“Should I Do a MBA?”

The question I am most often asked by mid-level managers in the companies I work with is about whether doing an MBA at this stage of their career will help them. Frankly, I don’t know. Being the truth, that answer never works. So, I throw a few dozen questions back at them: ‘help?’ ‘help with what?’ or on their purpose, aptitude, what they have enjoyed doing, what will happen if they just continue the way they have been going, and many such probes. Some of them do get enough pointers to go find the answer for themselves.

Management schools have found a gold mine in offering management courses for working professionals. The jury is out on whether the strictly academic atmosphere is a help or a hindrance to the executive. Several decades ago, it was Henri Fayol who claimed that “managerial ability can and should be acquired in the same way as technical ability at school, later in the workshop”.

But, as a practitioner, I have found Managing to be, above all else, a facilitating activity. There is nothing technical about it.

For me, a teacher at Management Schools, the ambience in a classroom full of executives is a major positive, because one is talking to people who have seen the insides of an office, walked the corridors reverberating with whispers, watched the hierarchy take on unpredictable forms of its own, and therefore, can and do appreciate the shared stories that pour in from participants in the class.

As Henry Mintzberg from the INSEAD Business School, and author of the famous 2009 book, “Managers Not MBAs” puts it:

“But what is the use of a few years of experience, especially when it is not managerial? Can that install the necessary depth of understanding about how organisations work and what management means?”

It is truly heart-breaking that lot of managers today have managed Projects and Products, but not People. The Team Leads in our companies are responsible for the results that the team will produce, but not for the individuals in the Team. The MBA course contents are clearly incompatible, as this 2003 “Message from the Dean” on the Harvard Business School website says:

“Our goal is to create an environment where students learn how to tackle difficult, complex problems. . . . Students learn what it feels like to exercise judgment, make decisions, and take responsibility”.

Clearly, all these are skills that are acquired with practice, and hence will get qualified to be called as arts, rather than science.

When the Art part goes missing, several aberrations show up. Here is what happened with a recent Case Study Discussion in a room full of 80+ practising Managers:

1.   They proffer advice (a la Consultants) rather than “feel” for the problem and empathise with the pain for the end-user.

2.   More empathy for the buyer (who pays) than for the consumer (who uses).

3.   Amazing naiveté when it comes to Marketing and on the wonders it can accomplish.

4.   Technology becomes the “solution” to everything within the Case, and without.

5.   Throw in competition, and all suggestions will be on how to “beat ‘em all”.

6.   Love for frameworks is paramount. Every 2X2 matrix in the textbook will be dutifully populated with stuff from the Case.

7.   Platitudes. Superficiality. High-level aspirations. Abound, in plenty. (For eg., “the company must provide end-to-end service and earn the loyalty of their customers.”)

8.   Effortlessness, Being Artless? Being prescriptive. “Just do this. And everything will be all right.”

The problem seems to be the Work Experience of the Manager-Student. It comes squarely in the way of his/her learning. Truly, experience is a double-edged sword. Even as you throw many theories, examples and anecdotes at the executive-students, you can see that they are picking only those that make sense to them. These are usually the items validated by their experience thus far at the workplace.

Mintzberg has noticed this: “Effective managing therefore happens where art, craft, and science meet. But the experience of the students stops it from being appreciated. They can only look on as non-artists do—observing it without understanding how it came to be.”

Explaining the need for INSEAD’s 5-nation collaborative Executive MBA, we are told: “Using the classroom to help develop people already practicing management is a fine idea but pretending to create managers out of people who have never managed is a sham.”

So, Should you do a MBA? If you have been a Manager, and is willing to unlearn all that your experience has taught you, why not?