The Global Perspective - Market Leading Commentary On The World Economy

Cheating: A Cultural Phenomenon

There's been a lot of discussion over the past few weeks about the ethics of MBA students since studies carried out recently found that more than half of all business school students admitted to cheating in one form or another at some point on their Master's degree course. There's an interesting article on the phenomenon by Market Watch's Thomas Kostigen:

The corporate scandals that have plagued Wall Street in recent history are setting a fine example for young students looking to make their mark in the business world: They are learning to cheat with the best of them.

Students seeking their masters of business administration degree admit cheating more than any other type of student, from law to liberal arts.

"We have found that graduate students in general are cheating at an alarming rate and business-school students are cheating even more than others," concludes a study by the Academy of Management Learning and Education of 5,300 students in the U.S. and Canada.

Many of these students reportedly believe cheating is an accepted practice in business. More than half (56%) of M.B.A. candidates say they cheated in the past year. For the study, cheating was defined as plagiarizing, copying other students' work and bringing prohibited materials into exams.

While the findings are indeed alarming, I think it's much more likely that that business school students are just being more honest than others in taking this survey. That possibility means that measures taken by academic departments may be wholly misplaced in curing the intellectual ailment inherent in the findings.

That's a big statement, but it makes more sense when you look at the overall picture. Cheating is not a practice confined to any one particular discipline (i.e. with inherently greater rewards in one over another), it's a cultural phenomenon which affects a wide-ranging level of students, from the arts to the sciences to law to business. While it's possible to argue - as this article does - that the recent exposure of corporate fraud may be influencing to some degree the students who decide to pursue MBA's, fraud is still as rampant a phenomenon in the sciences and in law as it is in business, it's just less spectacular - i.e. it doesn't usually involve billions of dollars - so it doesn't make for great headlines. Fraud, like cheating, is a cultural, rather than a generic phenomenon; it's driven by a societal value system which places enormous merit upon coming in first place and a shaming of coming anywhere else. In academia at least, business is just like any other discipline in most respects, unevenly sharing the spoils amongst the Magna and Suma graduates.

Where business is different - and this is where my argument that business school students are just being more honest in their answers kicks in - is that there's no inherent stigma in cheating in the way that there is in the law and science disciplines. Indeed, admitting cheating to some degree may even be seen as a desireable way to behave if the results paid off. This is not the case in law and science, where intellectual originality is prized foremost amongst other attributes, out of the necessary demands of those disciplines. A law or nuclear science student is therefore far less likely to admit to cheating in a finals examination than a b-school student, because of the serious shaming-effect it has on his or her intellectual integrity, which is critical to his or her ultimate success. In business, where intellecutal integrity is not so highly prized, one can admit quite freely to having dodged the odd goal-post if one has results to show for it.

If schools are serious about cracking down on cheating, then what needs to be remedied is not a stricter enforcement of anti-cheating measures by b-school academic departments, but a general paradigm shift by all academic departments on how they merit their elite. By placing such a huge premium on coming first, cheating - in any discipline - will always be rampant as students seek out the glory and favour of their peers and principles.

Bounded Irrationality

As I cruise into the last four weeks of my MBA programme here at BI, I'm starting that quite natural process of asking - "so, what did I learn?" The process is aided and abetted by the fact that exams, an end-of-year consulting project and tight last minute deadlines all more or less amount to a demand to an answer to this exact same question, condescended with that vague air of scholastic contempt which interposes the personal pronoun and an italicisation of the past participle: "so Daniel, what did you learn?"

Taking a contemplative break from this rather persistent inquisition this morning on the subway to school, I was re-reading the book that first made me ever want to study an MBA - "In Search of Excellence". I was actually re-re-re-reading this book when I first realised I wanted to study an MBA, but either way, I remember the time and place clearly enough: on a beach in the south of Spain, almost to the day this time last year. The book for me brought about the exciting possibilties of a hybridisation of academic analysis and business practice in an open, vocal and persuasive way at a time in my life when I was tired and emotionally burnt out by the quite contradictory combination of mundane day-to-day sameness of order-filling and madness of consistent pressure derived from working and drinking with colleagues and clients into the early hours every morning that the finance world offers up in plentitudinous quantities. More than anything, reading what Tom Peters and Bob Waterman had written only just after I was born reminded me that I needed to go and get a further education.

