In the
Country of the MBAs
The
number of business school students today is, oddly, difficult to quantify. A
Google search for the phrase “number of business school students worldwide”
turns up no hits. Three years ago, the Wall Street Journal suggested that, as is the case with lawyers, the field of
MBAs may be overcrowded. Like law students before them, business school
students may see their degrees commoditized.
If
you’re in business school now (or entering one), you may have read analyses
showing that the return on a US$125,000, two-year investment in an MBA degree
is not certain; or that career opportunities and management skills are as good
without one; or that many MBA programs do not help students develop the skills
needed to make ethical decisions or manage people well. (Three of the many
books on this subject stand out: Henry Mintzberg’s masterful polemic Managers
Not MBAs ;
Rakesh Khurana’s comprehensive and doleful history From Higher Aims
to Hired Hands; and Mariana Zanetti’s screed The
MBA Bubble.) But you also have an advantage over
lawyers, engineers, humanities Ph.D.s, and any other highly educated people
facing a shrinking job market. You have been (or are about to be) immersed in
the study of differentiation.
In business, differentiation is the path to
success: standing out from the competition, through your position or
capabilities or sheer force of will, enough to carve a future for yourself. You
will be called upon, throughout your career, to establish a distinct identity
for your company. The more capable your future employer (whether a business or
a not-for-profit) is at doing things other companies can’t copy — for example,
creating powerful products, meeting customer expectations, or cornering the
market in a particular sector — the more likely you will find success. You will
also, if you are sharp enough, be able to use similar techniques to establish a
distinct identity for yourself.
Personal differentiation isn’t just about
building a personal brand, although it is valuable to establish a reputation,
early on, for insights or expertise that few others can equal. It starts with
recognizing a sobering reality about management. Management is an eclectic
field, borrowing extensively from economics, statistics, psychology,
engineering, history, sociology, accounting, and computer science. In each of
these topics, people — including the members of your faculty, no matter how
eminent — borrow imperfectly, often unwittingly duplicating others’ discoveries
or seeing only part of the problems they are solving. The field is so broad,
and so fragmented, that no one knows everything in it. Indeed, it’s often
startling how little grasp even the most renowned experts have on the range of
management knowledge available to them.
(I say
this with some authority. I have been the editor-in-chief of this magazine for
11 years; an author or coauthor of several management and strategy books,
including The Age of
Heretics, a history of innovative and countercultural
management ideas; a ghostwriter on several other books; and a teacher in a
master’s program for new media entrepreneurs. But I am constantly humbled to
learn about major fields of research or practice that I didn’t know existed.)
Why does this matter? Because as John Milton
Keynes famously pointed out, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite
exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct
economist.” In other words, any decision made in business is a bet about the
way the world works. And until you understand the theory you’re betting on, you
can’t really test the decision or improve it.
So,
what theories should you understand? As you go through school, spend as much
time as you can learning about real enterprises: volunteering or doing
internships, working during breaks, perhaps even founding your own. Look for
the gaps in knowledge that managers have. For example, you may find yourself at
a medium-sized company — a supplier of parts, or a relatively small technology
firm with just a few patents. Many of these businesses have self-imposed
limits; they do not look outside their technical specialties, and may not see
opportunities available to them. They may not understand the logic of extending
innovation into new domains. They may be like Polaroid, the pioneer innovator
of instant photography. The company began to develop electronic shutters and
imaging in the 1960s, but never broke away from producing paper-based printing,
and thus
couldn’t compete when digital photography emerged.
You may learn something about continuous
improvement — the chain of ideas going back to statistical analysis to Western
Electric, to W. Edwards Deming, to Taichi Ohno in Japan, to Lean Production, to
Six Sigma, and much more. These ideas, grounded in diagnostic exercises as
rigorous as any forensic investigation, are often relegated to the shop
floor. But they also have immense strategic value, if you know how to
make the most of them.
Pay close attention to the practices of
managing people. The theories are so redundant and contradictory that they will
feel like they are bending around themselves like origami. You may indeed have
gone into business in the first place because the subject of finance is
relatively clean and clear; it doesn’t have the messy ambiguities of, say,
psychology or literature. Such preferences don’t matter. You will end up
distinguishing yourself (or not) on your ability not just to work with others,
but to inspire them, draw insight from them, observe them accurately, and
contribute to their growth and development. The more people you oversee, the
deeper the challenges will be, and the more you will be called upon to
transcend your own human limits. There are many theories about how to do this,
often under the rubric of leadership. Most of them are much too
situation-specific to be of value — except when you need them.
Those who work with you, no matter your
background, will recognize the depth of the challenge — and whether you rise to
it. “I was formerly a carpenter at a construction company,” a personal trainer
told me recently, “and every year we’d get another new boss fresh out of
business school. They knew nothing about the business, but they thought they
knew everything.” That’s the stereotype you will face. That’s what many people
will expect from you. Your opportunity to distinguish yourself starts with
being more willing than other MBA students to learn as you go, and with being
more attuned to the high stakes of every decision you make.
Everyone else will be unconsciously following
the dictates of some dead economist. In the country of the MBAs, you’ll have to
strive to cultivate your judgment and figure out which ideas are worth
heeding.
Art Kleiner
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/In-the-Country-of-the-MBAs?gko=8e99f&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20160901&utm_campaign=resp
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