Those who can’t, teach

Those who can't, teach - Schumpeter, The Economist, 8th February 2014

Following the article ‘Build it and they may come’ in The Economist of 18th January, this week’s issue has another interesting piece by Schumpeter. It is a hard hitting article titled ‘Those who can’t, teach’ which suggests that business schools are poorly managed. Two reasons for this are identified.

Firstly, business schools have been captured by academics. Academics are not good managers and they have too little incentive to focus on teaching. The quality and value of much of the research is also questioned; the emphasis is on PhDs and getting articles published in obscure journals, rather than in publications that managers might read

Secondly, there is a herd mentality. Most schools are trying to be like Harvard or Stanford. Huge investments in new campuses are taking place at a time when the number of people willing to pay high fees to attend a 'top' MBA programme is falling and on-line learning of different kinds is making investment in buildings an irrelevance

Schumpeter suggest that schools should try to compete by being different (either lower cost or in an innovative way), and quotes Michael Porter on the danger of being ‘stuck in the middle’.

Also cited is the fact that more organisations are running their own mini-MBAs and others are seeing shorter, less academic courses as providing greater value for money. This is likely to be a growing challenge to the Business Schools. We certainly hope so as this is an area of core business for MTP; many of our clients cut down on sending managers to business schools some time ago, particularly the longer generic courses that used to be so popular. It will be interesting to see whether this trend continues in the future; if so the financial viability of many of the weaker operators will be in question. We will see...  

Chris Goodwin