As I was surfing the web the other day I came across an article titled “Business School is a Joke“, written by a 19-year old sophomore in the Ross School of Business’s undergraduate business program. In many ways, I see what he’s saying in his article, though in many ways I vigorously disagree - perhaps due to my age, experience, the fact that I’m in a master’s program instead of an undergraduate one, or the program I’m actually in. However, here are some of the main points his article:
Here, he’s talking about a local deli’s head of corporate strategy and managing parter.
During her 45 minute PowerPoint-guided presentation, she said the word “growth” eleven times; she talked about deliverables and accountability; she went over their various systems, their management structure, and their mission statement. She didn’t mention sandwiches until I asked her which one she liked the most. She didn’t mention that the owners traveled extensively picking ingredients at tiny farms and bakeries, or brag about their customer service (their founder wrote a best-selling book about it), or describe their massive mail-order sales, or explain the seminars and tastings from which they generate a substantial profit, etc. In short, she didn’t really say anything at all, and yet the kids around me were taking notes.
That’s the root of the problem. That’s what the business school teaches us to do. Not once has a professor told us to “make great products” or “do something people love.”
Here’s a newsflash: the person was probably talking about corporate strategy, and trying to be generic. Corporate strategy doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with “products you love”, but about taking someone else’s product and maximizing it. It’s like a chess game; you don’t worry about your individual pawns or pieces, per se, you worry about winning the game. So I think maybe he missed the point on this one.
One of his good points comes from examining the depth of his classes:
There’s nothing wrong with introductory classes. Basic concepts, after all, need to be addressed early on. The problem was (a) the lack of rigor: we were taught to “plug and play” numbers (in accounting, too) rather than understand them.
Now I can say that we are rigorous in my program; we definitely don’t teach “plug and play” numbers here. Depth of understanding can help in interpretation. However, at the undergraduate level (and in the beginning of the program, no less) perhaps the importance isn’t always in understanding how the work is done but what the results mean. I see his point, but I disagree with his viewpoint on this one.
Here’s another gem from his rant:
At business school, it seems, bullshit wins.
Again, I’m going to disagree. For very few professions out there is time irrelevant. So, while striving for absolute quality is perhaps admirable, striving to maximize time and results is a even more admirable. In paraphrasing (and loosely applying) the 80/20 rule, if I can produce 80% of the results from 20% of the effort it otherwise takes, then I can actually do a lot more with my time if I let quality slip a bit. It’s not about bullshit, it’s about optimizaiton.
His concluding paragraph, despite some of the quality of his earlier points, proves to me that he’s missing the point:
Mandatory group work teaches you how to manage, and thus it’s at the heart of a curriculum designed to build professional managers. What this really means, though, is that it teaches kids how to assign tasks to people who aren’t capable of doing them, how to schedule wasteful meetings to re-format and explain individuals’ work, and how to make bad and inconsistent PowerPoint presentations. I’ve read enough Dilbert to know that the b-school model of management is accurate, but that doesn’t make it good.
You see, being an effective manager or even leading people isn’t just assigning tasks to people who aren’t capable of doing them. If I go out there and do little more than schedule wasteful meetings, than I haven’t learned what they taught me here. Instead, effective management is about producing great work from good people. It’s about figuring out the best way to do things, not just a good way. It’s about distilling patterns from unrelated facts. It’s about arranging individual resources to produce the maximum result possible, while taking little to no credit for success and all the blame for failure. That is what business school is about, not producing Dilbert-like managers who consume more than they produce.
And that’s why I think he really missed the point.
