In business, experience is the big teacher. What do you need to succeed in business? You need the ability to think critically and communicate, and those things you can get just as easily out of a philosophy degree. While MBAs can be useful, Stewart stresses they aren't necessary for becoming a good manager: Give them a real specialization as opposed to a phony one," says Stewart. "Forget all this nonsense about general case studies and teach how logistics operations work in a complicated supply organization. At the same time, he believes greater specialization is key. Stewart would like to see MBA programs focus not only on business but on broader subjects that would be useful for developing knowledge and critical thinking, such as political theory or evolutionary biology. They're pretty much pseudo-sciences, and when you use them as a basis for instruction, you're really teaching people how to master arcane jargon that has minimal connection to the real world, as opposed to teaching them to really think. In order to produce generalist courses, business school professors have been forced to invent subjects called strategy, called organizational behavior and so on. Stewart says this is a problem of content: While Stewart believes that highly specialized studies in areas such as process-oriented, operations research can be useful training for managers, it's the case-study oriented, generalist programs such as Harvard Business School that are less useful. We have a serious problem with credentialism getting out of hand," he says. "It makes sense to have a certain number of people study business-related subjects, but now it's a universal credential for doing business at a certain level. Stewart sees a problem with the sheer number of MBA degrees, about 140,000, awarded each year. There are some techniques and crafts associated with management, but the idea that there's a single body of knowledge that you can turn into formal expertise is false. What exactly is the management myth? As Stewart explained during our recent interview, it's "the idea that there is a body of technological expertise, something like engineering, that is called management, that you can package up, put into a textbook and transmit to students. In his new book The Management Myth, author Matthew Stewart takes a critical look at the management industry, from the business gurus who write best-selling books to the consulting industry to a subject near to me and to many of you, MBA programs.
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