This was the passage that struck me this morning, sitting on the old Norwegian underground trains, between sips of coffee:

The numerative, rationalist approach to management dominates the business schools. It teaches us that well-trained professional managers can manage anything. It seeks detached, analytical justification for all decisions. It is right enough to be dangerously wrong, and it has arguably led us seriously astray.

It doesn't tell us what the excellent companies have apparently learned. It doesn't teach us to love the customers. It doesn't instruct our leaders in the rock-bottom importance of making the average Joe a hero and a consistent winner ...

... the rational appraoch to management misses a lot. When the two of us went to business school, the strongest department was finance, a majority of the students had engineering degrees (including ourselves), courses in quantitative methods flourished, and the only facts that many of us considered "real data" were the ones we could put numbers on ...

... Rational means sensible, logical, reasonable, a conclusion flowing from a correct statement of the problem. But rational has come to have a very narrow definition in business analysis. It is the "right" answer, but it's missing all of that messy human stuff, such as good strategies that do not allow for persistent old habits, implementation barriers, and simple human inconsistencies. Take economies of scale. If maximum process efficiency could be reached, if all suppliers produced flawless supplies and produced them on time, if absenteeism were absent, and if sloppy human interaction didn't get in the way, then big plants would outproduce small ones. But (research indicated otherwise) ...

... The centralist problem with the rationalist view of organizing people is that people are not very rational.

And it's still pretty true today: a sizeable portion of my MBA class are engineers by training, a sizeable concentration of the classes are quantatitative (even a subject as ethereal as "strategy" is not content to accept its qualitative generic status, and has to consistently be forced - often reluctantly - into models and paradigms), and even if this particular MBA programme I am on is less quantitatively focused than perhaps MBA's specialising in Economics or Finance (and to be fair, there has been a large attempt to make it as qualitative as possible), then almost every professor, student and guest speaker is itching to demonstrate some kind of mathematical know-how - I haven't even seen a slideshow presentation without numbers or some sort of matrix model in the last year!

So I'm not about to wax lyrical on the empirical methodologies of Weighted Average Costs, Multiple Regression Analysis or any other of the numerative calculations I've learned how to do this year, but instead I want to focus on what brought me here to Oslo, and the tie back in some of things above about rationlity. I was originally due to go and study in Lausanne, Switzerland (the irony hasn't been lost on me that either way, I would have spent half the year in snow), until I took an unscheduled holiday up to the very north of Norway, to a place called Tromsø where my girlfriend is from. I like Tromsø - it's a very remote, peaceful city, nearer the North Pole than it is to London, and is how Hong Kong might have looked had it been located about three thousand miles north and never been developed - there is the same dramatic backdrop of the mountains and the city is marooned in the same way on an island connected to the mainland via a bridge. The two cities are such polar opposites in every oher way it's not a connection I imagine many other have made before, but the connection was true enough for me, and anywhere that even resembles the demographic of Hong Kong instantly makes me feel at home, since this is the place where I grew up for which I hold the fondest memories and strongest feelings. Waking up one morning with the midnight sun glaring over the mountaintops and over the water just below, I realised that attempting to commute for the year between Geneva and Oslo probably wasn't going to be the most practical of activities, certainly not from a logistical or financial standpoint but most of all from an emotional one. On this morning, at the end of August, two weeks before the MBA programme was due to begin, I phoned the administration at the BI and asked them if they had any places left. They did, and pretty soon, after some calls to colleagues for references, I found myself on a flight down to Oslo to attend an interview and take an exam, and that's how I ended up in Oslo.

But this was not a calculated decision, nor was it a cheap one or an obvious one - after all, Oslo is the most expensive capital city in the world now - but it was the single best decision I have made in my life thus far. I have had a fantastic year here in Oslo, and met some people who I will consider close friends for life now, and the Norwegians are pretty open and hospitable compared to most nationalities. Most of all, this MBA has represented for me not just a pedagogical excercise in numerative and technical training, but, and I think I speak for others on the programme here too, a more ethereal, emotional and personal learning curve of sorts.

