I don't want to say this but there is some certainty. Many people from various disciplines now pay heavily to apply for MBA and other business related courses. Many don't have any background knowledge in business and don't have time to attend the first year taught course regularly. Handicapped, they rely on experts to write their thesis for them, maneuvering their way to pass and get hold of the degree with their money. It is not surprising that if this worrying trend is not changed, we will churn out empty-headed MBA scholars!
Sounds interesting a question. Perhaps it is so because they train students who eventually end up international trade or in order forms of trade.
That is the purpose to know the game of trading on some scale .Rules and regulations keep changing , what is essential is to understand the "tricks of the trade" as they say ...
this is such a general question with an implicit conclusion that I disagree with. You can’t conclude ALL B schools In your question.
I don't want to say this but there is some certainty. Many people from various disciplines now pay heavily to apply for MBA and other business related courses. Many don't have any background knowledge in business and don't have time to attend the first year taught course regularly. Handicapped, they rely on experts to write their thesis for them, maneuvering their way to pass and get hold of the degree with their money. It is not surprising that if this worrying trend is not changed, we will churn out empty-headed MBA scholars!
this is pertinent to India. Not all but almost all schools of management have been dwindling. The standard is deteriorating and that 's the reason that MBA degree has started giving employment but not business or entrepreneurs
Business schools are on the wrong track. For many years, MBA programs enjoyed rising respectability in academia and growing prestige in the business world. Their admissions were ever more selective, the pay packages of graduates ever more dazzling. Today, however, MBA programs face intense criticism for failing to impart useful skills, failing to prepare leaders, failing to instill norms of ethical behavior—and even failing to lead graduates to good corporate jobs. These criticisms come not just from students, employers, and the media but also from deans of some of America’s most prestigious business schools, including Dipak Jain at Northwestern University’s top-ranked Kellogg School of Management. One outspoken critic, McGill University professor Henry Mintzberg, says that the main culprit is a less-than-relevant MBA curriculum. If the number of reform efforts under way is any indication, many deans seem to agree with this charge. But genuine reform of the MBA curriculum remains elusive. We believe that is because the curriculum is the effect, not the cause, of what ails the modern business school.
The actual cause of today’s crisis in management education is far broader in scope and can be traced to a dramatic shift in the culture of business schools. During the past several decades, many leading B schools have quietly adopted an inappropriate—and ultimately self-defeating—model of academic excellence. Instead of measuring themselves in terms of the competence of their graduates, or by how well their faculties understand important drivers of business performance, they measure themselves almost solely by the rigor of their scientific research. They have adopted a model of science that uses abstract financial and economic analysis, statistical multiple regressions, and laboratory psychology. Some of the research produced is excellent, but because so little of it is grounded in actual business practices, the focus of graduate business education has become increasingly circumscribed—and less and less relevant to practitioners.
This scientific model, as we call it, is predicated on the faulty assumption that business is an academic discipline like chemistry or geology. In fact, business is a profession, akin to medicine and the law, and business schools are professional schools—or should be. Like other professions, business calls upon the work of many academic disciplines. For medicine, those disciplines include biology, chemistry, and psychology; for business, they include mathematics, economics, psychology, philosophy, and sociology. The distinction between a profession and an academic discipline is crucial. In our view, no curricular reforms will work until the scientific model is replaced by a more appropriate model rooted in the special requirements of a profession.
Before asking how business education should change, we need to examine its evolution. Most business schools claim a dual mission: to educate practitioners and to create knowledge through research. Historically, business schools have emphasized the former at the expense of the latter. In fact, for the first half of the twentieth century, B schools were more akin to trade schools; most professors were good ole boys dispensing war stories, cracker-barrel wisdom, and the occasional practical pointer. We remember when MIT’s Sloan School of Management was known as MIT School of Industrial Management and its production class was taught by the manager of a nearby General Motors assembly plant. That was a useful, but hardly comprehensive and professional, education.
