Illustration by Sergei Brovkin and StarryAI

Fourteen of the top law schools recently announced they will pull out of the US News & World Report’s annual rankings. They say the rankings punish schools whose graduates pursue public interest jobs or advanced degrees, while rewarding those that spend more on students and drive-up tuition. School leaders claim the rankings rely on flawed survey techniques and opaque and arbitrary formulas, lacking the transparency needed to help applicants make truly informed decisions, and that the methodology creates perverse incentives.

The same “perverse incentives” and biases have plagued MBA and EMBA rankings for decades. So why are top business schools so silent? Because they are part of a system driven more by money than morals.

What’s wrong with MBA and EMBA Rankings? 

Almost everything. Most focus primarily on graduating salaries as a metric of success, or other questionable criteria that they have deemed important. None adequately addresses the overall quality of students, professors, and learning outcomes, or the impact graduates have on organizations or society, simply because these are harder to measure. No school is rewarded for being different or innovative.

The wealthiest students can afford the most expensive schools, and in turn receive the highest salaries, thus rewarding their schools with higher rankings. It’s a vicious cycle that has seen top-ranked MBA and EMBA programs charge upwards of $USD 200,000 for the treasured degree.

Schools can easily game the system. FT rankings require only 20% of alumni to respond (or a minimum of 20 responses). It’s rather simple to have the alumni fill out the survey only if they have very high salaries. And the more students/alumni you have, the more data points you can choose from to skew your school’s ranking in the right direction.

While there are separate MBA and EMBA rankings, the methodology and criteria are identical. Does a 45-year-old C-suite executive have the same needs (e.g. skills), goals and objectives as a 25-year-old junior manager?  Of course not. And most EMBA programs also mimic MBAs in terms of learning and (business function) structure, ignoring the gold mine that is the experience and knowledge of their senior executive participants. What a waste!

Diversity be Damned

The higher up the schools go in terms of tuition, the lower the diversity of their students. Programs costing more than $USD 150,000 comprise mainly Caucasians (almost 70%). The most expensive programs are also the most likely to get employer financial support.
What of international diversity, when more than 75% of EMBA participants are either from North America or Asia? Schools in poorer countries struggle to attract the same placement in rankings, even those that have excellent programs. More than 50% of the FT top 100 MBAs are American schools, with only one from Latin America and none from Africa. FT EMBA rankings include only two from Latin America and none from Africa.

Let’s hope that top business schools can set an example by focusing on learning and its positive impact on organizations and society, and cease to be distracted by these questionable rankings—just as those law schools had the courage to do.

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Personal note: I was once responsible for two of the top-ranked EMBA programs in the world at a leading business school. Today I work at McGill University where we have three excellent executive programs: the International Masters Program for Managers, the McGill-HEC Montreal EMBA and the International Masters for Health Leadership. In my opinion, these programs are much more cutting-edge and relevant than what I have seen from top-ranked EMBA programs. None of these programs would do well in the rankings. Why? Because  they were not shaped with rankings in mind. They were created with the vision of tapping into the experience of executives as a major part of the learning experience. And instead of teaching disciplines in functional siloes, these programs integrate several business functions under “managerial mindsets” which fosters innovation and creative problem-solving. We measure the success through the impact of our graduates. Many are leading some of the world’s most successful organizations, some of them helping to change broken systems in health care and government. There, they may not be making the highest salaries, but boy  are they making a difference.

There is plenty of business education, but hardly any management education. As a manager who is performing well, but wishing to perform better, should you do an EMBA? Not if it is about the administration of business rather than the practice of managing. Do you really want to sit in a nice neat row listening to lectures about action, or formulating strategies for companies you know nothing about while your own first-hand experience is being ignored? How about an emba that engages you as a manager, beyond administration.

Three Wrongs

For years, I went around giving talks at business schools about what is wrong with regular MBA education for management, namely that it trains the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences.

The people are wrong, because they lack the necessary experience. You have to live management to learn management. A manager cannot be created in a classroom.

The ways are wrong because they focus on what management is not. Management is a practice, where the art of vision, the craft of experience, and the science of analysis meet. Since the art cannot be taught and the craft can only be learned from experience, MBA programs rely on the science, by teaching analysis and technique, or else they use the disconnected experience of case studies.  One gives the impression that managing is about modeling and measuring, the other that it is about posturing and pronouncing (see Jack’s turn).

And this produces the wrong consequences, by distorting how too many MBAs practice management: as disconnected leadership. (For what happens when these managers become CEOs, see some troubling evidence.) Upon graduation, MBAs should be stamped with a skull and crossbones on their foreheads: Warning! Not prepared to manage.

EMBA programs take many of the right people—with managerial experience—and then train them in the same ways with the same consequences. Indeed, for years promotion for the top-rated Wharton EMBA boasted that it gives the students the same as they get in the regular MBA. Imagine that: nothing more for people with managerial experience!

Don’t get me wrong: Many MBA programs do a fine job of developing people for certain specialized jobs in business, such as financial analysis and marketing research. They just need to stop confusing this with the practice of managing.

Educating for Management

As I gave those talks, people started asking me the question that should never be asked of an academic: “What are you doing about it?” (We academics are supposed to criticize, not do anything about anything.) Duly embarrassed, in 1996 I teamed up with colleagues at prominent business schools around the world to change how management is taught, and practiced. We created the International Masters Program for Managers (impm.org), followed later by the International Masters for Health Leadership (imhl.org), and CoachingOurselves.com.

I remain personally involved in parts of the design and delivery of all these programs, and, frankly, they are wonderful, even if I have to say so myself. (I don’t. For example, a senior manager in banking said: “Now, four and a half years later, I am left with the distinct desire to do it all over again.” Other comments can be found on impm and mcgill.ca/imhl.)

