Drucker, the person most attributed with founding modern management, himself stated that you cannot teach management:
Prof Drucker expounds: "Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management."
His view is that management is neither an art nor a science but a practice - in which achievement is measured not by academic awards but by results.
I've certainly had plenty of run ins with young MBA n00bs who have just so little experience in the world that they're not just somewhat a negative, you can't even communicate with them. A company I worked at loved hiring them and putting MBA grads under some managers and giving them tasks. Most seemed to feel there were decisions to make and they were going to make them (hey they have an MBA) and that was that. Some simply didn't show any curiosity about anything, they didn't ask questions so they just never knew and thus their decisions were almost always flawed.
One wonderful fellow was given the task of making the schedule for a call center type environment of about 20 or so people. People would email him schedule preferences and he would make the schedule. This was a fairly straightforward task that had been done for many many years. Except that he never responded to emails and as far as anyone could tell the end product didn't reflect anyone's preferences. It was actually hard to get him to understand that other than responding to his boss's emails... he needed to respond to those who were not his boss. In addition we had to teach him that scheduling someone an overnight shift and then a day shift, and then a night shift and so on was a bad idea.
These guys were so stuck in their MBA world that it really was difficult just to COMMUNICATE with them as there was no shared experience. I don't think he ever had an actual job of any consequence, and his internships were with other MBA type folks doing MBA things with other MBA people.
I've no doubt there are young folks graduating with MBAs who would and will do great, but if you're talking about professional management and such roles IMO most people need a hell of a lot of life experience before they know what they are doing.
This is a common problem with folks who start in management roles right after college. It sounds incredibly trivial, but you have to kinda be on the other side ... "be managed", to better understand the difference b/w good management and bad.
I also had some very incorrect paradigms about the world which I was able to correct in the first couple of years of work (and which I continue to do today whenever I find them to be wrong). Not having the opportunity to do so is a great disservice to these folks... they may never realize some very simple things that most people find rather trivial but they seem to have great difficulty understanding.
e.g. that person who never responds to emails. If I were to guess, it sounds like he has a very inflated sense of self (not common right after college, especially from a top university). It is likely he thinks whatever he does is AWESOME and the boss will realize this and he doesn't need to communicate with the rest of the team.
This is the conventional wisdom in the "real world" as well. There is expected to be a big difference between getting an MBA straight out of undergrad, and getting one after a few years of business experience. On the other hand, this could just be an age bias, e.g., someone with more experience also happens to be older, but their "experience" might not have formed them into a competent manager or leader. In fact, it's actually a toss-up.
Mind you, somebody has to do the accounting. We still need clerks, though they have different titles now. I tend to see middle management as being largely an information processing task: Collecting, organizing, analyzing, and communicating information. The MBA's learn how to communicate in a more or less standardized way, like having a standard API for a computer program. I've been a middle manager, but do not have an MBA.
Where managers, including MBA's, tend to be weak, are in the areas of leadership and decision-making. You can put someone through business school, but it's a toss-up whether you can turn them into a leader.
The original idea of bschools where they where for mid career mangers where considered high flyers.
Now it seems the higher level degree status is used to game visa applications.
Maybe a MBA should only be issued if you can prove 10 or 15 years real world work experience which would return the MBA to its roots as a course for experienced people
No respectable business school should admit people without substantial existing work experience into any graduate course.
Unfortunately, it looks that more than a half of big name universities are happy to admit people without such, or even no undergraduate studies background.
In the US typical average age at matriculation is around 27-28 at top business schools and they have formal/informal work experience requirements.
People who get in straight out of college are typically doing 2+2 or similar programs although I know that submatriculation is technically possible at Wharton.
To your comment about people getting in with no undergraduate studies, this is extremely uncommon. The exceptions tend to be people like Blake Gottesman who went on to be very successful.
In the UK there are MBA programs in every town that are willing to admit anyone who will pay. A provincial backwater I know of has recently opened a University (with various associations with other real institutions) and the first thing they opened was a business school.
A person I know well with a poor academic background, no management experience and no-undergraduate degree joined an MBA program at a similar school. This person had just come into the finances necessary and wanted to jack in their job. After a year they realized that they were wasting their time, and this was not the route to management they were hoping for. In fact the school was packed with people from similar backgrounds, people trying to fill a few years. I advised them to do something else at the beginning which the subject took as me saying they were not capable.
And this points at the fundamental dishonesty of the MBA at an institution like this. These people took this guys money in order to fill seats when they knew he was ill prepared for post-grad study and that the MBA, even if he got it, was not going to open any doors to him.
