Improving MBAs by Jeanette Purcell, Personnel Today, 12th January

The author is CEO of the Association of MBAs and is thus unlikely to be fully objective but I thought that this article was, considering its short length, both informative and interesting. Its main basis was some research by the Association and Durham Business School which surveyed 100 schools and over 500 alumni from 57 countries. The focus of the research was the ways in which Business Schools are and should be changing - a topic that we have covered several times in recent blogs.


One finding was particularly interesting to me as a financial person - that a major trend is a move away from the domination of shareholder value thinking, towards the concept of multiple stakeholders. Connected with this is a greater emphasis on corporate social responsibility as a key issue to be covered on courses. One hopes that coverage of this trend includes some way of reconciling the many potential trade-offs between the various stakeholders, rather than the platitudes that are often voiced when a typical list of stakeholder headings is shown. Surely the key to reconciliation is convincing the shareholders who own the business that it is their long-term interests to look after the interests of the other stakeholders.

At this point the article becomes frustrating because there follows a long list of topics that business schools should, and in some cases are, focussing upon - risk management, sustainability, entrepreneurship, change management, creativity and innovation. This is the problem with articles in magazines like Personnel Today; they do not provide authors with enough space to go into sufficient depth and end up with something that is much too superficial.

The lack of depth in this list also made me wonder whether some business schools are adopting a similarly superficial approach to make it appear that they are moving with the times, particularly those who run generic courses that have not changed much over the years (no names mentioned!!). The temptation might be just to hire in someone to talk about sustainability and business ethics and to regard the box as having been ticked, rather than rethinking course design in a fundamental way.

The final point of the article is that Business Schools will need to put more emphasis on practical application than on theory, an observation that should not need a research project or a recession to reveal. One interesting aspect of this point was that the alumni of the schools believed this much more strongly than the academic staff and that the latter did not fully accept the criticism. No change there then!!

I would not recommend you to read the article because there is not much more than I have covered above but those who are interested should perhaps approach the Association of MBAs or Durham Business School for more detail of the research.

To read this article go to:

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2010/01/07/53630/improving-mbas-after-economic-downturn.html