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Full-time MBA programs by their nature attract many of the wrong people--too impatient and analytical, with little experience in management itself. These may be fine traits for students, but they can be tragically ill-suited for managers.

Conventional MBA programs then compound the error by giving the wrong impression of management: that managers are important people disconnected from the daily work of making products and producing services; that managing is largely about decision making through analysis; that managers pronounce deliberate strategies for everyone else to implement; and worst of all, that by sitting still in a classroom for a couple of years, you are now ready to manage anything.

When it comes to business education, for better or worse -- and I think for worse -- business schools are followers, not leaders. Typically, business schools hold their finger up to the wind and ask, What do our customers want? They have two kinds of customers. One is the people who are doing the hiring, and the other is the students. I happen to think that's a pernicious concept -- the idea that students are customers -- because it assumes that students know best what kind of education they should have. But that is the culture in most business schools.

Over the last fifteen years there have been a lot of ratings of business schools, and these ratings are very akin to customer-satisfaction ratings. You're basically asking the students, How good was the experience? That presumes that the students know what it is that they should be learning, or whether the environment in a particular school is better than another school that they never attended. And that attitude really undermines the notion of education. If you don't believe that the educational institution and the professors know more about the learning process than you do, then you shouldn't bother to go to the school. The notion that these are customers deflates a lot of quality; if professors are constantly rated on how well the students like them and the course, then the rigor and challenge of the course is oftentimes diluted. In other words, the measure of the professor's success in the classroom is an artificial measure. So all these ratings have had the effect of dumbing down the curriculum of a lot of business schools.

Business schools teach you the language of business, and that's quite useful. It's like if you want to go to work in France you have to learn French. It doesn't mean you're going to be very good in France, but it's good to learn the language. I think that what business schools do is to teach you the language of business and some managerial skills, that sort of stuff. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be any kind of a good businessman, manager or even a good leader.