While a manager cannot be created in a classroom, it is quite remarkable what a classroom of experienced managers can do when they are given the chance to reflect on their own experience and share their insights with each other. T.S. Eliot wrote in one of his poems that “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” Management education should be about getting the meaning.

The managers—average age in the 40s, which can amount to half a millennium of experience—stay on the job, and attend five modules of 10 days each over 16 months, held in England, Canada, India, Japan, and Brazil. Other activities on the job are designed to use work rather than make work. These modules focus, not on the functions of business, but on the mindsets of managing:

• The Reflective Mindset—managing self
• The Analytic Mindset—managing organizations
• The Worldly Mindset—managing context
• The Collaborative Mindset—managing relationships
• The Action Mindset—managing change

At the end of the very first module, in 1996, on the reflective mindset, while everyone else was going around saying “It was great meeting you!”, Alan Whelan, a sales manager at BT, was saying: “It was great meeting myself!” And in the worldly mindset, the managers meet their own world. We decided to call it “worldly” rather than “global” because the IMPM is not about becoming cookie-cutter global, it’s about getting into other people’s worlds to better understand their own world. This module is held in India, where the Indian managers in the program help their colleagues understand this other world.

We have a fifty-fifty rule in our classrooms: half the class time is turned over to the managers on their agendas. Hence they sit at round tables in a flat room so that they can go in and out of workshops at a moment’s notice. No need to “break out”. A variety of novel seating arrangements has resulted, including the use of keynote listeners at the tables and of inner circle discussions where people tap each other in and out of the conversations (see Don’t just sit there…).

Communityship beyond leadership

The managers in the IMPM are not lone wolves, parachuted into selfie-silos, as shown below. As indicated in the figure that follows, they are colleagues in a community of social learning, connected back to their home organizations. It has been said never to send a changed person back to an unchanged organization. But almost all management education and development programs do just that. We seek to do differently by asking the managers to form IMPact teams at work, to carry their learning back into their organizations for change. The manager in a small company who had to pick up the pieces after it had run into a serious problem reported that the IMPact team he created saved the company.

As suggested above, we favor communityship beyond leadership, in our programs and beyond. A number of innovations support this. For example, the concerns of each manager become the focus of friendly consulting by a small group of colleagues. One participant’s own manager had suddenly quit, and she was trying to decide whether to apply for the position. The hour of friendly consulting was so helpful that it continued over lunch.

In the managerial exchange, the IMPM managers pair up and spend the better part of a week at each other’s workplaces. The first time this happened, Mayur Vora travelled from his jam-and-jelly company in Pune, India to visit Françoise LeGoff, number two on the Africa desk at the International Federation of the Red Cross in Geneva. On the first day, Mayur saw Françoise typing and asked, “Can’t a secretary do that?” Welcome to the worldly mindset: Geneva is not Pune! On the last day, Mayur told Françoise he would be happy to meet with any of her staff. All of them lined up to convey various messages through him. Françoise reported that Mayur “was like a mirror for me.”

The MBA is fine so long as it is recognized for what it does well, namely train people for certain specialized jobs in business. But it must also be recognized for what it does badly, namely develop people to manage. Managing is too important to be left to the consequences of the MBA. it’s time for management education.

© Henry Mintzberg 2019. The next impm.org cohort begins in September.
This TWOG is adapted from a story in Bedtime Stories for Managers, which was adapted from one of 7 February 2017. For more on these programs, see Chapters 1-6 of my book Managers not MBAs; also the articles Looking Forward to Development, From Management Development to Organization Development with IMPact, and The five minds of a manager. 

Co-authored with Jonathan Gosling

Imagine a conference with a keynote listener instead of a keynote speaker. How about a meeting of the executive committee with the CEO facing backward, eavesdropping on the discussion but speechless until the end? Or picture a gathering of managers sitting in a circle to “show and tell” about their interests, just like they did in kindergarten.

Does all this sound like some other world? It could be yours. For years, we have had great success doing such things with managers in our programs. This began with our International Masters Program for Managers (impm.org), created to get past training about the business functions (the MBA), toward true education for managers. While a manager cannot be created in a classroom—this is the misconception of so many MBA programs—people who practice management can enhance their capabilities in a classroom that respects their experience.

The IMPM does things differently, starting with our 50:50 rule: faculty get half the class time to introduce ideas, but the other half is reserved for the managers to reflect on their own experience and share their insights with each other. In this program, which runs over 16 months, the managers come into our classrooms for five modules of 10 days, each one devoted to a managerial mindset, delivered by leading business schools around the world. (The reflective mindset takes place in Lancaster, England; the analytic mindset in Montreal, Canada; the worldly mindset in Bangalore, India; the collaborative mindset in Beijing, China; and the action mindset in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.) Call this an emba if you like, so long as you realize that here it means engaging managers beyond administration.

“How are you going to seat them?” asked Nancy Badore, who had created a novel program for Ford executives and was helping us think through ours. “I suppose in one of those U-shaped classrooms?” one of us answered. “Not those obstetrics stirrups!” Nancy shot back. We got the point! With that, we were off—never looking back (except when the class asked us to face backward, to receive some feedback).

Nothing explains these differences better than the seating arrangements that we have established in the IMPM. These enable the managers to listen more attentively, speak more thoughtfully, and address their problems together more effectively.

Table Talk 

Thanks to Nancy’s comment, we decided that the managers in our classrooms would sit at small round tables to facilitate learning from each other. No need to “break out” in some other place.

