Headline, September13, 2013

'''' !!! MBA TRAINS THE :

 WRONG PEOPLE -WRONG WAYS-

 WRONG REASON !!! '''

In late 90s, Professor Mintzberg was in hot pursuit of a personal goal that he wrote down on a scrap of paper and then locked it away in a vault at a bank in Montreal. He then considered and planned to open the vault someday to see if he had delivered on the goal. One of the things that he wrote : 'Change Management Education.'

It sounds like a strange ambition, given that management education in general, and the MBA in particular, has never been more popular. Top business schools are overflowing with application; companies  famous for their mutual love affair with MBAs  -Goldman Sachs, Mckinsey & Co. immediately come to mind-  now scramble to compete for the affections of the top graduates from the best schools. If it ain't broke, one can't help but wonder, why fix it?

Post that question to the Professor, and you'll get an earful as he explains, calmly but firmly, that management education is terribly broke. ''The MBA is a fabulous design for learning about business,'' he says. ''But if you are trying to train managers, it's dead wrong. The MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways for the wrong reasons.''

Mintzberg concedes that the U.S. style of management education is in demand around the world   -but mainly, he says, for the big bucks that such a degree confers upon its holder. 

''Right now, we are creating a new kind of new-aristocracy.'' he complains, ''a business class''  that believes it has the right to lead because it spent a couple of years in a classroom.'' But if you really want to learn how to be a manager, he says, you need to be in an environment with, well, other managers.

The Professor has other questions. How can aspiring managers expect to learn from business-school case studies   -which are obsolete on the day they are printed and which give the professor too much control over classroom discussion?

What does it mean to learn to think globally? It's not enough, Mintzberg insists, to teach American style ideas to a class with a smattering of students from outside the United States. 

To become a global minded manager, you have to learn how people from other counties and other cultures think and act in various situations. And how many companies really value the idea of management education itself  -    -as opposed to the credential itself?  ''I ask a lot managerial groups, 'What happened on the day you become a manager?'' says Mintzberg. ''And the answer, almost  inevitably, is 'Nothing.'

Lots of professors are good at raising provocative questions. What distinguishes  Mintzberg  is that he is devising answers. Along with a colleague, Jonathan Gosling of Lancaster University Management School, in the UK,  Mintzberg  has created an educational experience that in many ways the anti-MBA. The program, an International Masters in Practicing Management  -IMPM-   was in its fifth cycle in 2001. Nearly 180 participants have gone through the program.

And according to the those participants and their sponsoring executives, it has had an indelible impact on their personal and professional lives. ''It changes people more than any other program I've seen   -ever,'' says Frank McAuley, a Kellogg MBA and at the time, vice president for leadership effectiveness at the Royal Bank of Canada, which had sent scores of people through the program.

''It brings them to a different place.''

So what makes the  IMPM  different   -and more worthwhile-  for managers? Start with this : There is no home campus for the program, which consists of two-week modules spread over 16 months and five countries: Canada, France, India, Japan, and the UK. 

After each module, when the students have returned to work, they must write a ''reflection paper''  describing what they learned relate to their job. They meet regularly with a tutor in their area and work on  ''ventures,'' which are program-long projects to create real change in their own work environment.

There are five modules : Managing Self, the reflective mind-set, Managing Relationships, the collaborative mind-set, Managing Organizations, the analytic mind-set; Managing Context, the worldly mind-set; and Managing Change, the action mind-set. Each module is presented by one of the partner universities. 

Students travel to each campus for one module and spend the time immersed in the home culture of the country, making company visits, called ''Field Studies'' and learning from colleagues, some of whom are now in their home country.

''It has been absolutely a life changing experience,'' says Jane K. McCroary, a project manager for the online travel portal, (at the time) at Deutche Lufthansa AG and a member of the first graduating class. ''Somehow IMPM learning was implicit in the stomach in the gut.

You learned not implicit things but things that improved judgement and performance.''

In the IMPM, all students must be practicing managers and all must be sponsored by their companies. Students stay in their jobs, so that classroom activity can be connected to ongoing work experiences. The  IMPM also encourages people who already work in groups, whether those groups are in-person or virtual, to attend the program together. 

This is both a support Network and a better way of ensuring that new ideas will become reality when the participants return to the work world.

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With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the whole world. See Ya all on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless : '' ! For A Better World And Future ! ''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless