Cold Shower 20: The Monster We've Created: Dr. Fisher's Continuing Pique with MBA's

Cold Shower The Monster We’ve Created: Dr. Fisher’s
Continuing Pique with MBA’s Vol. I, Art. XX

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, I sense you have a problem with MBA’s. Before I go further, I should mention I have an MBA. What is your problem with us? Why single us out for contempt?

Dr. Fisher replies:

Not only do I have a problem with MBA’s, I have a problem with the entire construction of business and technology education. Currently, you can acquire an MBA in over 100 different disciplines. In my book Work Without Managers (1990) I make the claim that “any large company is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation.” Management education appears to be 100 or more MBA degrees in search of a career.

It is no accident that corporate America has lost its way as society has made a sharp turn from a mechanistic to an organic model of operation. Most CEO’s of the Fortune 100 companies, a score of years ago, were first trained as engineers. Engineering is a conformist, not a creative discipline, one in which control emanates from a hierarchy in which position power along with its vertical distribution carries out the decision-making will of the anointed one. That no longer works. Power now is in knowledge, and knowledge is distributed throughout the organization, making it expedient that decisions are made horizontally, timely, and at the level of consequences.

Leadership in this new configuration is a platform of trust supported by four legs: fairness, firmness, consistency and honesty. If any one of these legs should be missing, trust is broken down and morale is the first casualty followed by the Six Silent Killers (1998). What has this got to do with MBA’s? The answer is, EVERYTHING!

Management has evolved as a rational deductive process. When problems occur, management has decided it must be a problem of finance, human resources, accounting, database administration, customer service, business law, marketing, business communication, ethics, organizational behavior, supply-chain management, decision analysis, and on and on, creating MBA degrees to match and materialize such expertise. The result is that 80 percent of the cost of enterprise is indirect expense and only 20 percent in the making of the product. Guess what kind of people create the lion’s share of this indirect expensing? MBA’s. The unspoken rationale goes like this:
The way to stem the tide of change, without appearing to drag your feet, is to particularize diverse functions into experts, which can be controlled, rather than integrate these functions into generalists who might challenge your authority and decision-making.

Leadership is an intuitive inductive process based upon generalized knowledge and specific experience, and a conscious awareness and ability to deal with reality. This is missing.

Instead, business and technology education has created a monster, the professional worker. This worker chases degree after degree, discipline after discipline, and attempts to stay as far as possible from real experience and real work along the way. Everything for this professional is a priori, or a matter of cause and effect analysis, which often turns into circular logic with the dog chasing its own tail. Costly and time consuming presentations and pointless conferences with elaborate PowerPoint shows put the emphasis on description at the expense of action. Critical thinking, emphasizing the discipline of one’s box, is preferred to conceptual thinking, where the emphasis is on defining, designing and creating outside the box.

MBA’s have been trained with all the high tech tools in technology’s tool kit which they then apply to searching and discovering answers to problems that satisfy corporate requirements, instead of designing and creating answers that both meet these requirements as well as the personal needs of employees. You cannot have satisfaction of one without the other. MBA’s are trained to manage things. People are not things to be managed. People are individuals to be led. This is not in the curriculum.

For more than thirty years I have been exposed to MBA students and MBA professionals. I was an adjunct professor in graduate management education at a number of universities for several years. As an executive, I employed their services, and as a consultant I evaluated their corporate contribution against their compensation. My experience indicates that the first loyalty of B-school graduates is to their compensation, followed by their profession, next to telling senior management what it wants to hear, and finally to filling the right boxes to promote their careers by constantly campaigning for the next position.

MBA’s, as they are employed in many cases, are little more than overdressed computer programmers. My sense is that we are throwing our prime resources into financial or tracking activities remotely related to the production of goods and services. We do this because the business and technology model has not been thought through, but has evolved helter-skelter as traditional thinking and management has been stuck in leaderless leadership. MBA’s, as well as most professionals, have been unwitting chess pieces in a corporate chess game.

What is the answer? It starts with thinking differently on purpose. Corporate thinking is not structured to deal with a changing world because it does not offer creative, constructive and design solutions to enterprise. Placing MBA’s in the equation has reified vertical thinking at the expense of its complement, lateral thinking. This is unlikely soon to change because the complacent arrogance of corporate thinking prevents it from seeing the extent of its failure, which is epitomized with the arrival on stage of the MBA.

Copyright (1996) See Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers (2000) discounted at $15 (S & H included), or The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995) discounted at $10 (S & H included).