organization being selected to manage and then get into managerial jobs and learn it in the only way that you really can learn it, initially which is on the job, on the ground. Because the way, trying to teach management to somebody who has never managed is trying to teach swimming to someone who has never been in the water. You know the theory is fine but it doesn’t prepare you for what is coming.”

A totally different point of view from George Atkinson with Korn/Ferry International. Do you think business schools prepare good managers? “Yes, I think they do and I think it’s one element of many that fall into what makes a good manager. I think a lot of business schools do a wonderful job at giving them the tools to essentially ask the right questions when it comes to maybe beyond their functional area of expertise, what they need to ask in areas that don’t typically fall in their daily work. But on that level yes, and I think what we’re reading about a lot today are do business schools prepare good leaders and maybe that is a broader question but certainly not from an I would use a recruiter as a typical requirement in my mind to be a good manager but business schools typically do give them the right tools to manage effectively.”

Author, Penelope Trunk has another twist on that key question, “I think that whether business schools prepare good managers or not is actually secondary to whether it’s worth it to spend the amount of money that business schools are asking for in exchange for that preparation. So I mean there are a lot of ways to learn how to be a good manager and business school is a pretty pricey option. Maybe another way to look at it is do you need that degree for what you’re going to do after business school and a lot of times people think going to business school is something that you do to kind of open up a lot of options for yourself if you’re not really sure what to do. But the loans that you are going to take out to go to business school actually start shutting doors for you because you can’t always take high enough paying jobs to pay off the loans afterward. So you’re much better off figuring out exactly what you want to do and then looking at the people who are doing that and seeing if they all needed business degrees to do it. And if the answer if yes then it is worth it to go to business school.”

Lili Yeo did go to business school and now with her MBA presents yet another view of whether one must get a MBA in preparation for becoming an excellent leader. “To be a good manager it’s really just at the heart, you know being a good person and being able to lead other people. A leader is often somebody who people are willing to follow. So all of that is with respect and with time and people truly believing you are after their best interest. Does one need a MBA for that? That is way too big of a question, I think. What I would say is that at least for the MBA program that I went through; it made me look inside and see who I am and how I lead. I think that is a large part of the single biggest benefit that I received in business school with respect to me leading organizations and teams going forward.”

A study from Egon Center seems to support your position, Professor Mintzberg. It says that less than 20% of executives in the US, the UK and France and Germany believe that the MBA helps prepare managers for the real world. That falls in concert with what you’re saying. “Yes, the US and the UK are very strong on MBA programs but the UK has much more of what I’ve been talking about, is more sensible ways to train managers. Even in the MBA programs they use a lot of creative stuff. The US is much, much more traditional. What people don’t know in the US is that the real innovation in MBA education is happening in England, not America. In France and Germany there is not that same tradition. France has a bit of a related tradition in what they call their Grande Ecole where they do much of the same thing they just don’t call it MBA programs. Germany and Japan do not have a tradition of MBA programs. They are starting to develop them now.”

George Atkinson, as a recruiter what do you think of the Egon Center study? “I think that’s probably coming from the fact that a lot of people have a hard time looking at their managers and tying the MBA to their success and their ability to prepare them for the real world. Many folks in the industry today that have the MBA are successful seemingly to those senior leaders out there for their experience probably since they got the MBA. It’s hard to really tie that back. So I’m not surprised that the statistic is low, in fact they say many of the people that are saying the MBA is critical to preparing someone for success probably are more closely tied to what is going on in the MBA programs today and have invested interest in that. But most people don’t. Most people are consumed with their companies and what they are doing day-to-day in their jobs and they just don’t, it’s just not top of mind how the MBA prepares that person longer term.”

Lili Yeo, a 2006 MBA graduate, what do you think of this study that says students aren’t really prepared by MBA schools to be good managers. “My experience has been that MBA school often teaches you at this high level of what a CEO might think to the decisions that are important and pressing to them. So when you come back to the real world, and the real job, many people don’t actually value the MBA nearly as much anymore because there are so many different types of MBAs can get. So there is a lot less standard evaluation, much different than what say a MD for a doctor in that to say how much ability does a MBA really bring to the table.” Lili adds that it is a humbling experience to return to a world that doesn’t seem to value a MBA as much as you do.

The professor has a compatible view, “What we’re doing is creating a hubris. We’re creating a kind of an arrogance where people who have never managed anything or barely managed anything walk out of the classroom and think they are already ready to order people around or manage other people because they sat still in the classroom for two years. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“There’s this expectation that you’re out there as leaders and you’re going to be managing an organization, you’re one of the top elite folks that are eventually going to rise to the ranks of CEO. And there is this mentality that you have and part of it I guess the term could be potentially hubris being built up. But you come with that idea, I’m a leader and I’m going to lead situations and I’m going to lead people. I’m going to have all of these new tools to be using and I’m ready to hit the ground running. But the onus is on us to take a little bit more time to integrate properly before we wear ourselves and say we’re going to literally make change as leaders. There was a misalignment in our expectation for many of us of doing right out of the gate, versus actually spend a lot more time absorbing and then hopping back up.”

Now what if you’re an entrepreneur? Penelope Trunk, is it worth it to go to business school? “What we know is that what makes somebody a good entrepreneur is their ability to execute and you just can’t teach that in a classroom. You have to just go out and do it and that’s the best way to learn about entrepreneurship is to try it. You know do three businesses and fail; you’ll be a great entrepreneur.” That’s pretty expensive? “It’s actually really cheap. If you think about it I mean it’s free to start an online company, the software is free, the idea is free, it’s free, just about everybody under 30 knows how to go online and create a basic website so in marketing at this point in time is sending out 50 emails to 50 friends. If the idea sticks keep going, if it doesn’t stick do something else so all you’ve lost is your time. It’s not expensive at all.”