To the chargrin of much of the trading floor back in London, a former boss of mine used to say that he could trace the moment when he first really began to make a success of his career back to one morning, when before work in the early hours he found himself in front a mirror, looking into his own reflection. The image shook him so much in that he suddenly realised all the things he didn't know, all the things he hadn't yet done, all the things he was not that he went into work that morning with a clear agenda to make a phenomenal success of his career. This year was for me that moment in the mirror, that abstract from the false egoism abetted and abated by long hedonistic London power-drinks and dinners, and the morning I can trace it back to was that morning at the end of August in Tromsø.

The irony is, through the making of a quite irrational decision, I have discovered more rational faculties in myself than I have ever done. And this is my point: to deny one's own irrational composites - and the irrational composites of life or even business (which is just a practical and intellectual extension of life) - is an act of self-deceit, it is in essence, to deny the unexplainable in the order of life to oneself. And one can hardly make a sound decision based on incomplete information.

I can already see the eyes rolling of some that know me here, them saying to themselves "you've completely lost me here". Well if that's the case, let me try and sum it up like this. Winston Churchill once said "Kites fly highest against the wind, not with it." The metaphor stands true for the innate irony of human beings - in the polar opposite of a situation or circumstance we often find surprisingly the characteristics most opposing to those presented by the situation. In the same way, in choosing this MBA by letting go of my attempt to control everything in the most vain, rational way possible, I have in fact found more rational faculties than ever before in my life.

When you most need or want something (in any context, and it's especially true in a business context), let go of it and allow the counter-circumstance to prevail, and here you will most likely find what you were looking for. It's a far too often forgotten truth.

The European Merger

Santiago Iñiguez, dean of the Instituto de Empresa and blogger over at BizDeansTalk raises an interesting point this week about the potential marketing strategy for business schools in Europe as they face the challenge of competing against aggresive competition from American and Australian institutions:

In order to enhance the visibility of European higher education and to attract more foreign students there may be two alternative strategies. The first one is investing in the promotion of the generic brand, i.e. “Europe”. The second one is to promote the best brands in European education, i.e. those universities or business schools with worldwide recognition, in order to position European education with premium brands and high quality and hence support the generic brand. The latest Financial Times MBA Ranking, listing the leading b-schools in Europe, has done more for European management education than many other marketing campaigns promoting European management. Given the fragmentation of European higher education I would recommend the second strategy to EU marketing officers.

The situation described above is one that many institutions in Europe face, from tourism to real estate to financial services, and is inherent in the problem of combining the many disparate micro-climates  which constitute the continent's one brand: "Europe". Indeed, the current situation is not unlike that of a post-merger scenario, where many different dominant brands, all posessing their own unique cultures and alliances and loyalties, scramble to promote themselves and their superior benefits over one another's at the expense of the organisation as a whole.

Professor Iñiguez is right, of course: it makes more sense to pick six or seven of the largest, most prestigious business schools in Europe and actively promote them as Europe's point of call for business education, making the assumption that the other institutions will benefit from the increase in applicants to the region, but in order for that to happen, it requires that those institutions which do not make the list don't try and 'undercut' the system and aggresively promote themselves around the status quo. For the first scenario, that of "investing in the promotion of (the) generic brand ... Europe" is the only viable option which European legislators have found available today by default of lack of cooperation between countries and institutions within the  EU: most European business schools, for example,  have an open statement of intent to become "Europe's largest/biggest/most powerful b-school".

Such aggresive self-promotion on the part of the individual brands leaves potential customers confused as to what actually is "the best", and instead the brightest candidates (in many cases even those whose initial preference was to live and study on the European continent), in the case of business schools, end up going to Harvard or Stamford: at least there they are assured of quality. What Professor Iñiguez proposes - that Europe concentrate its marketing of business schools to focus around a favoured few - requires those that are less than brilliant right now to take a back seat and cooperate. This is much easier said than done in a climate where ultimately, you are talking about sixteen countries which don't even share the same common language.

The answer, I suspect, lies where many Europeans are now scared to tread; in the re-formation of empirical elitist governing bodies such as the Ivy League institution in the United States. The concept is painfully familiar in European history but contrary to the mission of left-wing Brussels politicos , for more than anything else Brussels is bent on equality. Equality, however, comes at an ironic price, as most Europeans have found in demise of the quality of everything from the food they now purchase in supermarkets (tailored to specific sizes and colours at the expense of taste) to living standards (real estate has appreciated phenomenally in most major European cities and towns with the introduction of a single currency forcing many once comfortable Europeans to adopt a culturally deplete suburban lifestyle where one was previously not required). 