It interests me that if you look at the CV's of board members at UK companies, take the FTSE 100 for instance and I don't see a lot of MBA's. Overwhemingy I would say the normal route into top level management in the UK is to do any undergraduate degree at a decent institution, then to join one of the Big Four accountancy firms as a trainee auditor. Throughout my career, in private business, listed companies, and private equity, I see people who are ex-Big4 in top positions. Outside of that there are lawyers, a few engineers and a few sales people. But if I were to be advising a 16 year old how to get into management, I have no doubt that I would be suggesting doing a degree they enjoy and using it to get into a Big-4 auditor.
It is also interesting that some UK accounting qualifications cover so much MBA type material, that it is possible to get a conversion onto an MBA in some accelerated amount of time. The big difference with accounting qualifications (ICAEW/CIMA etc) is that they have a really serious practical requirement including years of on-the-job experience. I guess that is a world away from an MBA
I'm a management consultant. My work is not ridiculous. What is ridiculous is the level of damage caused by the utter apathy and incompetence that exists in many organisations.
Just because someone is technichally skilled and highly intelligent, does not necessarily make them a capable leader, or a good manager, or even a productive employee. I have met managers, engineers and architects and other technical folks costing their employers millions due to their inability to communicate with others, process basic information and gain the trust of their colleagues. Non technical as well.
I have worked with dozens of organisations, engaging deeply with the people embedded there, and i have developed a decent understanding of how to identify 'people' issues and develop creative solutions, in a relatively short period of time.
Apologies if i sound defensive, but i see your sentiment on here a lot. And it is dead wrong.
For what it's worth, i do not have an mba or specific industry experience. Just good interpersonal skills and a willingness to listen, empathise, and improve the way things are done.
I am sure you believe management consultants provide value and drive changes that shore up flailing organizations. That might even be objectively true for a minority of cases. But having seen a few MBB engagements "deliver value" my take on it is that consulting business survives by delivering one service (only). A backstop for the executive leadership to justify their agenda. MBB said so! Sice they are expensive as hell they must be right.
Again this is about strategy consulting. The other flavors like turnaround/ execution consultants do provide tangible value. But the typical management consulting bashing is about the strategy kind. This is just my opinion. I don't expect anyone to agree. Nor am I attacking your worth as a professional. You could very well be the exception.
> But the typical management consulting bashing is about the strategy kind.
I technically do strategy consulting. Generally speaking, yes there is a lot of fluff to industry (if you want to call it that), but that's not because the role itself is flawed, it's because the individuals who are employed in it are. Note - I also do not have an MBA.
- People who are in their early 20's with 2-3 years of experience can offer great insight to strategy work, but their lack of experience really limits the amount of value they can provide. Clients frankly do not want to pay for them (they do anyway, but you get my point). So how do you get new talent into this area if you're not willing to pay for it? (I have no solution btw). Truly talented people move on elsewhere.
- I personally do not sell strategy services that cannot add value, but that's because my firm is a boutique provider and that's part of my value proposition. The big boys (McKinsey, Bain, etc) will literally sell you anything their price tag can justify, even if they don't genuinely believe the price tag is justify. That's not a knock of those firms, it's just the "Way it is"...I would do the same thing if I were in there shoes (there's a reason I'm not).
- Corporate profits continually grow at all time highs (despite relatively slow top growth outside of tech). Management/strategy consultants are VERY good at increasing profits, but are horribly matched for helping grow revenues/sales.
- Many companies have good internal strategic people within their exec teams, but need an external voice of reason to justify their position. I often claim my work consists of "Using Email, Excel, and Powerpoint to convince people to act". Sometimes it is very valid to have someone else with a different perspective to provide advice about something that you may be biased about. Again, my value proposition is that I'm not afraid to say what needs to be said, free from any incentives. Unfortunately many firms in this space like their follow-on services opportunity too much (class example is a Accenture/PwC/Deloitte/etc firm telling a client in a strategy session that they need to do an ERP implementation, oh and by the way, they sell that implementation too...THAT is bad strategy advice)
- I have first hand seen the result of good strategy work that has made individuals incredibly wealthy. I've also seen strategy fees hurt the bottom line because execs are unwilling to act on the advice they need. It's not a foolproof service offering - this is absolutely true.
If you think management is only common sense, then paying 500 bucks an hour for MBA grads is ridiculously.
Using that logic, either the CEO is stupid, or the company employees are utterly incompetent and lacks common sense.
Or, more likely,
a) there's some science/skills behind management that can be learned at school even by non experienced people;
b) those young MBA people worked 60/70 hours per week for 3/4 years being part of a team reporting directly to the C-level executives of Fortune 500 corps, solving quite complex problems.
He or she might be; plenty get those kinds of jobs on their personal connections rather than their track records.
But a more usual scenario is that the CEO wants to fund their next bonus by slashing jobs, and paying management consultants - with the company's money - to facilitate that is, to that sort of person, a shrewd move.
