Giving Credits Where Credit's Not Due?

Abstract

This article comments on a book on management education, titled Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development, by Henry Mintzberg. The cover of the book displays a picture of three diverse and smiling students dressed in academic regalia--turned upside down. This picture is misleading. It creates the expectation that the content of the book will turn Master of Business Administration (MBA) education upside down. The book does not do this; it does not flip the mammoth institution of MBA education on its pointy head. Instead, the book plots a time line of management education and shows where the MBA fits--and does not fit-- within it. Nonetheless, the result of this several-hundred page exercise is surprisingly subversive because Mintzberg convincingly demonstrates that the MBA does not fit at the end of the time line, a position it is commonly assumed to occupy, even own, by divine right. This repositioning has serious implications for our perceptions of the merit of the increasingly popular MBA degree. Mintzberg argues that the MBA teaches management by analysis, not the soft practice of management. Management practice requires a delicate and complex mix of art and craft, along with the science of analysis. MBAs are taught the science, but not the art and craft.