Round tables turn a collection of individual students into a community of engaged learners. (See Figures 1 and 2 at the end.) Managers bring wonderful experience to the classroom, so why not let them build on that with each other? So much better than pronouncing on cases that no-one in the room has experienced, or listening to theory without connecting it to their reality. We have a ritual starting every day in the IMPM, called morning reflections.  It begins with everyone scribbling personal thoughts in his or her Insight Book (empty except for their own thoughts), followed by sharing their insights around the table, and then on to the plenary…

Show and Tell in a Big Circle  

For these plenaries, we used to do what most programs do after workshops: ask for comments from each table—that dreadful go-around. Tell the teacher what was learned. Then one day, a new colleague put everyone in a big circle and sat down too. A great “show and tell” discussion followed. The next day, another colleague put them in the circle again but stood there, as if to say: I will give you permission to speak, and you will direct your comments to me, which I will follow with a smart reply. (Professors hate to stop professing.)

We had a photo of this, and so we whited him out. The next day, one of us repeated the circle, stood there too, and announced: “I’m in charge”—and promptly walked out. When he returned after the plenary, the class informed him that next time he was to take his place in the circle, like everyone else.

Eavesdropping  

How about this? Instead of just discussion around each tables, followed by a big circle, turn around one person at each table, to eavesdrop without speaking, and then have these people report in the plenary on what they heard. Focused on listening, instead of waiting to speak, they hear a lot more of the nuance.

Here’s an example of using this eavesdropping. A colleague who was doing a session on managing retrenchment polled the class in advance as to who had positive, negative, and no experience with retrenchment. The positives sat at some tables and the negatives at others, to share their what they had learned about retrenchment. But what were we to do with the few who had no experience? Of course. have them eavesdrop at those tables! They all took profuse notes, and then…

The Inner Circle  

…we brought these eavesdroppers together in the middle, facing each other in a little circle, to chat about what they heard, with the everyone else listening all around. (They became the eavesdroppers, about what they had just said!) Everyone loved this. One manager in the middle said that her group probably learned more about retrenchment than anyone else. Another, on the outside, said this was the best reporting out of a workshop that she had ever seen. The class dubbed the circle in the center “The Neutral Zone.”

Tapping In  

Why stop here? After those in an inner circle have had their say, and some others are itching to add something, why not let them tap someone on the inside and replace him or her. The discussion carries on, in fact gets enlivened, still with the same number of people. Here we have something quite fascinating: a running conversation, with a few people at a time, yet everyone participating—listening intently and able to join, with no-one in charge. Once, when a journalist from the New York Times was in the class to write an article about the IMPM, we put him in the inner circle. Trouble was, everyone hesitated to tap him out!  (See his article, “The Anti-MBA.”)

Keynote Listener  

If we can have eavesdroppers at the tables, then why not in the whole class? One time, in another of our programs, we invited Marshal Ganz from the Harvard Kennedy School to do a session. He came early, to see what we were doing beforehand—presentations on some earlier work. So we designated Marshall to be the keynote listener, and comment on the presentations. Everyone, Marshall included, sat in a big circle as he discussed what he had heard. No canned speech, just honest reactions from a thoughtful listener.

Beyond the Classroom  

OK, so all of this is well and good for a bunch of managers and professors having a good time while learning a lot in a classroom. But it hardly needs to stop there. We have used keynote listeners to replace keynote speakers in large conferences. We have used inner circles in rooms of 200 people, all sitting at round tables. After a presentation and workshop discussions around these tables, we said: “Quick, point to someone at your table who had a really good idea.” We invited the first few targets to come forward and share their ideas. One participant described this kind of exercise as a “great way to turn a large meeting into a series of meaningful conversations”—as well as one big conversation.

And into the Managerial Workplace  

We have yet to turn the CEO of some major corporation around. (Maybe because they are too busy turning their companies around.) But imagine bringing all of this into the workplace: round tables, morning reflections, eavesdropping, taping, keynote listening, big circles and inner circles. Carlos Ramos was exposed to the seating in another of our programs (EMBA Roundtables), and when he got back home, installed a round table on the floor of his factory in Mexico City. Here is the picture he sent us, with the comment that “We use it very often” when there is the need to reflect on a difficult issue.

Coaching Ourselves

The two of us are part of another program, called CoachingOurselves.com, that dispenses with the professors and the classroom, but not the ideas. Managers gather together in their own workplace with a few of their peers or reports, and download slides on a particular topic (for example “Strategic Blindspots” or “Developing our Organization as a Community”). These they discuss with each other while relating the ideas to their common experience, to carry their insights forward to improve their organizations. In other words, change how and where managers sit, and suddenly management development can become organizational development!

As we mentioned earlier, you can experience all this for yourself. The next IMPM cohort begins in September (impm.org; for other innovations in the program, see “How about an emba that engages managers beyond administration”). Another version, in health care (imhl.org), begins its next class in April of 2018. The embaRoundtables.org, a one-week IMPM-type program for managers, runs every May (this year from May 1 in Dublin), and the McGill-HEC EMBA, modeled after the IMPM but with shorter modules in Montreal, runs from September every year.

Morning reflections in our IMPM module in Rio de Janeiro.

© Jonathan Gosling and Henry Mintzberg 2017; edited from an initial posting on this site on 1 July 2015. 

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Business schools like to boast about how many of their graduates have become CEOs—Harvard especially, since it has the most. But how do these people do as CEOs: are the skills needed to perform there the same as those that get them there?

MBA students enter the prestigious business schools smart, determined, and often aggressive. There, case studies teach them how to pronounce cleverly on situations they know little about, while analytic techniques give them the impression that they can tackle any problem—no in-depth experience required. With graduation comes the confidence of having been to a proper business school, not to mention the “old boys” network that can boost them to the “top.” Then what?

Some Surprising Evidence This is one question that these centers of research do not research. Some years ago, Joseph Lampel and I made an exception. A decade after its publication in 1990, I looked at a book called Inside the Harvard Business School, by David Ewing, long an insider. (The first line was “The Harvard Business School is probably the most powerful private institution in the world.”) The book listed 19 Harvard alumni who “had made it to the top”—the school’s superstars as of 1990. My attention was drawn to a few of them who would not have been on that list after 1990.

