(2004-02-03) Watkins Mba Programs

Michael Watkins on not getting tenure, and what's happening at MBA programs. I have been wondering for some time: To what extent are business schools producing insights of use to practicing managers? Is the investment that they are making in research justified in terms of results? Is the HBS (Harvard Business School) brand at risk? I believe that the answers to these questions are, respectively, little, no, and very much so. I further believe that this is the result of the "capture" of business schools (including unfortunately and increasingly HBS) by discipline-oriented academics who consume more value from their institutions than they create for them... Go too far in the direction of practice and you become a consulting/training company. Go too far in the direction of academic respectability and you become irrelevant. The latter has been the fate of many of the business schools at leading universities - they rarely produce cutting-edge thinking that impacts business practice (take a look at the top 250 books on management at Barnes and Noble and note how few are written by business school academics.) Jim Collins, the author of Good To Great, for example, was essentially fired by Stanford... In an HBS faculty meeting a year or so ago, the then Senior Associate Dean in charge of Executive Programs gave a sobering presentation on the state of HBS's open enrollment executive program offerings. The gist of the presentation, as I heard it, was that HBS was attracting fewer and fewer managers from leading US companies in growth industries and more from (1) non-leading companies in stagnant industries, and (2) international participants who continued to see the HBS brand as very attractive. To me, this was a clear warning sign of creeping erosion of the HBS brand...