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Harvard Business School creates value through its ability to find great people, extract them from their companies, turn them into free agents, assemble them in one place in Boston, and then spit them out on an extremely predictable schedule in a manner that is user-friendly to people who want to hire them. It's not the faculty members who are doing the most useful work at these institutions. It's the admissions staff and the placement office that create the real value.

Basically my objection is that MBA programs claim to be creating managers and they are not. The MBA is really about business, which would be fine except that people leave these programs thinking they've been trained to do management. I think every MBA should have a skull and crossbones stamped on their forehead and underneath should be written: "Warning: not prepared to manage".

And the issue is not just that they are not trained to manage, but that they are given a totally wrong impression of what managing is; namely decision-making by analysis. The impression they get from what they've studied is that people skills don't really matter.

So they come out with this distorted view. I've seen it over and over again where people have MBAs and go into managerial positions and don't know what they are doing. So basically they write reports and plans and do all sorts of information processing things and pretend that it's management. It's killing organizations, and I think it's getting worse over time.

I'm critical of management programs that promise boot camps. Managers live boot camps every day of their lives. What they need is to slow down and reflect.

Law school worships understanding, business school worships skill. Law-school students scrutinize what has been done. If business-school students don't quite learn by doing, they learn how things have been done.

The case method does little to cultivate caution. Decisiveness is rewarded, not inaction. Students can become trigger-happy as a result, committed "to taking action where action may not be justified or to force a solution where none is feasible." Class discussions can easily polarize. Persuasiveness is valued-but not publicly changing one's own mind. Few students do so in the course of discussion; if anything, positions tend to harden as debate continues. Skilled managers, by contrast, try to stay flexible, altering their positions as new evidence and arguments emerge.

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.

A profession has a codified body of knowledge, and to practice a profession you need to be trained and certified...But we don't have much codified knowledge in management, and we certainly have no accreditation that ensures people are good managers; in fact, the most common accreditation-the MBA-is exactly the opposite. We have great managers who have never spent a day in a management program. We don't have great surgeons who never spent a day in medical school, or great engineers who never studied physics. So the idea of management as a profession doesn't hold up at all. There's no aspect of management that conforms to professional qualifications.

As far as being a science, physics is a science; chemistry and biology are sciences. Management isn't a science; it isn't about finding truth. Management isn't even an applied science, because that's still a science. Management is the application of science, among many other things. Managers use whatever they can in a practical way to get things done or to encourage other people to get things done.

Most management is a craft-that is, it relies on experience, on-the-job learning. I put it this way: It's as much about doing in order to think as thinking in order to do.

The typical business school today is concerned with business functions, not management. Certainly managers have to understand business functions-marketing, accounting, sales, and so on-but the practice of business is not the same as the practice of management. Mixing all these functions together in a person is not going to produce a manager.

Now, while business schools have been successful in analyzing things, in separating all these specialized functions, they have not been successful in putting them together, in synthesizing them into a coherent vision or integrated system. That's the difficult-and the interesting-part of management.

The trouble with business schools' emphasis on analysis is that it leads to an emphasis on technique or formula thinking. I define technique as something that can be used in place of a brain, and management schools have made a specialty of offering courses in techniques-empowerment techniques for human resources or portfolio models for financial resources. I'm not saying that technique doesn't have a place in management, but it must be used carefully and in context, not generically by people on the fast track who see technique as a way of compensating for a lack of experience. You've heard of the so-called rule of the tool: Give somebody a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Well, MBA programs have given their graduates so many hammers that many organizations look like smashed-up beds of nails.

When I was at Stanford a professor of organizational behavior told a bunch of us, "You folks kill me. You've spent all your time on economics, on statistics, on policy, on accounting. Those of you that are going to end up running businesses, you're going to hire economists and CFOs and IT people and statisticians. But what it's all about is motivating people; it's getting to know people." That was one of the best pieces of advice that I ever got. Don't lose the human side of business, don't lose the organizational side. Because if you do, you're only going to get so far.

I hate management books but I'm a big fan of business books. I love to read about business, strategy and very clever business people. I love to read about marketing, corporate finance, the new accounting tools that are coming in. But no management book can tell you how to be a CEO. The MBA is a commodity - it's a guidebook but it's theory. There is nothing to match practice and the practice is all about managing people. If you understand people, you'll make it.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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Business schools are invaluable for laying the foundations for the practice of management. This is especially true for marketing, finance, or human resources, but far less so for strategy. The problem with the current system is that it forces strategy into the direct and narrow approach to teaching. If the shortest distance between two points in geometry is a straight line, then the shortest distance between teaching and learning consists of making students internalize concepts as rapidly and as efficiently as possible. A deep grasp of strategy, however, resists this approach because understanding strategy means seeing and understanding parts and wholes simultaneously.

