Matt Symonds
49 min read
Stanford GSB’s MSx program has among the most experienced cohorts in graduate business education, with an average 12.5 years experience in the workforce
“Using the classroom to help develop people already practicing management is a fine idea, but pretending to create managers out of people who have never managed is a sham.”
It is twenty years since Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg, wrote Managers, Not MBAs, his bold critique of how managers are educated. He argued that leaders cannot be created in a classroom, they arise in context. But people who already practice management can significantly improve their effectiveness given the opportunity to learn thoughtfully from their own experience.
“The MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences,” Mintzberg insisted. “The problem today is that the analytical side is overemphasized, especially in MBA programs, which teach mostly that. They give the impression that managing is all about analysis. Even case studies, which are detached from reality, make it seem like you can manage by reading reports and making decisions in a vacuum.”
He called for a more engaging approach to managing and a more reflective approach to management education. Mintzberg also outlined how business schools can become true schools of management.
Professor Henry Mintzberg: “You’re not supposed to ask those questions of an academic, because we’re not supposed to do anything about anything. But eventually I got embarrassed, so I said, ‘Okay, I’d better do something’”
The award-winning Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies has been teaching for the past 56 years at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. It was here that in 1996 he co-founded an alternative management program called the International Masters Program for Managers.
The IMPM is a modular, international program based at McGill and four other business schools around the world. It is different from an MBA, Mintzberg says, because it accepts a different type of student, and different from the standard EMBA because of its heavy emphasis on reflection.
In a previous Poets&Quants article, THE MBA For the Anti-MBA Crowd, Mintzberg says he founded the IMPM partly out of embarrassment. He was visiting business schools to talk about flaws in their MBA programs, and people started asking him what he was actually doing about it.
“You’re not supposed to ask those questions of an academic, because we’re not supposed to do anything about anything,” he jokes. “But eventually I got embarrassed, so I said, ‘Okay, I’d better do something.’” So he created the IMPM.