So Joseph Lampel and I studied the post-1990 records of all 19. How did they do? In a word, badly. A majority, 10, seemed clearly to have failed, meaning that their company went bankrupt, they were forced out of the CEO chair, a major merger backfired, and so on. The performance of another 4 we found to be questionable. Some of these 14 CEOs built up or turned around businesses, prominently and dramatically, only to see them weaken or collapse just as dramatically.

Frank Lorenzo experienced major failures with all three airlines that he headed, while Roy Bostock, who for a decade headed up Benton & Bowles, the renowned advertising agency, saw it close down five years after he retired. Perhaps most prominent and dramatic was the story of Bill Agee, CEO of Bendix and later Morrison Knudsen. About a book written by Mary Cunningham, another Harvard MBA, who worked alongside Agee, a Fortune reviewer wrote:

What little discussion there is of actual business consists mainly of genuflecting in front of a deity called The Strategy…. Near as I can tell, it consisted of getting Bendix out of a lot of fuddy-duddy old-fashioned products and into glitzy high tech. What makes this a terribly ingenious idea, let alone a good one, she does not say.¹

Another Fortune article elaborated. Agee “was facile with finance and accounting, shrewdly selling assets and investing in other companies…. [But after] Bendix’s ill-conceived effort to go high tech…a takeover attempt…backfired, leading to the sale of Bendix.” Then, at Morrison Knudsen, a construction company, Agee “made some dreadful business decisions.” According to some executives, he used questionable accounting practices to boost earnings by tens of millions of dollars. The writer concluded that “Agee’s fatal flaw was his weakness as a manager.”²

Of course, a couple of years in a classroom does not necessarily destroy someone’s potential for management—there were, after all, those 5 other CEOs who seemed to do well. But the performance of the 14 suggests either that this business school has succeeded in putting some wrong people on the track to that top, or else that its emphasis on cases may have given some right people the wrong impression of management.

More Surprising Still   These results were obviously surprising. They did not prove anything, but they certainly deserved consideration: is it possible that the most renowned business school in the world graduated a group of people who performed so dismally at the apex of managerial power?

Hence, more surprising still is what happened next. Nothing.

We hardly hid these results: an initial version appeared in a 2001 Fortune magazine article³ and a later version in my book Managers not MBAs (2004, pp 111-119), which has sold 90,000 copies (presumably to some people who read it). You might think that this would have set off alarm bells, or at least evoked a bit of curiosity. That they do not suggests as much about business schools as do these results about their graduates.

More Troubling Still   Since I first posted this lament here in late 2014, two business school professors have weighed in, one of them my first doctoral student, Danny Miller, Director of the Research Center for Business Families at the HEC business school in Montreal, the other Xiaowei Xu of the University of Rhode Island. They authored two articles with much larger samples and even more troubling results.

In “A Fleeting Glory: Self-serving Behavior among Celebrated MBA CEOs”⁴, they used an ingenious sample:  444 chief executives of American corporations celebrated on the covers of Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes magazines from 1970 to 2008. The research compared the subsequent performance of those companies that were headed by MBAs—one-quarter of the total—with the ones that were not.

Both sets of companies declined in performance after those cover stories—Miller commented later that “it’s hard to stay on top”—but the ones headed by MBAs declined more quickly. This “performance gap remained significant even 7 years after the cover story appeared.” The authors found that “the MBA degree is associated with expedients to achieve growth via acquisitions...[which showed] up in the form of reduced cash flows and inferior return on assets.” Yet the compensation of the MBA CEOs increased, indeed about 15% faster than the others! Apparently they had learned how to play the “self-serving” game, which Miller referred to in a later interview as “costly rapid growth.”⁵

The second study, entitled “MBA CEOs, Short-term Management and Performance” (2017⁶), used a wider, more recent sample: of 5004 CEOs of major U.S. public corporations from 2003 to 2013.  The results were much the same. “…we find that MBA CEOs are more apt than their non-MBA counterparts to engage in short-term strategic expedients such as positive earnings management and suppression of R&D, which in turn are followed by compromised firm market valuations.” Once again, these MBA CEOs were rewarded for this “performance.”

Why does this persist?  Business schools have become enormously successful, in some respects deservedly so. They do a great deal of significant research (Harvard now especially so). In universities, they are centers of interdisciplinary work, bringing together psychologists, sociologists, economists, historians, mathematicians, and others. And their MBA programs do well in training for the business functions, such as finance and marketing, if not for management. So why do they persist in promoting this education for management, which, according to mounting evidence, produces so much mismanagement?

The answer is unfortunately obvious: with so many of their graduates getting to the “top”, why change? But there is another answer that is also becoming obvious: because at this top, too many of their graduates are corrupting the economy.⁷

© 2017 Henry Mintzberg    See the last TWOG which described something  quite different: management education for practicing managers who reflect on and learn from their own experience. See also The Epidemic of Managing without Soul. 

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There is plenty of business education, but hardly any management education. What, then, are you to do as a manager performing quite well, thank you, only to be repeatedly bypassed by MBAs who screw up? Join them by getting an EMBA and then do damage control?

Do you really want to sit in a nice neat row listening to lectures about action and engagement? Or pronounce on cases in companies that you never hear of before yesterday while your own first-hand experience is being ignored?  Is it just the administration of business that interests you, or the practice of managing?

