John Ralston-Saul, writing in The Doubter's Companion in 1994:
> BUSINESS SCHOOLS: Acting schools which train experts in abstract management methods to pretend they are capitalists.
> The graduates of these institutions have dominated Western business leadership for the last quarter-century. This corresponds exactly with a severe economic crisis in the West, which has included runaway inflation, endemic unemployment, almost no real growth, record levels of bankruptcy, and a collapse in industrial production. Manufacturing, the sector which they have been trained to manage, has suffered more than any other.
> This raises two questions:
> 1. Is there any indication—practical, statistical, philosophical or financial—that training future business leaders in specialized management schools has benefited business or the economy?
> 2. Has this new élite — approximately a quarter of the university population — been able to communicate to society any convincing program for ending the crisis?
> Not surprisingly, an education which above all teaches the management of structures is impervious to failure. Those within the structure continue to define the economy’s needs in their own terms and so seek out successive new generations of business school graduates.
> In 1993 the Harvard Business School reacted to growing criticism of its methods by announcing a new curriculum. In the future students would “focus less on specific disciplines and more on combining skills to solve problems.” But it is precisely their obsession with problem-solving that is the heart of the problem. To organize the training of business leaders from the point of view of the corporate executive is rather like training athletes to compete from the point of view of the team’s office manager.
> The outside observer might conclude dispassionately that these schools should be shut down or their methodology revolutionized. The graduate will argue, like the World War I staff officer, that failure could be turned into success if only there were more of his own kind in positions of power. Just one more wave of bodies heaved out of the trenches for a charge and the war will be won.
> BUSINESS SCHOOLS: Acting schools which train experts in abstract management methods to pretend they are capitalists.
> The graduates of these institutions have dominated Western business leadership for the last quarter-century. This corresponds exactly with a severe economic crisis in the West, which has included runaway inflation, endemic unemployment, almost no real growth, record levels of bankruptcy, and a collapse in industrial production. Manufacturing, the sector which they have been trained to manage, has suffered more than any other.
> This raises two questions:
> 1. Is there any indication—practical, statistical, philosophical or financial—that training future business leaders in specialized management schools has benefited business or the economy?
> 2. Has this new élite — approximately a quarter of the university population — been able to communicate to society any convincing program for ending the crisis?
> Not surprisingly, an education which above all teaches the management of structures is impervious to failure. Those within the structure continue to define the economy’s needs in their own terms and so seek out successive new generations of business school graduates.
> In 1993 the Harvard Business School reacted to growing criticism of its methods by announcing a new curriculum. In the future students would “focus less on specific disciplines and more on combining skills to solve problems.” But it is precisely their obsession with problem-solving that is the heart of the problem. To organize the training of business leaders from the point of view of the corporate executive is rather like training athletes to compete from the point of view of the team’s office manager.
> The outside observer might conclude dispassionately that these schools should be shut down or their methodology revolutionized. The graduate will argue, like the World War I staff officer, that failure could be turned into success if only there were more of his own kind in positions of power. Just one more wave of bodies heaved out of the trenches for a charge and the war will be won.