Erwin's StarOffice Tango

"How Business Schools Lost Their Way"
I just read the HBR "How Business Schools Lost Their Way" in the German edition of the HBR magazine. Pretty interesting!!!

The German magazine also included and interview with Ernst Baumann, HR VP at BMW. He was asked questions regarding the importance of an MBA for leadership positions at BMW. According Ernst Baumann the existence of an MBA degree does not have any effect on promotions or salaries. It's the actual skills that matter. BMW seems to be especially keen on soft skills like the ability to work in teams, business ethics/conduct, communication, etc.

According to the article, BMW has made very good experiences with business schools where real managers teach instead of just academic professors. Their experiences with INSEAD however were pretty bad. INSEAD was used for leadership trainings, but the BMW managers could not take the INSEAD professors seriously because obviously the professors had no real experience and insights about the topics they were teaching about.
( Jul 26 2005, 07:28:31 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [3]

Kommentare:

I think we can ask two very different and yet perfectly valid questions: (1) how does the MBA degree help its holder, and (2) how do MBA-holders as a group benefit employers, or society, etc.? Even if we say, for the sake of argument, that employers on average find that their MBA employees are no better than their non-MBA employees, it doesn't follow that getting an MBA might not benefit the individual.

To understand this further, consider that many or most students in full-time MBA programs are career-changers. For someone who entered the working world - purely by chance - as a programmer, the MBA may be the only way to switch to a career in Marketing, management consulting, banking, or whatever. Will this MBA grad be a better banker than those who started as bankers after college and worked their way up? Maybe or maybe not. But if he discovered he wanted to be a banker only after five years of programming, the MBA may have been his only means to make the switch.

An MBA is also an invaluable resume credential that helps one get hired in bad times. From an employer's point of view, its employees (once hired) may all be interchangeable commodities, but from my individual point of view, I'm sure glad I have a top-tier MBA to help me stand out among the crowd as I consider a career change. I personally have been hired by companies who would not have given me the time of day before I had my MBA.

Gesendet von ashish am Juli 26, 2005 at 09:56 PM CEST #

Try reading this paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=766404 It is an excellent and effective rebuttal of the silly views of Bennis and O'Tool.

Gesendet von Nicolai Foss am August 24, 2005 at 08:52 PM CEST #

Do you think that the MBA is going to get so devalued that people will have to start getting a doctorate in Business Administration to stand out? It just seems like so many people are getting MBAs now that as far as degrees and not experience goes, a doctorate would become a natural evolution for those people who really want to be competitive for the best jobs.

Gesendet von James am Januar 28, 2006 at 01:53 AM CET #