For years, I went around giving talks at business schools about what’s wrong with MBA education for management: that it trains the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences.¹ The people are too young: a manager can’t be created in a classroom. This makes the ways too analytical: since the faculty can hardly address the art and craft of managing with these people (let alone by themselves), they have to rely on teaching them technique, or else use the second-hand experience of cases.  And by giving the students the impression that this has taught them to manage everything, whereas in actual fact they have learned to manage nothing, the consequences are often dire: the dirty little secret of even the best business schools is that too many of their graduates fail, even as CEOs. (Some surprising facts on this in an upcoming TWOG.)

Eventually people started asking me the question that should never be asked of an academic.  “What are you doing about it?” (We’re supposed to criticize, not do anything about anything.) Duly embarrassed, I teamed up with colleagues from leading schools around the world to create the International Masters Program for Managers (impm.org). Think of it as another kind of “emba”: engaging managers beyond administration.

While a manager cannot be created in a classroom, people who practice management can benefit enormously in a classroom that encourages them to reflect on their own experience and share their insights with each other. T.S. Eliot wrote in one of his poems that “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” This program is about managers getting the meaning of their experience.

Accordingly, the managers who participate in the impm (average age in their 40s) stay on the job—this is about doing a better job more than getting a better job—and come into the classroom for five modules of 10 days each over the course of 16 months. These focus, not on the functions of business (marketing, finance, etc.), but on the mindsets of managing: reflection (managing yourself, hosted by Lancaster University in England), analysis (managing organizations, hosted by my university, McGill, in Montreal), worldliness (managing context, hosted by the  Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore), collaboration (managing relationships, hosted by Renmin University in Beijing), and action (managing change, hosted by the FGV school in Rio de Janeiro).²

At the end of our very first module, on reflection, while everyone else was going around saying “It was great meeting you!”, Alan Whelan, a sales manager at BT, was saying: “It was great meeting myself!” We were off to a good start!

We have a 50:50 rule in our five classrooms: half the time it’s over to the managers on their agendas. Hence they sit at round tables in a flat room so they can go in and out of workshops at a moment’s notice. No need to “break out.”

These managers are not lone wolves parachuted into class to sit in selfie-silos, as shown in Model 1. They are colleagues in a community of social learning, engaged in their common development, as shown in Model 2.

This arrangement has opened the door to a variety of novel practices. 

•    “This is the best management book I ever read”, IMPM graduate Silke Lehnhardt told colleagues at Lufthansa who were about to start the program. She was holding up her Insight Book, which was empty when she first received it. Every day begins with morning reflections, first alone as everyone records in that book thoughts about the learning and their managing—on the job, in the business, in their life. Then they share these thoughts with colleagues around their table, followed by discussion in a big circle of the most compelling of their insights. Shouldn’t every manager’s best book be the one that they have written for themselves?  

•    It is intriguing what can happen in friendly consulting, where the concerns of each manager become the focus of attention of a small group of empathetic colleagues. One manager’s boss quit suddenly during the program, and she was struggling with whether to take that position. The hour of friendly consulting proved so helpful that they kept going over lunch.

•    Mayur Vova was running his jam and jelly company in Pune, India, while Françoise LeGoff was number two on the Africa desk at the Red Cross Federation in Geneva. They did the very first managerial exchange together, where the IMPM managers pair up and spend the better part of a week at each other’s workplaces. When the two of them arrived at the next module, they couldn’t wait to talk about their experience. At the start of that week, Mayur saw Françoise typing and asked: “Can’t a secretary do that?” Welcome to the worldly mindset: Geneva is not Pune! (That’s why we call it worldly, not global: the IMPM is not about becoming cookie cutter global, but about getting into other people’s worlds to better understand their own.) On the last day, Mayur told Françoise that he would be happy to meet with any of her staff. All of them lined up to convey through him their impressions of her management style. Better than a 360! Mayur “was like a mirror for me,” Françoise reported.

•    We encourage the managers to form an IMPact team back at work, to carry the learning into the company for sharing and action. In one small company that had run into a serious problem, the manager in the program, who had to pick up the pieces, formed such a team. He told us it saved the company.

The IMPM has been slow to spread to more conventional business schools, perhaps because they are too busy teaching cases about how the established companies missed the new technology. Is this the new technology? You have to see it to believe it.³ (The next IMPM class begins on May 15. Read also about the health care version, at mcgill.ca/imhl.)

The MBA is fine so long as it is recognized for what it does well, namely train people for certain specialized jobs in business (such as marketing research or financial analysis). But it also has to be recognized for what it does badly, namely prepare people to manage. Beyond the MBA, it’s time for management education.

© 2014, 2017 Henry Mintzberg. This is a revision of a TWOG that first appeared on 19 December 2014. For more on all this, please see “Looking Forward to Development” (Training & Development, 13 February 2011), “From Management Development to Organization Development with Impact”  (OD Practitioner, 2011,Vol. 43 No. 3), and “Developing Naturally: from management to organization to society to selves”

with Jonathan Gosling

Imagine a meeting of the board with the chairman facing backward, not allowed to speak until the end. Imagine a conference with a keynote listener instead of a keynote speaker. Imagine adults sitting in a circle to “show and tell”, just like they did in kindergarten. Does all this sound silly?

We’ve been doing such silly things for years, with great success. They can listen better, speak more thoughtfully, address problems more effectively. Instead of just listening to “speakers”, or not listening while waiting to speak, or enduring a meeting with everyone trying to speak at once, we use a host of different seating arrangements that encourage discussion and development at its best—in and beyond our classrooms.

Twenty years ago we created the International Masters in Practicing Management (impm.org) to get past business education (the MBA), toward true education for managers. We wanted to do things differently—to engage managers beyond administration (a kind of emba if you like). But we hadn’t thought about seating.

“How are you going to seat them?” asked Nancy Badore. She had created a novel program for Ford executives and was helping us think through ours. “I suppose in one of those U-shaped classrooms?” one of us answered. “Not those obstetrics stirrups!” Nancy shot back. We got the point! With that, we were off—never looking back (except when the class asked us to turn around, to receive some honest feedback).

