The Food's No Good and They Don't Give Us Enough: Reflections on Mintzberg's Critique of MBA Education

This article comments on a book on management education, titled Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development, by Henry Mintzberg. The first half of the book consists of a thorough analysis of the dysfunctional problems endemic in business schools, and it is as thoughtful, in its own way. Besides reviewing and analyzing the reasons for several problems relating to management education, Mintzberg addresses several of the less frequently discussed, bit equally potent, forces that underlie the problems with business school education. Mintzberg's analysis of the division among Master of Business Administration faculty is impressive. Besides elaborating upon the widely known split between the economics-based disciplines and the social science-based disciplines, Mintzberg pays particular attention to the evolution of the field of management the splits among management scholars in business schools. Management also worries about the unsuccessful incorporation of important business topics into Master of Business Administration curricula. He argues that Master of Business Administration faculty have too readily reduced strategic management to a kit bag of analytic techniques that are often inadequate and irrelevant to effective strategic thinking itself.