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Managers Not MBAs

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

It's never too late to learn, but sometimes too early. —Charlie Brown in Peanuts

There are no natural surgeons, no natural accountants. These are specialized jobs that require formal training, initially in a classroom. The students must, of course, be able to handle a scalpel or a keyboard, but first they have to be specially educated. Then they can be foisted on a suspecting public, at least for internship or articling, before being allowed to practice on their own.

Leadership is different. There are natural leaders. Indeed, no society can afford anything but natural leaders. Leadership and management are life itself, not some body of technique abstracted from the doing and the being. Education cannot pour life experience into a vessel of native intelligence, not even into a vessel of leadership potential. But it can help shape a vessel already brimming with the experiences of leadership and life.

Put differently, trying to teach management to someone who has never managed is like trying to teach psychology to someone who has never met another human being. Organizations are complex phenomena. Managing them is a difficult, nuanced business, requiring all sorts of tacit understanding that can only be gained in context. Trying to teach it to people who have never practiced is worse than a waste of time—it demeans management.

Management as a Practice

Were management a science or a profession, we could teach it to people without experience. It is neither.

Management Is Not a Science Science is about the development of systematic knowledge through research. That is hardly the purpose of management. Management is not even an applied science, for that is still a science. Management certainly applies science: managers have to use all the knowledge they can get, from the sciences and elsewhere. But management is more art, based on "insight," "vision," "intuition." (Peter Drucker wrote in 1954 that "the days of the 'intuitive' manager are numbered" [93]. Half a century later we are still counting.) And most management is craft, meaning that it relies on experience—learning on the job. This means it is as much about doing in order to think as thinking in order to do.

Put together a good deal of craft with a certain amount of art and some science, and you end up with a job that is above all a practice. There is no "one best way" to manage; it all depends on the situation.

Effective managing therefore happens where art, craft, and science meet. But in a classroom of students without managerial experience, these have no place to meet—there is nothing to do. Linda Hill (1992) writes in her book about people becoming managers that they "had to act as managers before they understood what the role was" (67). In other words, where there is no experience, there is no room for craft: Inexperienced students simply cannot understand the practice. As for art, nothing stops that from being discussed, even admired, in the conventional MBA classroom. But the inexperience of the students stops it from being appreciated. They can only look on as nonartists do—observing it without understanding how it came to be.

That leaves science, which is what conventional MBA education is mostly about, at least in the form of analysis. So, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, conventional MBA students graduate with the impression that management is analysis, specifically the making of systematic decisions and the formulation of deliberate strategies. This, I argue in Chapter 3, is a narrow and ultimately distorted view of management that has encouraged two dysfunctional styles in practice: calculating (overly analytical) and heroic (pretend art). These are later contrasted with a more experienced-based style labeled engaging—quiet and connected, involving and inspiring.

Management Is Not a Profession It has been pointed out that engineering, too, is not a science or an applied science so much as a practice in its own right (Lewin 1979). But engineering does apply a good deal of science, codified and certified as to its effectiveness. And so it can be called a profession, which means it can be taught in advance of practice, out of context. In a sense, a bridge is a bridge, or at least steel is steel, even if its use has to be adapted to the circumstances at hand. The same can be said about medicine: Many illnesses are codified as standard syndromes to be treated by specific techniques. But that cannot be said of management (Whitley 1995:92). Little of its practice has been reliably codified, let alone certified as to its effectiveness. So management cannot be called a profession or taught as such.

Because engineering and medicine have so much codified knowledge that must be learned formally, the trained expert can almost always outperform the layperson. Not so in management. Few of us would trust the intuitive engineer or physician, with no formal training. Yet we trust all kinds of managers who have never spent a day in a management classroom (and we have suspicions about some others who spent two years there, as will be discussed in Chapter 3).