Then, in 1959, prompted at least in part by the enormous demand for professional managers in a booming postwar economy, the Ford and Carnegie foundations issued devastating reports on the woeful state of business school research and theory. Both foundations recommended ways to give B schools respectable academic underpinnings and offered grant money toward achieving that end. Driven by conscience and cash, top-tier universities began to treat their business schools almost as seriously as law schools. By the end of the twentieth century, nearly all the nation’s leading business schools—the two dozen or so elite MBA-granting institutions and another dozen schools fighting to join the highest echelon—offered a curriculum of academic distinction. But, in the process, their focus switched, and now the objective of most B schools is to conduct scientific research. Going back to the trade school paradigm would be a disaster. Still, we believe it is necessary to strike a new balance between scientific rigor and practical relevance.
The Scientific Model
Virtually none of today’s top-ranked business schools would hire, let alone promote, a tenure-track professor whose primary qualification is managing an assembly plant, no matter how distinguished his or her performance. Nor would they hire professors who write articles only for practitioner reviews, like this one. Instead, the best B schools aspire to the same standards of academic excellence that hard disciplines embrace—an approach sometimes waggishly referred to as “physics envy.” In departments such as physics and economics, top faculty members have few responsibilities other than to attend to their disciplines. They are not required to train practitioners or to demonstrate practical uses of their work; and they are free to do whatever research they choose and to produce subsequent, even more focused, generations of scholars. In this scientific model, the university exists primarily to support the scholar’s interests. For the most part, universities accept this arrangement and the intellectual premise on which it rests: namely, that universities help society advance by supporting scientists who push back the boundaries of knowledge. They leave the practical implications to others.
It’s very different in schools of law and medicine, which deliberately engage with the outside world. Law schools expect faculty members to be first-rate scholars; in fact, articles published in law reviews are often cited in trials. But these institutions also value professors’ ability to teach. Similarly, medical schools carry on advanced biological research, but most members of the teaching faculty are also practicing doctors.
Why have business schools embraced the scientific model of physicists and economists rather than the professional model of doctors and lawyers? Although few B school faculty members would admit it, professors like it that way. This model gives scientific respectability to the research they enjoy doing and eliminates the vocational stigma that business school professors once bore. In short, the model advances the careers and satisfies the egos of the professoriat. And, frankly, it makes things easier: Though scientific research techniques may require considerable skill in statistics or experimental design, they call for little insight into complex social and human factors and minimal time in the field discovering the actual problems facing managers.
Business school professors using the scientific approach often begin with data that they use to test a hypothesis by applying such tools as regression analysis. Instead of entering the world of business, professors set up simulations (hypothetical portfolios of R&D projects, for instance) to see how people might behave in what amounts to a laboratory experiment. In some instances those methods are useful, necessary, and enlightening. But because they are at arm’s length from actual practice, they often fail to reflect the way business works in real life.
When applied to business—essentially a human activity in which judgments are made with messy, incomplete, and incoherent data—statistical and methodological wizardry can blind rather than illuminate. Consider some of the most difficult questions facing managers: How does a culture of celebrity affect leadership? How should a CEO be compensated? How does one design global operations so they are at once effective and equitable? What is the purpose of a corporation beyond the creation of shareholder value? Such broad, multifaceted questions do not easily lend themselves to scientific experiment or validation.
When applied to business—where judgments are made with messy, incomplete data—statistical and methodological wizardry can blind rather than illuminate.
Another consequence of the scientific model is that professors’ evaluations are influenced by the number of articles they publish in A-list business research journals. Submissions to these discipline-based publications are refereed by anonymous panels of scholars who assess research findings based on objective, scientific standards. Those safeguards, de rigueur for A-list journals, help ensure that published research passes scientific muster. Indeed, the system works fairly well in the hard business disciplines, such as economics and finance, to which mathematical modeling can be easily applied. Even in finance, however, the system creates pressure on scholars to publish articles on narrow subjects chiefly of interest to other academics, not practitioners.
To be fair, some of what is published in A-list journals is excellent, imaginative, and valuable. But much is not. A renowned CEO doubtless speaks for many when he labels academic publishing a “vast wasteland” from the point of view of business practitioners. In fact, relevance is often systematically expunged from these journals. For instance, a leading management journal recently reviewed the results of a promising study of the behavior of several thousand leaders in global corporations. The initial research results showed that certain indicators of leadership misbehavior could be monitored to identify ethical problems before a crisis occurs. Unfortunately, that finding could not be proved in a strictly scientific sense. As a result, the version of the article that was finally published focused not on developing practical methods to reduce organizational risk but, instead, on questioning a minor detail in a previous study on a different subject. The article was factual, but it was neither interesting nor useful.