Table Talk

We decided that the managers in our classrooms would sit at small round tables to facilitate them learning from each other. No need to break out.

Round tables turn a collection of individual students into a community of engaged learners. Managers bring wonderful experience to such a classroom: why not let them reflect on it and share their insights with each other? Our 50:50 rule dictates that, after we as faculty introduce new ideas, it’s over to the managers for discussion, on their agendas. We also have a morning ritual: every day begins with everyone scribbling personal reflections in his or her Insight Book, followed by sharing their insights around the table, and then a plenary….

Show and tell in a big circle

For these plenaries, we used to do what most programs do: ask for the best ideas from each table. That dreadful go-around. Then one day a new colleague, mercifully inexperienced in all this, put everyone in a big circle and sat down too. A great “show and tell” discussion followed. The next day, another colleague, unfortunately experienced in all this, put them in the circle again but stood there, as if to say: I will give you permission to speak, you will direct your comments to me, and I will follow with some smart reply. (Professors hate to stop professing!) So we whited him out. (See the photo.)

The day after that, one of us repeated the circle, stood there, and announced: “I’m in charge”—and promptly walked out. Returning after the plenary, the class informed him that next time he was to take his place in the circle like everyone else..

Eavesdropping

How about this? Instead of a big circle, turn one person around at each table, to eavesdrop without speaking, and then have these people report in the plenary on what they heard. People who are focused on listening, rather than on waiting to speak, hear a lot more of the nuance. Here’s an example of what more can be done with this eavesdropping. A colleague doing a session on managing retrenchment polled the class in advance as to who had positive, negative, and no experiences with retrenchment. Then we sat the positives at some tables and the negatives at others, to share their experiences. But what about the few who had no experience? Why not have them eavesdrop at those tables? They all took profuse notes, and then…

The Inner Circle

…we brought these eavesdroppers together in the middle, facing each other in a little circle, to chat about what they had just heard, with everyone else listening. (In effect, they became the eavesdroppers, about what they had just said!) Everyone loved this! One manager in the middle said that her group probably learned more about retrenchment than anyone else. Another, on the outside, said this was the best reporting out of a workshop that she had ever seen. The class dubbed this “The Neutral Zone.”

Tapping in and out

But why stop here? After those in an inner circle have had their say, and others are itching to add something, why not let them tap someone on the inside and replace him or her. The discussion carries on, in fact gets enlivened, still with just a few people (4 or 5 best). Here we have something quite fascinating: a running conversation, with just a few people at a time, yet many people participating, and all listening intently, and no-one in charge. Once, when we had a journalist from the New York Times visiting the IMPM class, we put him in the inner circle. Trouble was, everyone hesitated to tap him out! . (See his article, “The Anti-MBA.”)

Keynote Listener

If we can have eavesdroppers at the tables, why not in the whole class? One time we invited Marshal Ganz, from the Harvard Kennedy School, to run a session in a MOOC we are doing (Social Learning for Social Impact). He came early, to see what we were doing. So we designated him keynote listener in the previous session, to comment on presentations that the participants were making. Everyone, Marshall included, sat in a big circle as he discussed what he had just heard. No canned speech, just honest reactions from a thoughtful observer.

Beyond the classrooms

OK, so all this is well and good for a bunch of managers and professors having a good time while learning a lot in a classroom. But it hardly needs to stop there. We have used keynote listeners to replace keynote speakers in large conferences. We have also used inner circles in rooms of 200 people at round tables, asking at the end of a workshop: “Quick, point to someone at your table who had a really good idea”¹ and then asking the first few targets to come forward. One participant described this kind of exercise as a “great way to turn a large meeting into a series of meaningful conversations.”

And into the managerial offices

We have yet to turn the chairman of some major corporation around. (Maybe they are too busy turning their companies around.) But imagine all of this brought into the workplace: round tables, morning reflections, eavesdropping, big circles and inner circles. Or don’t imagine. Ask Carlos. He experienced the seating in one of our programs (embaroundtables.org), and when he got back home immediately installed a round table on the floor of his Mexico City factory. Here is the picture he sent us, with the comment that “We use it very often” when there is the need to reflect on a difficult issue.

Peer Coaching around the tables

Now we have another program, called CoachingOurselves.com, that dispenses with the professors, the classrooms, and the conferences. Managers gather in teams in their own workplace in the same roundtable format Each team downloads slides on a particular topic (for example “Strategic Blindspots”, “Developing our Organization as a Community”, “Beyond Bickering”), relates the material to their common experiences, and carry their insights forward for improvement in their organizations.

Change how and where managers sit and suddenly management development becomes organizational development.

© Jonathan Gosling and Henry Mintzberg 2015. Come sit with us at impm.org (next class 25 October 2015), or mcgill.ca/imhl for health care, or embaroundtables.org for a one-week experience.

Morning reflections in our module in our IMPM module in Rio

There is plenty of business education, but hardly any management education. In the last three TWOGs, I have been critical of this business education, because of the harm I believe it has been doing to the practice of managing. In this TWOG, I describe a very different form of education, to focus away from heroic leadership, toward engaging management.

For years I was going around giving talks about these concerns. Eventually people starting asking me: “What are you doing about it?” I’m a professor: we are supposed to criticize, not do anything about anything. But duly embarrassed, with colleagues from McGill in Canada and at business schools in England, India, Japan, and France (later China and Brazil), we created the International Masters in Practicing Management (impm.org). This is an emba all right—experiencing management by action.