In strategy, good foundations consist of understanding the whole and the parts of strategy, separately and together. Business schools are ideal for understanding the parts, less so for the wholes, and not at all for the relationship between the two. Understanding this relationship is at the heart of strategy.

There is a balance between talking and thinking, analysis and reflection. Teaching strategy moves back and forth between these dualities. The desired outcome is strong intuitive capabilities combined with a developed ability to articulate. Intuitive capabilities are essential for recognizing the parts and wholes that make up strategy; articulating is necessary for exploring and developing an understanding of how they interact. The process exists to ensure that intuition helps articulation and articulating reinforces intuition.

The process can easily go wrong, and our present educational systems almost ensure that it does go wrong. Direct learning reinforces the tendency to over-articulate. Students learn to apply SWOT analysis, industry analysis, or value chain analysis but these tools drain strategy of its complexity and nuance. The opposite is also true. Paradoxically, direct learning reinforces the tendency to be over-intuitive. Students learn strategy as a set of disconnected and abstract words. From there it is a small step to mastering words like 'competencies', 'vision', and 'leadership' which explain very little.

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 train people to sit in their offices and look for case studies. The more Harvard succeeds, the more business fails.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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MBA programmes tend to emphasise analysis and technique - they teach you to understand market research, to evaluate financial data and so on. All those things are fine and important but if you take that to be management, you're in trouble. Conventional MBA programmes are mostly for young people with little or no experience. Management isn't a science or a profession that can be taught in a classroom. It's a practice. And it's a practice that grows out of experience.

Think about what business schools do:They train people to talk about ideas and concepts and to solve problems. But the one thing they typically don't do is train students how to actually do anything - not just analyze problems but implement their solutions in the messy world of real people.

Ask yourself this question:Would you undergo heart surgery if the surgeon had been trained in the same way that business-school students are trained? Imagine that the surgeon had sat around in medical school discussing heart-surgery cases, watching heart-surgery videos, and listening to great heart surgeons talk about what they did - and now you're lying on the operating table, as that surgeon's first real patient.Would you let that surgeon cut you open?

The truth is that business school is more about talking than doing. After graduation, many B-school students take jobs in management consulting. I've always found the job market to be perplexing for this reason:You can be a plant manager - actually have what it takes to run a plant - and make up to $100,000 a year. Or you can talk about plant management and make twice that. Why do people get paid more for talking about things than for actually doing them? The message from the job market is that it's more important and more valuable to be clever than it is to have the ability to make something happen.

I've always conceived a business school education as being a process of helping you learn how to learn from experience. It should put you in a position where, when you leave and start having experiences in the workplace, you will make the most of those experiences as you continue to learn.

The best business schools will tell you that management education is mainly about building skills--one of the most important of which is the ability to think (or what the M.B.A.s call "problem solving"). But do they manage to teach such skills?

What they don't seem to teach you in business school is that "the five forces" and "the seven Cs" and every other generic framework for problem solving are heuristics: they can lead you to solutions, but they cannot make you think. Case studies may provide an effective way to think business problems through, but the point is rather lost if students come away imagining that you can go home once you've put all of your eggs into a two-by-two growth-share matrix.

Next to analysis, communication skills must count among the most important for future masters of the universe. To their credit, business schools do stress these skills, and force their students to engage in make-believe presentations to one another. On the whole, however, management education has been less than a boon for those who value free and meaningful speech. M.B.A.s have taken obfuscatory jargon-otherwise known as bullshit-to a level that would have made even the Scholastics blanch.

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.

Management education and management practice have been anchored in functions, or what academics refer to as disciplines. The last two decades have seen phenomenal growth in the body of knowledge and associated expertise in the field of management. Drawing on disciplines such as economics, psychology and sociology, business schools developed their own acumen in areas such as finance and marketing. Faculty became experts in these areas and spawned many generations of business graduates with strong functional expertise. A general management orientation was traditionally achieved by integrative courses that drew on all functional areas. The "chinks in the armour" of this approach have been apparent for some time. The "silo mentality" of business is a direct result of this functional focus.

Before the tremendous bodies of functional knowledge emerged, the focus was on issues. The challenge today is to build on the functional knowledge without being a prisoner of it.

I could spend days talking about management style. But every business is different - there is not a recipe or a Drucker book in which you can learn about management. Doing an MBA you will learn about strategy, finance, marketing...but you will never learn about management. You will only learn about management by doing it.