Scholars, in their own defense, argue that the gradual accumulation of tiny facts will one day accrete to a larger and more general scientific understanding of organizational behavior. Practitioners who have to make real decisions, however, must meanwhile look elsewhere for guidance, notably to the business press and to the best-seller list—now home to fewer and fewer books by faculty members.
Most issues facing business leaders are, in the final analysis, questions of judgment. What looks like a straightforward financial decision—say, to cut costs by relocating a service center—often has implications for marketing, sales, manufacturing, and morale that can’t be shoehorned into an equation. Strategic decisions, especially, are likely to go awry when based purely on quantitative factors, as Robert McNamara—the developer of many such techniques at Ford and, later, the U.S. Department of Defense—ruefully admits. In what amounts to a major mea culpa, he now argues that hard analysis often leads to overweighting the value of the knowledge you have. Of course, this bias affects everyone, not just scientists, but the aura of quantification masks the fact that social scientists often assume that the variables not included in their equations are insignificant. In business research, however, the things routinely ignored by academics on the grounds that they cannot be measured—most human factors and all matters relating to judgment, ethics, and morality—are exactly what make the difference between good business decisions and bad ones.
As McNamara’s Vietnam War–era experience painfully demonstrates, leaders tend to get into trouble not by fouling up the numbers but by failing to give the correct weight to all the quantitative and qualitative factors that should figure in their decisions. The greatest risks they run are the by-products of their trained tendency to define problems in terms of what they know and then to fall back on past behavior when faced with a new challenge. As McNamara concedes, “We see what we want to believe.” That is not surprising; most of us wear the concrete shoes of our earlier successes. But in a rapidly changing global economy, business education should help students learn to recognize their conditioned reflexes. However reassuring the halo of science, it can also lull us into a false sense of confidence that we are making objective decisions.
By allowing the scientific research model to drive out all others, business schools are institutionalizing their own irrelevance. We fear that this will be a difficult problem to correct because many business professors lack enough confidence in the legitimacy of their enterprise to define their own agenda. For example, business economics journals today are practically indistinguishable from traditional economics journals. And, not to be “out-scienced,” management researchers now focus on technical issues that have the look and feel of topics studied by their peers in the harder disciplines.
Business scholars could take a lesson from their colleagues in the discipline of psychology, which was stifling under the scientific model three or four decades ago. Psychological research then was dominated by rigorous, but ultimately unproductive, studies of reaction time. As long as psychology professors labored within that small area, they learned little that was of value to anyone. It was only after they began to apply their imaginations—and rigor—to much broader problems that psychology began to make enormous strides. Not until respected psychologists dared to ask questions that mattered, whether or not they could be quantified in traditional ways, were groundbreaking studies undertaken, such as the Nobel Prize–winning work of Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky on how people make financial decisions. Unfortunately, most B school professors still limit their sights to what they can measure readily—a kind of “methodolatry”—instead of searching for new ways to study what is important. In fact, management professors seem to have an almost morbid fear of being damned as popularizers. Do they believe that the regard of their peers is more important than studying what really matters to executives who can put their ideas into practice? Apparently so.
Who Gets Tenure
This new emphasis on scientific research in business schools remains, for the most part, unspoken. Indeed, most deans publicly deny it exists, claiming that their schools remain focused on practice, albeit with an increasing awareness of the value of rigorous research. Here we must watch what leaders do, not what they say. At elite business schools, and at the wannabes emulating their practices, the shift toward the centrality of scientific research is evidenced almost everywhere.
Just look at the hiring and tenure processes. Deans may say they want practitioner-oriented research, but their schools reward scientific research designed to please academics. By recruiting and promoting those who publish in discipline-based journals, business schools are creating faculties filled with individuals whose main professional aspiration is a career devoted to science. Today it is possible to find tenured professors of management who have never set foot inside a real business, except as customers.
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