Those people were hired for a reason; if the CEO literally cannot think of anything useful for them to do then they have utterly failed as leaders. But they are lavishly rewarded nonetheless.
I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but what I heard is that the most common task of management consulting is to sell an already made decision to the rest of the company. The consultant appears neutral and is expected to have good presentation and sales skills. The analysis technique and inputs can be chosen to yield the desired result. The more expensive the consultant the better for credibility. So it's obviously a great way to make money.
The principal-agent problem is thus between the company and the person hiring the management consultant(s).
Backfilling a CEO idea happens sometimes. And that's not bad per se. They still need to see if their idea holds water, and consultants have great presentation skills that the CEO can leverage trying to explain the idea to stakeholders.
But most of the time, at least the top consultancies, they will call out stupid ideas. They have their own reputation to keep and shareholders, the guys actually paying for the party, don't usually like being made fools constantly.
Or, most commonly, be hired to shed some light on a bunch of seemingly equally good ideas. Business strategy issues hardly have black or white and sometimes the recommendations fail. People in the company make sure to publicize the consultancy involvement as a cover your a strategy, but hardly share the credit when things work.
About the parent comment on principal-agent problem. He must be a management consultant for throwing a buzzword around in a discussion and dropping the mic :)
At least the school my fiancée is currently attending (Kellogg) is decidedly not stuffed with people 2-3 years in investment banking. A lot of people here are exactly the same graduating class (2011) because of the almost mandatory 5 years. There are exceptions, but a large portion of the people I've met during these past two years are exactly my fiancée's age.
The skewed distribution of grad students who have reached the minimum requirement of job experience suggests, to me, that they are there primarily to advance their careers through credentialing, and not because of the knowledge a Kellogg MBA imparts. Is there really a substantive difference between a school stuffed with 2-3 years out of undergrad, and one stuffed with students 5 years out? I doubt it.
A large part of the Kellogg "experience" is what the other students bring into the classroom. 2 years may not seem like a lot, but it's a world of difference apparently in what stories/examples students can provide one another for the concepts being taught in class.
I don't have a direct understanding of any of this, but that's how my fiancée and our friends explain it when I ask. Take that for what you will!
Management consultants can be extremely valuable. If, for example, a new restaurant hired a good one with domain experience, a lot of money would be saved and fewer restaurants would fail. How many new restaurant owners have extensive experience with HR efficiency or ordering supplies efficiently or marketing effectively given their target market? Hell, many new restaurant owners have no idea about their market — they’re betting on decor and recipes and hype rather than implementing sound business practices from the start. Even experienced chefs might not know how to budget and plan well. They also might not be good at marketing either.
Management consultants can add incredible value. It’s ridiculous to dismiss their work.
If, for example, a new restaurant hired a good one with domain experience, a lot of money would be saved and fewer restaurants would fail.
But there is a name for that role already: Head Chef
A better analogy is a manager of an already successful restaurant hiring a consultant to help them reduce the staff's wages and make them work longer hours. Such as an expert on zero-hours contracts perhaps.
Source? HBS has no such requirement (a friend got in with just 3 years of management consulting experience). Here's a quote straight from the Stanford GSB page: "Work experience is not required for entry to the Stanford MBA Program." Work experience isn't even listed as a requirement on the Wharton application. Etc.
They may not all list it as a hard requirement, but a school like MIT sloan says on their site applicants have an average of 5 years of work experience [1]. You can maybe get accepted with less than 4 but you would need relevant other life experience. (I'm pretty sure HBS listed 4 years when I applied decades ago, but I cannot find a reference)
Ah, that explains it. The business school cohort average age has dropped considerably since you applied. These days it's typical to apply with 2-4 years of real-world experience (acceptance & start add a year to that) and uncommon to apply/be accepted if you're over 30. Keep in mind that average experience statements like the sloan one are heavily skewed by the few old-timers in the programs who have been working for a long time in comparison to the kids who make up the majority of cohorts.
> The average entering MBA student is 28 years old the top universities.
That sounds about right for the mean, with the median a few years younger, and then a smattering spread out of a larger range above the median than below.
> 23 year MBAs probably went to an no-name online degree program
No, they are probably younger tier, direct entry from undergrad students at conventional insitutions. No name online MBAs Target mid-career people, and are probably much older.
Prof Drucker expounds: "Teaching 23-year-olds in an MBA programme strikes me as largely a waste of time. They lack the background of experience. You can teach them skills - accounting and what have you - but you can't teach them management."
His view is that management is neither an art nor a science but a practice - in which achievement is measured not by academic awards but by results.
https://www.ft.com/content/5e78a9cc-3732-11d9-a8bb-00000e251...