While a manager cannot be created in a classroom, people who practice management can benefit enormously by reflecting on their own experience and sharing the insights with each other. This kind of social learning has proved to be the most powerful pedagogical tool we have. T.S. Eliot wrote in one of his poems that “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” We all have to get the meaning of our experiences. Saul Alinsky suggested further, in his book Rules for Radical, that we do not accumulate experience; we undergo “happenings.” These “become experiences when they are digested [and] reflected on…”

Accordingly, the managers who participate in our program (average age early 40s) stay on the job—this is about doing a better job, not getting a better job—and come into the classroom periodically for 10-day modules—five in all over a 16 months. These focus, not on the functions of business (marketing, finance, etc.), but on the mindsets of managing: reflection (managing self), analysis (managing organizations), worldliness¹ (managing context), collaboration (managing relationships), and action (managing change).² At the end of our very first module, on reflection, while everyone else was going around saying “It was great meeting you!” Alan Whelan, a sales manager at BT, was saying: “It was great meeting myself!”

We have a 50:50 rule in the classroom: half the time over to the managers on their agendas. Thus they sit at round tables in a flat room, so they can go in and out of workshops at a moment’s notice. No need to “break out.” These managers are not lone wolves, parachuted into the class to sit in silos, but people engaged in their development, linked back to their workplaces (see Models 1 and 2).³ This has opened the door to a variety of novel practices.

• “This is the best management book I ever read” Silke Lehnhardt told her colleagues back at Lufthansa. Every day in the program, starting with morning reflections, everyone records their thoughts in the empty Insight Book we give them—anything and everything about being a manager, on the job, in the business, and about life. They share these thoughts with colleagues around the table and then the best insights are discussed altogether in a big circle. Shouldn’t every manager’s best book be the one they have written for themselves?

• We all have our own concerns. It is quite remarkable what can happen in friendly consulting, where a concern of each manager becomes the focus of attention of a small group of experienced colleagues dedicated to helping him or her think it through. One manager’s boss quit suddenly during the program and she was struggling with whether to take that position and give up what she had been developing in her own job. The hour of friendly consulting was so helpful that they carried on over lunch. (More on the process in a later TWOG.)

• Mayur Vova was running his jam and jelly company in Pune, India, while Françoise LeGoff was number two on the Africa desk at the Red Cross Federation in Geneva. We were going to introduce managerial exchanges, a new element in the program, at an upcoming module. The managers were to pair up and spend a week at each others’ workplaces. But these two got a head start, before we could even brief them about it. When they arrived at the module, the two of them accosted me: they couldn’t wait to tell me about the experience. At the start of that week, Mayur saw Françoise typing and asked: “Can’t a secretary do that?” Welcome to the worldly mindset: Geneva is not Pune. On the last day, Mayur proposed to Françoise that he would be happy to meet with any of her staff. All of them lined up to convey through him their impressions of her management style. Better than a 360! Mayur “was like a mirror for me,” Françoise reported.

• We encourage each manager to form an IMPact Team back at work, to carry the learning of the program back into his or her company for reflection and action. One small company ran into a serious problem, and the manager in the program found himself picking up the pieces. He and his colleagues formed such a team to focus their discussions: he believed it saved the company.

The IMPM has been spreading internally. For example, Renmin University in Beijing, which runs the module on collaboration, has created a CMPM for China. And at McGill we have developed the International Masters for Health Leadership (mcgill.ca/imhl), for experienced people from all aspects of health care. But the pedagogy has been slow to spread to other business schools although I have written extensively on it.⁴ Maybe they are too busy teaching cases about how the established companies missed the new technology.

Is this the new technology? You have to see it to believe it.⁵

The MBA is fine so long as it is recognized for what it does well, namely train people for certain specialized jobs in business, but also for what it does badly, namely prepare people for managing. Beyond the MBA, it’s time for management education.

© 2015 Henry Mintzberg

Business schools like to boast about how many of their graduates have become corporate CEOs—Harvard especially, since it has the most. But how do these people do as CEOs: are the skills needed to perform there the same as the ones needed to get there?

MBA students enter the foremost business schools smart, determined, and aggressive. There case studies teach them how to pronounce cleverly on situations they know little about (as discussed in last week’s TWOG), while analytic techniques give them the impression that they can tackle any problem. With graduation comes the confidence of having been to a proper business school, not to mention the “old boys’ network that can help boost them to the “top.” Then what?

Some Surprising Evidence

This is one question these centers of research do not study. We made an exception. A decade after its publication in 1990, I looked at a book called Inside the Harvard Business School, by David Ewing. (The first line was “The Harvard Business School is probably the most powerful private institution in the world.” Unfortunately he might have been right.) The book listed 19 Harvard alumni who “had made it to the top”—the school’s superstars as of 1990. My attention was drawn to a few people who would not have been on that list after 1990.

So Joseph Lampel and I studied the subsequent records of all 19. How did they do? In a word, badly. A majority, 10, seemed clearly to have failed, meaning that the company went bankrupt, they were forced out of the CEO chair, a major merger backfired, and so on. The performance of another 4 we found to be questionable at least. Some of these 14 CEOs built up or turned around businesses, prominently and dramatically, only to see them weaken or collapse just as dramatically.

Frank Lorenzo experienced major failures with all three airlines that he headed, while Benton & Bowles, the renowned advertising agency headed by Roy Bostock for a decade, was closed down five years after he retired. Perhaps most prominent and dramatic was the story of Bill Agee, CEO of Bendix and later Morrison Knudsen. About a book written by Mary Cunningham, another Harvard MBA, who worked alongside Agee, a Fortune reviewer wrote:

What little discussion there is of actual business consists mainly of genuflecting in front of a deity called The Strategy…. Near as I can tell, it consisted of getting Bendix out of a lot of fuddy-duddy old-fashioned products and into glitzy high tech. What makes this a terribly ingenious idea, let alone a good one, she does not say. (Kinsley, 25 June 1984)

Another Fortune article picked up from here (O’Reilly, 29 May 1995). Agee “was facile with finance and accounting, shrewdly selling assets and investing in other companies…. [But after] Bendix’s ill-conceived effort to go high tech…a takeover attempt…backfired, leading to the sale of Bendix.” Then, at Morrison Knudsen, a construction company, Agee “made some dreadful business decisions.” According to some executives, he used questionable accounting practices to boost earnings by tens of millions of dollars. The writer concluded: that “Agee’s fatal flaw was his weakness as a manager.”