George, what do you think of Penelope’s view that business school might not be worth it? “I disagree. I mean I think that an entrepreneur needs all of the basic skills in the different disciplines that a MBA offers that you wouldn’t get on the job maybe right out of college. I actually think that it’s that much more critical that an entrepreneur does have a basic knowledge in finance, sales, marketing, branding, communications maybe less so on organizational development because they are a sole practitioner and they don’t need to lead a team necessarily but in my experience, a lot of the programs now have great entrepreneurial coursework, how to run a small business that is pretty specific to that type of individual that doesn’t think they are going to be along for the corporate world and wants to run their own business. And the fact of the matter is that I think that most successful entrepreneurs coming out of business school did spend a few years in industry before branching out on their own. So you know that gives them the entre if nothing else to the type of platforms and companies that can give them the basic tools beyond a MBA before they launch their own business.”

The professor maintains that if you want to be a good manager holds off on business school until you have real life experience managing people. “What the American business schools have been doing for years is trying to fix something that’s not fixable. And that is they are trying to figure out how to teach management to people who are not managers. So they have leadership courses and they have ethics courses and they have team building courses and they have outside assignments and field studies and all kinds of things. It doesn’t solve the basic problem. You have to start with the right raw material, you have to start with people who are managers and know what it is all about. That is what they do in England, but in the states they don’t get it.”

And George, it sounds like you’re saying that success in the business world depends largely on the candidate’s level of emotional intelligence. Is that true? “I think it is, but again that answer isn’t going to absolute, it’s got to be both sides of the coin. I mean someone needs the basic tools to know how to assess a PNL who knows something about financing, time value of money, knows how to market a brand, knows how to assess a sales force, get into new markets, knows a little bit about international business, organizational development. These are all things that you have to come out of getting a MBA with some exposure to. Again it goes back to knowing how to ask the right questions. However, I do think that the softer skills and leadership skills that are being offered in specific coursework more and more is going to become more critical but again it goes back to the notion of the pool of people and the method by which you are learning, some being maybe more team based than others, maybe some being more virtual and that’s okay. But it’s the process that I think creates the right kind of leader, not just kind of the textbooks.”

“We already know that the most important skill in business is emotional intelligence. There is a great study that was published actually twice in the Harvard Business Review about how people would rather work with somebody who is incompetent and nice than competent and a jerk. So it just kind of underlines how you’re not going to be able to get things done in this world if you’re not well liked. And that’s all emotional intelligence it’s not being great with the spreadsheet or being great with case studies. So I think what the MBA really is right now is a ticket to play, there are still situations where you know if you want to be a VP at the Fortune 500 you’re going to have a hard time doing that without a MBA. The MBA is a ticket to play. For entrepreneurship it’s just not a ticket to play. It just doesn’t matter. Nobody cares if you have a MBA when you’re going for funding for your company, they care if you have a good business plan, they care if they think you can execute on the business plan and I don’t think anybody is getting brownie point on execution by having a MBA.”

So what makes a good leader then? “What makes a good leader, someone who knows their place and knows how to manage the resources around them because nobody can be an expert in everything. And when we’re looking for good leaders certainly there is going to be certain functions, depending on the industry and depending on the company that you’re going to be looking for specific skill sets but by and large a good leader is someone who knows how to leverage, get the right resources around them. So you know knowing how to select the areas of expertise and the types of people that will be doing what the leader ought to be doing, which is motivating the troops, setting a clear mission or clear objective for the business that people can follow and a good leader I think gives his or her people the room to do the jobs.”

Advice Penelope? “Be honest with yourself about what you want and what you have to offer, where your strengths are and worry about that. Don’t worry about what used to be the prestigious, powerful thing to do just go with what you need to do for this life.”

Professor what kind of advice would you give to students at this point as far as getting a MBA, not getting a MBA if they really, really want to be managers and not accountants and that kind of thing? “Go work and get into a managerial job and learn what managing is about and then find a program like ours and like some of them in the UK that really focus on how managers learn.”

Lili, what is your advice? “For those that are getting their MBA make sure that you constantly look at your expectations and refine them and talk to both people in the schools and out of the school, pre and post their MBA to really get a much more realistic view and to calibrate your expectations, pretty routinely. For those who are going to be coming out, I would certainly advice that have a healthy amount, as much as confidence as we can get coming out of business school which is fantastic also have a healthy amount and dose of humility and an attitude of learning, it will definitely set the career a lot, I think in many ways a lot more successfully going forward in the integration process in your organization.”

What do you hope our listeners will take away from this program? “I think that one element of the decision making process, whether it’s what school to go to or what I have to think about doing after MBA that I would stress is it’s okay not to know for sure. You know have to necessarily be so focused to say I know exactly what I am going to do when I graduate therefore that is why I enrolled in this program at this particular school. Most people are going back and getting their MBA either mid career or earlier. I believe, in my opinion it’s perfectly okay to be doing that because you’re not too sure what you want to do long term. There are elements of what maybe you’ve been doing that you want to leverage and you want to continue but it may be a different industry, it may be in a slightly different function, it may be in a different geography. That’s all okay, I think that it is perfectly understandable for someone to take that approach when they are selecting a school because that’s what you’re there for; you’re there to get that kind of exposure to find out where you belong and enjoy it because it’s a great experience, personally speaking and one that it can make a difference. It doesn’t punch a ticket for success automatically by any stretch but it is certainly something that can be helped on a number of levels.”

For information, advice and to register for your bi-weekly MBA Podcast, visit mbapodcaster.com. I’m Diana Jordan with MBA Podcaster, thank you for listening and stay tuned next time when we discuss another topic that will help guide you through the MBA process and your career beyond.