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Managers Not MBAs, by Henry Mintzberg.
From Issue Eight of our newsletter.
Subtitled ‘a hard look at the soft practice of managing and management development’, this is a seminal work from Henry Mintzberg. ‘This is a book about management education that is about management.’ Mintzberg believes that ‘both are deeply troubled, but neither can be changed without changing the other’. The book is in two halves. The first is an intensive critique of the conventional MBA, i.e. the full-time programmes that take relatively young people, generally in their twenties, and educate them in business functions: finance, marketing, IT, management science etc. This education is too focused on developing analytical skills. These skills, Mintzberg contends, are supposed to be portable for application in any enterprise regardless of context.
First introduced in 1908, the MBA last underwent serious revision in the late 1950s. Now in 2004, the irony of the business schools’ pride in their product innovation and strategic change is not lost on Mintzberg. Part 1 is highly critical, he says, because he has to counter some deeply entrenched views. ‘Considered as education for management, conventional MBA programmes train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences’. Mintzberg’s main concern is the dominant belief among some quarters of the business and educational worlds that the MBA is training in management and leadership for organisations.
English readers will be pleased that Mintzberg identifies England as the place where there are notable exceptions and these provide the bridge to Part 2. This addresses his ideas and innovations, developed with international colleagues, for the development of practising managers. Mintzberg is not against people learning about business functions, just as long as it is not assumed that this creates managers. Part 2 looks at the International Masters in Practicing Management and many other approaches to real management development. These draw enormously on the knowledge and experience of practicing managers. These approaches can link management development to organisational development, effectiveness and better results.