If EU legislators, participant institutions and organisations are to make the most of the single brand, there's going to have to be more give-and-take from those that are not really where they claim to be right now, and that means, in come cases, putting political ideals and personal aspirations on hold for while.

Blogging From The Top

Santiago Iñiguez, Dean of the Instituto De Empresa on blogging:

"Blogging has saved me time, made me more efficient and opened my eyes to a changing media, communication and management education landscape. It has been said that a complaint is worth its weight in gold and I could not afford to let this opportunity of having an open channel to customer feedback go past- you could say it is free CRM

"...  I jot down potential ideas for posts, or sources of information, which helps me better shape and clarify my own ideas and hence makes them easier to communicate. In fact, I use many of the posts and comments published in the blog -and their background research- later in meetings, speeches or presentations.

"Furthermore the discipline of finding newsworthy management education articles each morning means that I am more up-to-date with the sector and better able to react ... Blogging has also been an immense opportunity for networking. Interestingly, my experience is that most of the networking does not happen openly through participation in the blog but many of the readers contact me via email to address the discussed issues or to deal with other particular concerns."

I have personally had the priviledge of some personal exchanges with Professor Iñiguez, and I have always found him extremely couteous and generous with his time.

The potential for weblogs is far greater than just gratuitous self-promotion, which many still think to be the case with this medium of communication: blogs are fantastic marketing tools and can help readers delve into areas of life (such as Iraq) that otherwise are personally inaccessible, even for the most hardened journalist. Like the Dean, I too find the process of gathering and generating thoughts and ideas very helpful - certainly, as a naturally disorganised person it helps me to keep my thinking more efficient.

The overall benefits of weblogs are so tremendous, I wouldn't be surprised if this was standard practice in higher education pretty soon.

Leaders of The Future

One of the interesting things about having your own website is seeing all the different search terms that lead people your way, and in some cases, noticing patterns and trends amongst them.

As I am studying for my MBA at BI in Oslo, and as such tend to write about the experiences here on 'The Global Perspective', if you type in anything to do with MBA's into a search engine, chances are this weblog will be pretty high on the list.

The following are some real examples of MBA and organisation-related searches that have led users here:

• how does an MBA degree help in personality
• about organizational behaviour of any organization
• does mba make a good manager
• current affairs for m.b.a.
• google, mba hungry
• organizational behaviour
• humbler, kinder people are going to be the future business leader
• humbler and kinder managers should be mbas

What is curious about all of the above searches - and they represent only a scattering of many - is that they all originated from Google India. What this seems to imply is very revealing - a deep interest in personal development to become leaders of the future.

Compare this with the following MBA and organisation-related searches returned from Google's webpages in the U.S.A., U.K. and Europe that again, led to this weblog:

• Does MBA make higher income
• MBA millionaire??
• how can i make millions with MBA
• MBA's and income

Not one of the 'Western' searches related to the above contained any terms about bettering leadership or managerial ability - equally, none of the Indian searches have so far mentioned money, salaries, or income.

The comparison is startling: while the Indians seem to be focusing on education as a form of leadership training and bettering the organisation per se, Western countries appear to be focusing on the bottom line. Without reading too much into such limited data, it's hardly surprising so much business is being outsourced.

The trends should be at least wake-up-call as to where business is to continue to be headed over the next few decades unless Western business education and practice can adopt a less selfish form of thinking - after all, such immediate focus on profit maximisation has led to the ruination of many a once-great organisation.

"Deconstructing" The Holocaust

British historian David Irving's denial of the holocaust in Austria in 1989 bears all the hallmarks of the intellectual genre "deconstructionism".

Deconstructionism is the discipline coined by Jacques Derrida and most widely attributed to Milton scholar Professor Stanley Fish, which taken to its most controversial application claims the actual reality of an event is less important than the social consequences which arise out of its interpretation. Initially applied as a form of literary and legal criticism, the genre has led to some controversial debates in wider academia, particularly in the field of the sciences and history, where absolute truth is imperative to the subsistance of the the disciplines.