Ever since the 1910s when Frederick Taylor (1911) wrote about that "one best way" and Henri Fayol (1916/1984) claimed that "managerial ability can and should be acquired in the same way as technical ability at school, later in the workshop" (14), we have been on this search for the holy grail of management as a science and a profession. In Britain, a group called the Management Charter Initiative sought to barrel ahead with the certification of managers, not making the case for management as a profession so much as assuming it. As its director told a newspaper, the MBA "is the only truly global qualification, the only license to trade internationally" (Watts 1997:43).

The statement is nonsense, and the group has failed in those efforts. It is time to face a fact: After almost a century of trying, by any reasonable assessment management has become neither a science nor a profession. It remains deeply embedded in the practices of everyday living. We should be celebrating that fact, not depreciating it. And we should be developing managers who are deeply embedded in the life of leading, not professionals removed from it.

Those fields of work discussed earlier can be divided into ones in which the person doing it truly "knows better" than the recipients and others in which acting as the expert who knows better can get in the way. Upon being wheeled into an operating room, few of us would be inclined to second-guess the surgeon. ("Could you cut a little lower, please?") No matter how miserable the bedside manner, we accept that he or she knows better. But a schoolteacher who acts on the basis of knowing better can impede the learning of the student. School teaching is a facilitating activity, more about encouraging learning than doing teaching.

Managing is largely a facilitating activity, too. Sure, managers have to know a lot, and they often have to make decisions based on that knowledge. But, especially in large organizations and those concerned with "knowledge work," managers have to lead better, so that others can know better and therefore act better. They have to bring out the best in other people. The idea that the chief does it all, coming up with the grand strategy and then driving its implementation by everyone else, is frequently a myth left over from the mass production of simple goods. Yet it is one of the impressions left by MBA education. "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" (in "Message from the Dean," Harvard Business School Web site, 2003).

Because grade school teachers can easily carry their skills from one classroom to another, they can still be called professionals. But not so managers, who can hardly carry their skills from one function to another within the same organization, let alone across organizations or industries. In other words, knowledge about context is not as portable in management as it is in education or engineering or medicine. That is why so many managers who have succeeded in one place fail in others (which is hardly true of teachers or engineers or physicians—so long as they stick to the skills they have).

A Guest Manager? Imagine a guest manager. The very idea seems absurd. How could anyone just come in and manage something? The manager must have a deep understanding of the context. Yet we accept substitute teachers who take over classrooms for a day, and Doctors without Borders who set up hospitals in hours. But temporary managers?

The one obvious example is instructive—a guest conductor. A few rehearsals, and off go the musicians performing at the most prestigious concert halls in the world. The reason is simple: the whole exercise is so highly programmed. Mozart is pulling the strings; everyone plays to his highly orchestrated score. We shall have professional management as soon as other organizations become as programmed as the symphony orchestra, playing their strategies like scores from Mozart, with all the obedient employees and customers sitting in neat rows responding on cue.

The practice of management is characterized by its ambiguity. That is why, despite its popular use, the metaphor of the conductor on the podium is wholly inappropriate (at least during performance, if not necessarily rehearsal; see Mintzberg 1998). Most work that can be programmed in an organization need not concern its managers directly; specialists can be delegated to do it. That leaves the managers mostly with the messy stuff—the intractable problems, the complicated connections. And that is what makes the practice of management so fundamentally "soft" and why labels such as experience, intuition, judgment, and wisdom are so commonly used for it. Here is how a successful manager at a major airline described her MBA husband to me: "He has the technique, thinks he knows best. But he is frustrated because he doesn't understand the complexities and the politics. He thinks he has the answers but is frustrated by being unable to do anything about it." He never learned management in the business school.

"Experience" in MBA Admissions

Most business schools today require "work experience" of their MBA applicants, typically up to about four years. Some, in fact, are openly biased against much more than that, and Harvard apparently made the decision recently to reduce that to about two years and accept some applicants straight out of undergraduate studies.

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 organizations work and what management means?

