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Saturday, January 1, 2011

Does MBA training encourage poor decision-making?

During my first year of my MBA studies, I felt pretty good about what I was learning.  I was reading about finance, economics, operations management, marketing, change management, and many other things that any good business leader ought to know.  Then I took a class in information technology, a subject with which I am somewhat familiar.  I thought that the class was actually pretty good - it gave students without a background in IT a good sense of the decisions an IT manager must make on a day-to-day basis.

However, getting a good sense of the types of decisions an IT manager must make and being able to make those decisions are two completely different things.  Yet many of our assignments involved us reading about a typical scenario and writing recommendations to solve the problems outlined in that scenario, and led the students to believe that IT management is something that any skilled manager can do well.

So I looked back on many of my other courses to see if this course was atypical; and it was not.  Reading cases and coming up with recommendations was a common practice in most of my MBA courses.  It scares me a bit to think of the recommendations I confidently made to solve real-world problems with only a modicum of knowledge in the subject of the class.  Unfortunately, I've frequently observed since then other students making recommendations without knowing the subject matter.  Ok, I'll admit, I continue to do so as well.  It's what MBA students do.

What's the alternative?  I still think that the subject matter taught in a typical MBA program is still worth teaching and that an MBA is still worth obtaining for anyone wishing to go into business management, so merely eliminating the MBA is not the answer.  But is there another approach that might work better?

One possible alternative I've come up with is to train MBA students to find and evaluate information rather than interpreting and applying information.  Managers are not always going to have reliable sources of information, so being able to gather useful information should be paramount in any training.

I would also suggest that more time is spent giving students a glimpse of the subject matter beyond what is covered in the class.  It is important to get a foundation in most business subjects, but I would argue that it's more important to know what you don't know, to get a better feel for what questions to ask when the inevitable knowledge gaps arise.

Does anyone else have any suggestions on how MBA students can avoid the "recommendation trap" (for lack of a better phrase) that I described above?

3 comments:

  1. I think that the MBA is more about action than about research, so the focus on interpreting and applying information is appropriate. The courses are a set of primers to all various areas of management. Specialization occurs after the MBA and more experience.

    There are two reasons why I trust that the training an MBA receives will not lead to faulty decision making.

    First, unlike an MBA class, information in the real world is unlimited. You can take as much or as little time as is necessary to gather the information for decision making. We make snap decisions in class because we are purposefully limited in the scope of information we can utilize.

    Secondly, most MBAs who will be making recommendations will be making them because the people they work for trust them to make those recommendations. The MBA degree qualifies you not to make a decision in all areas, but says that you know how to take information, weed out the unimportant bits, apply frameworks you have learned and come to a conclusion. It's the responsibility of the people who trust the MBA to ensure they have access to all the information, or teach them how to collect it. Some of that information will include experience in relevant areas.

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  2. I didn't really think of the MBA as being more about action than research. That makes sense. However, action without adequate information can lead to poor decisions.

    I have to say that I'm glad I got my MBA. It gave me a great base of knowledge that I think will help me be a better manager in the future. I do think that it can lead to overconfidence if the individual student does not use that knowledge properly.

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