Whatever one's take on the trial of Irving, who is being tried in Austria at the moment where holocaust denial is illegal, it is an interesting comment on the social power that academic institutions and obscure intellectual trends still hold over society that the claims are being taken so seriously.

Perceptions of Precision

Here is a cute and elegant take on punctuation in the English language, with in particular, emphasis on the use of the comma:

"Optimists see the apostrophe as comma in transcendence; pessimists see the comma as apostrophe condemned to earthly life.

"Her comma is a brief moment of peace, a time to recollect thoughts scrambled by loud words and louder silence, an unspoken armistice.

"My comma is an obstacle, a rage-inducing eternal pause, undoubtedly illogical -- why, every sentence must end in a period, an exclamation, a question! I want to get my point across, clean up the mess, and settle the matter. My comma is my foe."

Depspite being perhaps a little over-laboured, the analogy illustrates quite well how the very same punctuation methods in speech can irritate one and placate another equally.

When I finshed one course on my MBA here at the BI in Oslo, I received the following feedback over my class participation; "As for the relation to the rest of the class - be mindful that British English speakers, often unintentionally, can irritate others not with their precision of languge, but their belief that everyone else has as discerning a sense of it as theirs. I have a number of Brit friends who can drive their German and US colleagues up the wall with finely tuned sentences ."

I have also foud it to be the case that sometimes what I say to my Norwegian colleagues is not believed to be made in all earnesty, simply because of the way I am saying it. It raises an interesting question: surely this is one discipline that should be mandatory for Business Schools to teach: how to communicate with different cultures, accross international parameters? It can, after all, mean the difference between success and failure when it comes to dealmaking.

All The News That's Fit To Study

National American journalist turned celebrity-blogger Michelle Malkin picks up on an article in The Boston Globe about how a conservative student newspaper at Harvard has become one of the first in the mainstream media to publish the Danish cartoons.

“A conservative student newspaper at Harvard University has become one of the few media outlets in the country to show inflammatory Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, angering students on campus and prompting a forum to discuss the controversy,” she reports. “The four cartoons appeared in the Feb. 8 issues of The Harvard Salient, a conservative, biweekly newspaper, under the headline, ‘A pox (err, jihad) on free expression.’ The student editors called the cartoons, including a sketch of Mohammed carrying a bomb in his turban, “relatively innocuous.””

This is not the first time Harvard or indeed any educational institution is going to face tough ethical calls over the publication of the pictures that have caused so much violent outrage. One of the central problems for Islam academics now with the Moslem reaction is that it has made what might have otherwise been a fairly trivial bit of prejudicial humour a crucial, highly photographic demonstration of Middle Eastern outrage at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and as such has inadvertently earned the debacle – and the cartoons themselves – a place in History, Political Science, Ethics and numerous other disciplines.

The consequence is that the incident is going to be taught from now on in a whole host of subjects, and that the prohibited cartoons themselves become a crucial part of that teaching. This conundrum will leave many academics once again wondering just how to reconcile political and religious correctness with the accurate pedagogical representation of their disciplines.

The Quest for Earnesty

The erudite voice of “Biz Deans Talk” and Dean and Professor of Strategic Management at Madrid’s Instituto de Empresa, Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, whose predictions for trends in management education in 2006 I recently wrote about here on The Global Perspective gave a benevolent appraisal of this weblog and offered my criticisms an engaging and warm response on the popular high-profile business education site on Sunday, in turn demonstrating a sincere quest for the truth far too infrequently seen in today’s society of both academic and management practitioners.

“One of those precious occasions that academics value and enjoy most is when they are lucky to find sharp and intelligent critics,” he wrote in post entitled “A Community of Constructive Criticism”. “Acute and smart criticism is what has fostered the progress of human thinking in all fields from philosophy to the sciences and the arts. Criticising and questioning lies also at the basis of the methodology used at the fundamental stages of professional academic life, such as the defence of PhD dissertations or the publication of papers and books.”

Professor Iñiguez de Ozoño’s optimistic attitude to the critics is prescient, for if only such brazen willingness to accept challenges to ideas was more commonly embraced in both the Common Room and the Board Room then progression might be made far faster and more often, and consequently everyone might benefit from the increased rapidity and frequency of innovational change and subsequent capital flow that would come as a result. Almost always failure in progressive performance is fuelled somewhere by the inability of someone to let down the guard of humility and admit to occasionally having made a miscalculation.