Imagine dropping a young MBA student into a classroom of experienced managers, even in a course on a specialized business function such as marketing or finance. So long as the class remains with theory and technique—in other words, remains at a generic level—the student would be fine. But as soon as the discussion turns to application—to nuance and appreciation—the student would be lost. In this respect, a classroom full of such students is always lost. "If you know how to design a great motorcycle engine," quipped Richard Rumelt, a professor of strategy at UCLA, "I can teach you all you need to know about strategy in a few days. If you have a Ph.D. in strategy, years of labor are unlikely to give you ability to design great new motorcycle engines." Business is about motorcycle engines: strategy is the means; motorcycle engines are the end. Conventional MBA programs are about strategy in the absence of motorcycle engines.

Wrong Time?

Of course, this lack of experience suggests that the problem is not the wrong people so much as the wrong time. Do MBA programs teach the right people at the wrong time?

I think not, for two reasons. First, too early can make the right people wrong. Giving them a questionable impression of managing can distort how they practice it subsequently. Chapters 4 and 5 present some evidence on this. My colleague Jonathan Gosling has made an intriguing suggestion in this regard. The MBA appeals to people who are just gaining their independence from family and roots. Going "global," for example, sounds good to them. Yet management is about something quite the opposite—namely, the acceptance of responsibility. So MBA programs may be inadvertently encouraging an attitude of independence that is fundamentally antithetical to the responsible practice of management.

Second, I argue that MBA programs by their very nature attract many of the wrong people—too impatient, too analytical, too much need to control. These characteristics together with the MBA credential may get them into managerial positions. But with what consequences? That is the subject of Chapters 3 through 6.

The Applications Charade

At the time of this initial writing, with a great deal of publicity and considerable help from McKinsey & Company, a new business school was being set up in India. The Indian magazine Businessworld (Gupta 2000) reported on its application criteria: "Students must be smart team players with proven leadership qualities and two years of work experience." How to select for such "proven" leadership qualities after only two years? "Selection criteria: GMAT scores, college performance, extra curricular and work experience."

This is typical of how people get into MBA programs. In the first instance, they select themselves, presumably in the belief that leading is better than following (and pays better). In fact, many people apply to MBA programs not just to move up but to move out—to find a better job somewhere else; in other words, to get away from the source of whatever limited experience they do have. Should that be telling us something?

The business schools choose from this pool. They select from among these self-selected leaders. The schools may look for evidence of leadership potential (e.g., posts held in extracurricular clubs, etc.), but when they boast about the quality of their students, they almost inevitably cite GMAT scores and grade point averages. Nicely numerical, all these—the business schools' own bottom lines. But do they measure managerial potential?

GMAT stands for Graduate Management Admission Test, and it assess one's ability to give fast answers to little numerical and verbal problems (e.g., "If Mario was 32 years old 8 years ago, how old was he x years ago? (A) x – 40, (B) x – 24, (C) 40 – x, (D) 24 – x, (E) 24 + x" [GMAT 2000]). This is accompanied by an analytical writing task. Since how well you do depends on how well everyone else does, you had better prepare by buying a special book or taking a special course, because that is what everyone else is doing. "Take [the Kaplan exam preparation program] and get the score you need to get into the school you want," claims one big provider on its Web site (2003). So instead of practicing management, the would-be manager practices tests.

Good managers are certainly intelligent, and the GMAT certainly measures intelligence, at least formalized intelligence. But nonmanagers can be intelligent, too, as are no small number of dreadful managers. So the GMAT constitutes a useful but insufficient screening device, more useful, in fact, to identify successful students than successful managers. The latter have to exhibit all kinds of other characteristics that are not measured by such scores—indeed, many that are not adequately measured by any scores.

An MBA student at my own university once reproached me for having mentioned intuition in regard to the selection of MBA students. How can you possibly select for intuition, he insisted, when you can't even measure it? How indeed. Another asked whether the use of judgment in the selection process would not introduce bias. Sure, I replied, because bias is the other side of judgment. The best way to get rid of bias is to get rid of judgment. MBA programs that rely on these numerical scores get rid of judgment, and so, too, do they get rid of assessing managerial potential. In the process, they introduce their own bias—for science over art and craft.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Managers Not MBAs by Henry Mintzberg Copyright © 2005 by Henry Mintzberg. Excerpted by permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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