Peter Walker writing on-line at www.guardian.co.uk discusses whether the old style leadership teachings at business schools may have contributed to the financial fiasco today. Do Professors need to do some serious reflecting about what they are indoctrinating students with?
" Too many MBA programmes, the simplified version goes, draw in young, greedy types with little business experience and indoctrinate them with half-baked management and finance theories, along with an unshakeable belief in their own talents, before sending them out to earn ill-deserved fortunes in investment banking and consulting."
Clearly a controversial argument but many are questioning the nature of the courses on offer. Professors are pondering whether the theories they taught played a role in the troubles we find ourselves in today.
Mauro F Guillen, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton school concedes regret: "We didn't ring the bell. It's very easy for me to say in hindsight, 'I wish I'd emphasised the idea that leadership and compensation systems can produce these perverse and negative effects'. But I don't think this has been an ethical issue. The problem was people were on auto-pilot, taking on enormous risks to meet certain targets."
Personally, I think we need a fresh take on the programmes and the values they impart. Perhaps now we will have the drive to move away from individualism and move towards servant leadership models and collaborative approaches to business with social accountability at a core level.
One professor Srikumar Rao, who has taught an MBA elective at London Business School, as well as schools in the US, with the grand title of Creativity and Personal Mastery. It requires students to plough through a reading list ranging from PG Wodehouse to books on Zen and quantum physics before addressing whether they even want to spend their lives working 15-hour days in the pursuit of riches. Rao says he is now encountering people "more ready to speak their minds. They are much more reflective. In fact, many have turned down offers at high-prestige firms in favour of asking, 'What can I do that really brings meaning to my life?'."
Unusually for a business school professor, Rao expresses serious misgivings about the fundamental ethos of such institutions: "Our top business schools are really not education institutions, they are indoctrination institutions. There are certain things which are so much dogma that you don't even want to encourage any challenge to them - the primacy and efficiency of markets, maximising shareholder value. These things are not in question."
Do you think we need to change the way we train our future business minds?
I agree with all that you say -- especially the bit about teaching about servant leadership models, collaborative approaches and social accountability.
But whilst today's MBA courses are woefully out of date, I fear that the education system as a whole is rather broken...
What do you think?
Posted by: twitter.com/tav | September 21, 2009 at 10:14 AM