If you want a two year break from life, go to business school. If you want to meet a bunch of new, generally smart, and always interesting people, go to business school. If you are a techie but like the business side of things, want to get an intellectual (and functional grounding) in business stuff, want a two year break from life, and want to meet interesting people, go to business school.

The reality is that almost all the high professions require continuing education in order to ensure that their practitioners are up to date with the newest knowledge and techniques. Given the rapidity by which our business context is changing, the graduates of business schools should be able to access continuing education. If we really do believe that knowledge is important for effective practice, then it would seem that having some mechanism for connecting graduates to what is relevant would be very important.

My worry-and this is not limited to business schools-is that we have created a context in which people want the status of a profession without any of the constraints of a profession. A profession is not only about the benefits that you claim. It's also about what you renounce.

I think one of the roles of a professional school in higher education is to make clear to the students not only the privileges they get but also the responsibilities that they have, and then to create the necessary governance systems to ensure that those responsibilities are fulfilled to the best of everyone's ability.

The letters MBA should, if the schools were honest, stand for Master of Business Analysis, because the tools and disciplines of analysis are what the students learn, not management, or administration as it used to be called. Analysis is a necessary part of good management and leadership but it is not the whole of it. Who to trust, how to inspire, how brave to be, how forgiving or not—these relationship and judgment skills may be discussed in a classroom but they can only be learned by practicing them.

You can bring the world into the classroom but you cannot replicate it there. The new MBA graduate should carry a white flag as she or he goes to work for the first time—"I know how to count," it would say. "Now teach me how to do."

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand. But often, you can't.

A great business design school would have the student go much deeper on understanding the user and the user experience than we currently do in business schools. I would like to have students start with a project where they have to go out and understand everything they can about users – whether it be beer drinkers or car drivers.The skills you need for this are skills of observation and inquiry and we don’t teach that in MBA programs.

MBA students need more than professed values. They need to know that the world is morally complex and morally dangerous. They need to know that bad deeds can come from good values. They need to know that valuing integrity enough to keep one’s hands off other people’s money is only the beginning, not the end of business ethics.

There are many ethical questions in business life that we cannot answer by professing values. And the wrong answer to those questions can start us unawares down a slippery slope that quickly turns sticky. Devoting an hour or two of an MBA curriculum to moral philosophy is a good way to give students an understanding of why professed values will not protect them against such moral dangers. Yes, it’s important to make the philosophical complexities simple! And of course it is important to move quickly to practice.

But a quick look at just three moral philosophers – Aristotle, Kant, and Mill – shows why confident reliance on professed values can make for bad ethics Aristotle valued virtue or character. Kant valued rationality and duty. Mill valued utility.

All those values are good, but they often conflict in practical life. A manager may value kindness as a virtue and therefore rightly want to avoid lay offs. But the same manager may simultaneously and rightly feel a need for layoffs because he or she also values profit (utility) and duty to shareholders.

Managers in such situations where their real values conflict with each other will hardly be helped by pre-announced values claims. Rather they need to know what Aristotle, Kant, and Mill teach, together if not individually. Good values such as virtue, duty, and utility can conflict. In such cases, managers need some other things besides supposed values or even real values to help decide what’s right.

An occupation earns the right to be a profession only when some ideals, such as being an impartial counsel, doing no harm, or serving the greater good, are infused into the conduct of people in that occupation. In like vein, a school becomes a professional school only when it infuses those ideals into its graduates. A business school does that effectively when it forces its students to ask, “How do I want to change the world for the better?” and provides them with the skills, tools, and values to bring that about in a responsible manner.

Business schools are teaching ethics and corporate social responsibility, but they do not teach these subjects in the context of building a higher-ambition or a high commitment, high performance firm. Students learn about finance and organizational behavior, for example, without ever learning how to integrate these and many other disciplines (marketing, operations, etc.) into a coherent, internally consistent set of practices that collectively reinforce a higher- ambition mission. If financial considerations require cost cutting, what should be the stance of the company toward layoffs if management also aspires to develop commitment from employees? If the company strategy calls for rapid growth, can this be done without diluting the higher-ambition culture? If you are trying to develop such a culture, rapid growth makes it harder to find people who fit the culture and possess the capabilities needed. And business schools... do not ask students to reflect on their values and define who they are and then help them see how these values relate to decisions they make about strategy, performance measurement, growth, and so on.

In short, business schools... do not teach integrity. By integrity we mean learning about (1) how different disciplines must be integrated with each other and higher-ambition purpose and values, and (2) how students' espoused higher-ambition values are reflected in decisions and actions they recommend should be taken in marketing, strategy, and finance. What business schools need is a course that teaches students how to think and act to build a higher-ambition firm.