Professor Iñiguez de Ozoño’s willingness to share in the formation of his ideas so publicly is noteworthy too: writing regularly on a weblog, interacting and commenting with notable journalists such as Della Bradshaw, the Business Education Editor of the Financial Times, he takes steps towards constructing a public dialogue that few in positions of such leadership responsibility can claim to have even considered. With so much of academia and business being permeated by competitive paranoia, it is encouraging to see a public intellectual and professional with great distinction casting off the chains of fear and genuinely pursuing the act of knowledge progression.

With all the draconian attempts at making public organisations more perspicuous to investors over the past five years, managers and market watchdogs alike might learn a thing or two from the continental Dean’s modus operandi, for corporate transparency and accountability is as much about creating an open dialogue about management practice and internal corporate strategy as it is about opening up financial accounting statements. Indeed, the point is perhaps an understatement – after all, it is usually one form or another of corporate paranoia that leads to balance sheets being misrepresented since the construction of financial accounting statements starts with the premise that Management is honestly revealing the strategic intents of the company.

Professor Iñiguez de Ozoño concludes his arguments: “Again, let me thank Mr. Harrison for his comments. I hope he is joined by many other bloggers to expand this community of constructive criticism” – I too hope that a wider audience, both academic and professional, joins him in the search for truth and verisimilitude in the dawning of this new corporate era.

Scrapping Discrimination from the Syllabus

An interesting discussion is forming over at The Fredd Kambo Joint, where I have recently been invited to participate as a Guest Author. The host of this weblog, Fredd Kambo, is a Qualitive Analyst on the consulting division of Shell in London, and gave me a very warm welcome a couple of weeks ago after writing my debut for “The Joint”, a casual piece entitled “On Blogging” about the merits of weblogging and the purposes behind it.

My most recent post however has concerned an issue of rather more contemptuous subject matter: discrimination lawsuits. In the piece, “The Cost of Discrimination”, I citied an article I had received by e-mail about how four women from the Investment Bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein are suing their employer after “having hit a glass ceiling” due to alleged sexual discrimination. The story would be one of a fairly typical sexual discrimination case were it not for the size of recompense the women are asking for: $1.4 billion.

The writer of the cited article, who takes the opinion that this is a few zeros of compensation too far, notes poignantly: “… to put that amount into perspective … the maximum payout, including compensation for pain and suffering, for the victims of the July 7th London terrorist bombings is $877,000 … the families of the victims of September 11th received, on average, $1.5m from the US government and other sources, excluding charities. The payouts are said to have ranged from just $300,000 to $3m. And people died as a result of these tragedies.”

It’s a fair comparison, and Kambo is equally sceptical about the alternate reality that is equally over looked. “From my perspective as a black professional in big business, I think that the time has come for the law to intervene”, he says. “What I would ask for is a policy and action that appreciates and rewards differences. Simply put, I want the freedom to be completely who I am at work. Safe in the knowledge that my rewards are based on what I do and not who I look or act like. And because in 2006 we still haven't solved this one successfully, I think it's time for a greater power in the form of the law to provide the incentive. Is that incentive $1.4 Billion? To be honest, I'm not so sure it's effective in bringing about what is more a cultural change. Of course it will make people sit up and take notice, but I fear that what will really happen is more lawyers watching lawyers watching the company's back.”

Whatever one's take, most poignant in this discussion is the sad fact that a by all accounts successful black professional, in the top educational and career echelon of British society, maintaines that “by 2006 we still haven’t solved this one successfully”. Kambo’s conclusive observation that “the leadership in business will reward those who act and look like them” perhaps points out the best direction for formulating a credible remedy to the archaic injustice of prejudice but whose ears does this advice fall on?

Strategy

For all the hours that Consultants and Management strategists and thinkers spend talking and writing about “building brand equity” and “cost minimisation”, there is precious little time spent on the considerations of “building equalitative human equity” in organisational contexts. Lawuits like this one should make anyone currently involved in business strategy formulation and academic postulation just a little red in the face, because if one can’t formulate an organisational culture in the twenty-first century that is liberal to the acceptance of women in the workplace, then subsequent implementation of grander and far more wider-reaching cultural concepts such “globalised outsourcing” and “multi-country strategies” become almost meaningless in any real sense. The issue of “equalitive strategies” would surely make for a far more useful analysis than all the ruminations about “strategic intent” that is in vast over-supply in the pages of the Harvard Business Review and Mc Graw-Hill “national bestsellers”, and it begs the question why there has not been and is not more considerable study undertaken in this area of research: not many an MBA syllabus, after all, features this topic as a “core subject”, and at best buries it in elusive discussions such as “ethics”.

