It'll be interesting to see if I'll get a black eye or a grin from fellow alumni board of governors for what am about to write. Business Week says that the number of MBA applicants in 2012 were flat or down at top schools. So why is demand for MBA education flat when there's an ever greater need of better management? Let's explore.
MBA education is more than a 100 years old. Tuck was the first school to offer a graduate management degree in 1900. This was a time when the industrial age was in full swing - teddy bears were mass produced and there was massive job growth for typewriter secretaries. The original MBA constituted a two year program covering accounting, statistics, banking and languages. Other parts of the world followed quickly after World War II to be as industrialized as America. A curriculum of core courses with electives became the norm during the second half of the century and since then we've mass produced MBAs (we manufacture about 100K MBAs a year) for humanity to consume.
Today, differentiation among MBA schools is blurred. Everyone talks much of the same thing - globalization, China, ethics, outsourcing, technology and so on. Everyone offers similar outcomes - higher paying jobs in consulting, investment banking and other industries (for the rest of us). If you don't believe me, do this experiment. Go to the websites of top 10 schools and ask a 12 year old to spot easy differences other than colors. Each business school tracks the other based on the hierarchy that Business Week buckets them in and tries to out-do the other. I'm somehow reminded of toothpastes in a grocery aisle - there are more and more nuanced toothpastes but all I do with it is brush my teeth. On why I think of toothpastes - read Different, an excellent book by Youngme Moon (an MBA professor who gently stepped out of the herd).
[STOP READING HERE if what am saying is offensive because I'm now planning to sound really stupid]
Spending time at NY Studio School and Singularity, made me wonder what I was doing there and eventually reflect on the future of MBA education. Grounding in management fundamentals is important but I think it's time look ahead.
Diversity of disciplines
Managers of the future will need to be interdisciplinary to the point that they are as comfortable with grasping biology as they are with computer security. This means that business schools will need to intersperse engineering, medicine, humanities and other disciplines into the curriculum - not as core courses but as points of departure to expose MBA students to real life. Exposure to robotics will change perspective on inventory management. Exposure to 3D printing will change perspective on China. Exposure to synthetic biology will change perspective on disease management. Exposure to sculpture will change perspective on business models. Exposure to poetry will change perspective on human resources. Aren't we supposed to learn all this at school?
I know what you are saying. People go to business school to study business. My only response is - then why do we end up doing all the other stuff after school?
A lot more in a lot less
Life used to change every 20-25 years. Most of the stuff that our lives depend on today (smart phones that talk to you, tablets that you don't eat, intelligent learning thermostats, Star Trek-like video calls and so on) didn't exist 10 years ago. Given the exponential growth of technologies, I foresee that life will now change every 5 years.
In this context, think about what we do in business schools. We teach case studies that can't really compete with a live wiki on the topic, leave alone a Bing search. Can't we talk about Boeing's Dreamliner mess versus Southwest Airlines happy employees all the time? When MBAs complete their education, they are already not relevant. Plus they expect high salaries to pay off their high student loans.
This university condenses 300 lectures into an intense 10 week program. Their executive programs have 25% new information every few months. The programs are run by 5 core people (not a typo). At business schools, we need to be able to provide a lot more in a lot less time to stay relevant. While the case study method is fine for teaching fundamentals, I think it's time to move on.
ExOs
I first heard the term Exponential Organizations (ExOs) from Salim Ismail. He showed several examples of organizations run by a small groups of multi-skilled people managing enormous scale with the help of technology. What if there's no role of a CEO or CFO in the future? What if there is a small group of people executing diverse tasks? What if micro-tasking tools like CrowdFlower help managers engage millions of workers globally on demand? What if organizations don't have a mass of employees but become smaller, agile groups of individuals with real names? Will MBAs be equipped to swallow their egos and handle ExOs?
Doing and failing
I visited TechShop where regular people were building extraordinary things by tinkering - the world's fastest electric motorcycle and a flying jet-pack are indeed extraordinarily ripe for business. At Biocurious, I met a computer programmer who used a laser-jet printer, a CD disk drive and an Arduino processor to print cells on an array. The teachers in both these environments allowed students to constantly tinker and fail. This allowed people to fearlessly build interesting things without a business objective. We don't let students fail in business school - we give them a Low Pass.
Managers of the future need "doing and failing" experience earlier on because a lot more has to be done with a lot less. Business schools will need a lab of sorts that let people "do" things versus sit and learn. I see a lot of managers who are scared to get their hands dirty. They can run analyze numbers, conduct meetings and provide insight but can they "do-and-fail" directly? Would they think of prototyping differently by using 3D printers? Would they balk at printing skin?
Invest in the right brain
I met Jeremy Howard who built this ultra-cool company called Kaggle that hosts competitions for data scientists. The gods of algorithms are pushing heavy weight out there to solve complex business problems. It'll become more important for managers to ask analytically interesting questions than being able to run numbers themselves. Artificial Intelligence is advancing at such a rapid pace that machines will soon do whatever we want them to do. MBAs need to know what they want done. To get those ideas, their creative brains need to be nurtured. We've done an excellent job churning out reams of analytically-oriented people during the last 100 years. What we now need are also right-brained people who can tame AI beasts.
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