Why Not the General MBA Programs?
To understand the relevance of MBA programs in today’s world, we need to understand a bit of the history of management. The year 2011 was the 100’th anniversary of “Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor. This publication was said to be the beginning of modern management. In the words of Peter Drucker, Taylor was “the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study”.
Gary Hamel talks about the birth of management from Taylor and others in Three Forces Disrupting Management. He says, “This transition from an agrarian and craft-based society to an industrial economy required an epical re-socialization of the workforce. Unruly and independent-minded farmers, artisans, and day labourers had to be transformed into rule-following, forelock-tugging employees. And 100 years on, this work continues, with organisations worldwide still working hard to strap rancorous and free-thinking human beings into the strait-jacketed, institutionalised obedience, conformance, and discipline.”
Theories and Strategy
The current scenario is entirely different from what it was about 100 years ago. Naturally, the management theories of controlling people in a predetermined manner do not apply today. Management techniques of the past century, including Scientific Management, Total Quality Management and ISO 9000, have focused on eliminating process variance and adhering to clearly defined procedures. Although such variance-reducing techniques increase an organisation’s capacity to exploit existing resources, they also hamper exploratory activities. By attending one of the best management universities, students can gain a solid understanding of cutting-edge management practices that prioritise innovation and agility.
Things like hierarchical organisation charts, performance appraisals, KPIs, and targets are all reminiscent of Taylor’s principles, all aimed at getting a fixed performance from the people consistently working in an organisation. Someone somewhere determines what is to be done, and others are expected to follow what is pre-fixated.
As Gary Hamel says, CEOs are often hamstrung by the notion that innovation is the purview of ‘creative people with a particular gift’. As a result, everyone else remains away from the responsibility of coming up with new ideas. This limits the quality as well as the quantity of ideas.
Henry Mintzberg, a noted professor of strategy, notes that formal business education compartmentalises the whole business into discrete silos: marketing versus finance versus economics versus accounting. “Top MBA programs education divides business into a whole set of functions. But management is an integrating device, and MBA students don’t learn how to manage or integrate. Management, like medicine and engineering, is a practice,” he continues, distinguishing ‘practice’ from both sciences, which can be accomplished by analysis and art fed by intuition. “In a practice, one achieves mastery in the doing and has to pull together disparate knowledge to apply to situations at hand.” Therefore, it’s essential to choose the Best Universities For MBA that offer a more practical and comprehensive approach to business education.
Management Teaching Methodology
The best business management courses have historically been trying to teach how to control an organisation and the processes within it. B-schools teach about the application of resources to achieve business goals, measurement tools, etc. They teach about leadership and setting objectives, etc. They struggle with ‘how’ an executive can envision a future state, envision ‘what the company should be’. In the chapter ‘Design Matters for Management’ from the book “Managing as Designing”, Richard J. Boland Jr. and Fred Collopy of Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University state as follows:
- A decision attitude toward problem-solving is used extensively in management education. It portrays the manager as facing a set of alternative courses of action from which a choice must be made. The decision attitude assumes it is easy to come up with alternatives to consider but difficult to choose among them. The design attitude toward problem-solving, in contrast, believes that it is difficult to design a good option, but once you have developed a truly great one, the decision about which alternative to select becomes trivial.
Today’s world is much different from that of the 1950s when the movement to expand analytic techniques in management began to flourish. The decision attitude and the analytic tools managers have to support were developed in a simpler time. They are the product of fifty years of a concerted effort to strengthen management education’s mathematical and scientific basis. We suggest that now is the time to incorporate a better balance of the two approaches to problem-solving in management practice and teaching.
What is needed in integrated MBA colleges today is the development of a design attitude which goes beyond default solutions in creating new possibilities for the future. We are NOT trying to teach the graduates of MBA courses how to be designers, but we plan to introduce them to these approaches so they can be more open to discovering possibilities and making selections among various growth opportunities.
Design approaches are oriented toward innovation, creating new possibilities to generate value. We believe that if MBA program graduates adopted a design attitude, the business world would be different and better. Managers would approach problems with a sensibility that swept in the broadest array of influences to shape inspiring and energising designs for products, services, and processes that are both profitable and humanly satisfying.
Harvard Business Review defines Design Thinking as a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centred design ethos. Through direct observation, innovation is powered by a thorough understanding of what people want and need in their lives and what they like or dislike about how particular products are made, packaged, marketed, sold, and supported. Wikipedia states that design thinking involves a seven-step process of defining, researching, ideating, prototyping, choosing, implementing, and gathering feedback around any given challenge or opportunity.
Tim Brown, president and CEO of design consultancy IDEO, defines design thinking as “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”
Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”. Similarly, we cannot use the same paradigm of management theory in today’s world. The world has changed, and we need a new approach. DYPDC’s PG management degree programs in Business Innovation & Strategy are among the best management universities that incorporate design thinking as a fundamental methodology. It is one of the best business management courses that will lead you into tomorrow, ready for tomorrow’s world through the power of design thinking.
