Rethinking the MBA

📖 The Scoop

Business education is at crossroads. In the 1960s and 1970s, when leading firms wanted new hires with cutting-edge business insights and analytical skills, they would hire MBAs from top-tier business schools. An MBA from HBS, Stanford, Wharton and a select few others was seen as a key certification, conferring the special professional knowledge and skill that would give a firm competitive advantage in the 20th century marketplace. No more. As HBS professors David Garvin, Srikant Datar, and Research Associate Patrick Cullen show in this landmark book, the rapidly changing world economy has made the status and role of business education highly uncertain. In this impressively-researched book, many pressing concerns come to light: Financial and consulting firms, which in the past hired the large majority of MBAs from top-ranked programs, now increasingly have in-house programs, which advance people just as quickly as B-School, in their view; More and more, recruiters have come to value the screening process top schools use to pick students, and now prefer to recruit straight from a school's admission list; and, Deans, recruiters, and firms have come to feel that B-Schools are behind the curve on globalization, not giving students the kind of heightened cultural awareness and refined global outlook they need. Even with all the ostensible focus on leadership, stakeholders complain that MBAs often don't really understand the practice of leadership or have sufficient awareness of their impact on others. What's more, in recent years there have been several high-profile critiques of business schools from leading academics such as Warren Bennis, Henry Mintzberg, and Rakesh Khurana. The current financial and economic crisis has only heightened the focus on the role of business schools: Did the norms and values taught at top business schools somehow contribute to the meltdown? The authors give the most comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling account yet of the troubled

Genre: Business & Economics / General (fancy, right?)