6 ideas
Management is a practice that blends three things: art (vision and creative insight), craft (learning from direct experience), and science (systematic analysis). The MBA overweights science, which produces a calculating style detached from the work. Good management keeps all three in balance.
The MBA takes young people with little or no managerial experience and teaches them the business functions and analytical techniques, not how to manage. Because they have no experience to anchor these abstractions, they leave believing they are trained to manage when they have only been trained to analyse.
MBA graduates tend toward two corrupted styles. The calculating style manages by numbers and analysis from a distance. The heroic style casts the leader as a saviour who acts on the organisation from above, often through dramatic moves such as mergers and downsizing. Both ignore the tacit knowledge of the people who actually do the work.
The book follows 19 Harvard MBA alumni who had been singled out as business superstars, and finds that 10 of them largely failed as CEOs, with a further 4 having questionable records. The early fast-track success that business schools celebrate did not translate into sustained organisational performance.
The case study trains students to make big decisions about organisations they know only from a twenty-page summary. This conditions managers to believe that superficial knowledge plus analysis is enough, rather than deep, situated familiarity. The classroom habit then carries over into how graduates run real companies.
Education for practising managers should be organised around five mindsets rather than business functions. Reflective covers managing self, analytic covers managing organisations, worldly covers managing context, collaborative covers managing relationships, and action covers managing change. Experienced managers learn by reflecting on their own work alongside peers, as in the IMPM programme, and bring those insights back to their organisations.