Of course a couple of years in a classroom does not necessarily destroy someone’s potential for management—there were, after all, those 5 others out of the 19 who seemed to do well. But the performance of the 14 suggests either that business schools have succeeded in putting some wrong people on the track to that top, or else that the schools’ emphasis on cases and analysis may be putting some right people on the wrong track to managing.

More Surprising Still

These results were surprising. They did not prove anything, but they certainly deserved consideration. So more surprising is what happened next. Nothing. We hardly hid these results: we published them in a Fortune magazine article (19 February 2001) and they appeared in my book Managers not MBAs (2004, pages 111-119, which has sold 80,000 copies). You might think that this would have set off some alarm bells, or at least evoked a bit of curiosity. That they did not may suggest as much about business schools as do these results about their graduates.

In the last three TWOGs, I have been critical of what has been going on in business schools, especially Harvard. Is this some kind of vendetta against it? Not at all.

When I studied management across the river in the 1960s, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Harvard Business School was just as renowned as it is today. But it was weak in research—in fact some of its prominent faculty derided research. The turnaround since then has been quite remarkable. In the areas I know, Harvard’s faculty is fantastic, especially in the ability of many to relate concrete issues to conceptual understanding. Too bad that they have to devote so much of their teaching efforts to a method—and its view of management, like that of other business schools so concentrated on analysis--that is doing such great harm to our organizations and the societies in which they function (see mintzberg.org/enterprise).

We are mired in a heroic view of management (now called leadership)--centralized, numeric, individualistic and often narcissistic--that is too often detached from what is supposed to be managed. People who believe they can manage everything often prove themselves capable of managing nothing. We don’t need generic managers; we need engaged ones. The problem has been bad enough in the private sector; its infiltration into other sectors of society is far worse. Do NGOs need “CEOs”, business models, strategic plans, measures galore, and all the rest? Harvard and most other business schools have to be doing better than that.

Next week’s TWOG will discuss what we have been doing about this, by focussing management education on practicing managers who learn from their own experience.

© 2014 Henry Mintzberg

“[In lecture courses, students] are waiting for you to give ‘the answer.’ There’s a built-in bias against action. What we say with the case method is: ‘Look, I know you don’t have enough information—but given the information you do have, what are you going to do?¹

“OK, Jack, here you are at Mammoth Inc. What should the company do now?” The professor and eighty-seven of Jack’s classmates anxiously await his reply to the “cold call.” Jack is prepared; he has thought about this for a long time, ever since he was told that the case study method is intended to “challenge conventional thinking.” He has also been reminded repeatedly that since good managers are decisive, good MBA students have to take a stand. So Jack swallows hard and answers the question.

“How can I answer the question?” Jack begins. “I barely heard of Mammoth before yesterday. Yet today you want me to pronounce on its strategy.

“Last night, I had two other cases to prepare. So Mammoth, with its zillions of employees and all those products, got a couple of hours. I read the case over once quickly and again, ummm, less quickly. I never knowingly used any of Mammoth’s products. (I didn’t even know until yesterday that the company makes the rat poison I use in my basement.) I never went inside any of its factories. I’ve never even been to Come By Chance Newfoundland where it is headquartered. I spoke to none of its customers (except myself). I certainly never met any of the people mentioned in the case. Besides, this is a pretty high tech company and I’m a pretty low-tech guy. My work experience, such as it was, took place in a furniture factory. All I have to go by are these few pages. This is a superficial exercise. I refuse to answer your question.”

What happens to Jack? At the business school, I’ll let you guess. But from there, he goes back to the furniture business where he immerses himself in the products and the processes, the people and the industry. Gradually, with his courage to be decisive and challenge conventional thinking, Jack rises to become CEO. There, with hardly any industry analysis at all (that would have come in a later course), he and his people learn their way to a strategy that transforms the industry.

Meanwhile, Bill, sitting next to Jack, leaps in. He too has never had the chance to go to Come By Chance. But that doesn’t stop him. He makes a clever point or two and gets that MBA. This gets him into a prestigious consulting firm, where, as in those case study classes, he leaps from one situation to another, each time making a clever point or two, concerning issues he recently knew nothing about, always leaving before implementation begins.

As this kind of experience pours in, it is not long before Bill becomes chief executive of a major appliance company. (He never consulted for one, but it does get him thinking about that Mammoth case.) There, after downsizing a few thousand of those human resources, he himself formulates a glitzy high-tech strategy which is implemented through a dramatic program of acquisitions. What happens to that? Guess again. [Or see next week’s TWOG.]

“Readers [of the book What They Really Teach You at the Harvard Business School, written by two of its students] are probably asking, Read the case and do that analysis in two to four hours? Harvard’s answer is yes. Students need to prepare two to three cases each day. . . . So [they] must work toward getting their analysis done fast as well as done well.”²

This appeared more or less as above in a box in my book Managers not MBAs (2004).³ Recently Harvard has been running ads in The Economist for its executive education programs, showing an executive-looking lady who is saying: “We studied four companies a day. This isn’t theory. This is experience.”

This is nonsense.

Tune in to next week’s TWOG for some consequences of this kind of educating, and the week after about how real experience can be used in the education of practicing managers.

© 2014 Henry Mintzberg