Comments by backtoreality

I was a practitioner for ten years rising to general manager and handling a hole unit. Turned it around and learned many lessons in a few years about organizational life and business. Then become a student again and got a doctoral degree from a prestigious USA top ten university. Studied all about the writings on strategy, marketing and organizations. All exciting and fun. Then became a faculty teaching strategy, international business, technology and innovation in the graduate programs. Today I am the COO of a publicly trade company and back to reality.

MBA programs still focus on teaching tools and methods as if these could solve a company's problems by magic. Most if not all business problems, even losing market share, owe their root cause to people's personal agendas rather than the organization's agenda. CEOs still believe that a company's problem can be solved with a tool. In part because of the MBA teachings? Reality shows otherwise. Most solutions are simple, and fall in the people's realm. MBA programs do no teach anything of these issues. Even courses such as OB (Org Behavior) and OT (Org theory and design) are of not much interest to students or MBA programs, in part because they do not get closer to reality. They focus on tools and theoretical approaches. Witness OD (org development) in vogue in the 70's and hot during the 80s, still useless, out of touch with organizational reality and not even taught anymore in MBA programs. Take marketing, the essential message is tools solve all marketing problems, and the client is first. Who in any working organization will say otherwise? but who will raise his/her hand and say yes we really do believe in the client and we work for our clients?? maybe one in a million? what organizations do and what they claim and what MBA programs do and what they claim are far, far, far away from reality. Both reflect each other.. out of touch with reality. We prepare people and send them with tools not with a deep understanding how to tackle the organizational problems caused by people's behaviors, people's agendas and people's power desires, how to deal with them and how to confront and fix them is of most importance. MBAs need more of these know-how than tools canned in two-by-two matrices.