I expect the answer lies, predictably enough, with prestige and money. It is a sad statement of management consultancy and strategy alike that rather than try and genuinely pursue the ends of bettering and enhancing organisational reach today – which is how this industry started out in the first place – most are out to make a quick name for themselves after expensive educational programmes. A study of “Discrimination” is not likely to bring about very much “hero status” in the still predominantly white-male oriented academic ivy league clubs of alumni snobbery, nor is it likely to bring in lecturing fees of five figures a seminar, and thus is sidelined to the realms of obscure specialist research.

The very fact that discrimination is this much of an issue in an era when organisations cannot get enough of globalisation, outsourcing, and international expansion shows that academics and Management Gurus alike need to think a little more about what they can bring to their discipline, rather than what their disciplines bring to them, for by comparison with these serious issues, books such as "Think Big, Act Small" and "The World is Flat" seem more trivial than the minions they parody as lapses in progressive thinking.

Poignantly Predictable Predictions

The prolific and controversial Dean of the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, Santiago Iñiguez, made some noteworthy predictions for business schools on the last day of 2005 in an article titled “Management education in 2006: Anticipating some trends” which will no doubt raise some eyebrows from those already dubious about the value of business school educations, and in particular MBA programmes, in preparing tomorrow’s managers for the real world of commerce.

While Iñiguez observations that “business schools are a very dynamic segment of education and in 2006 they will continue to transform management practices through the creation and diffusion of knowledge and the preparation of executives and entrepreneurs” would not be refuted by many, the actual value of the supposed “preparation” is a widely controversial topic which has attracted some prominent dissention for years, and the current predictions he makes shed a revealing light on the issues in contention.

In short, the Dean’s predictions for b-school development are that there will be a continued drive towards internationalism (and in particular Asian internationalism), that there will be a more philanthropic focus on business school education this year, that “the development of information technologies will have a deeper impact in forms of delivery and learning methodologies than in the past”, and that in the process, there will be a shift in positions of b-school Deans as institutions search for Professors who act more like managers than academics in the charter of their roles as principles.

What is worrying about much of the predicted shifts forward in management education is not that they are too radical or out-of-touch – as has been the focus with much of the criticism of business schools – but that they seem so long overdue. The embracing of globalisation and information technologies are hardly the likely steps of change for 2006 in any thriving organisation today: companies have been reliant upon computers, software and technology to encompass a wider spectrum of international communication for decades now, and any that haven’t have long ago been elminated by those that have. The fact that Iñiguez feels the need to point them out at all should sound warning signals to even the most passionate traditionalist. Likewise his observation that “I also expect that 2006 will bring the opportunity to foster corporate social responsibility in management education”: if leading managers have not been educated with the fact that their future organisations should be aware of the impact of “social responsibility” in mind then it is little wonder they have suffered as such social misfits in a wider organisation context.

But the prospective remedial actions of shifting management education’s “centre of gravity” from the western world to Asia and searching for Deans who act like managers rather than academics signal the most startling sign of just how much a lack of any coherent strategy most modern business schools have in dealing with the issues at hand. Both actions suggest that academic institutions are content to be led by popular market forces rather than acknowledge their potential as catalysts of the direction of commerce: by their very nature as the starting-point for the career development of individuals who will shape tomorrow’s corporate landscape, business schools potentially wield an enormous amount of power, especially since there is no signal of a slowdown in the uptake of applicants for them.

Overall, Iñiguez paints a confusing picture – for while it appears that business schools have been overtly aware of the intricacies and development of the corporate flock and their own imperious potential to shepherd it, they appear to have being doing so little about it. It should come as no surprise then that the alumni of these establishments enter the workforce more confused about what they should be doing than their academically undecorated contemporaries, for it appears that the sum total of their Bachelors and Masters acolytions amount to the observation of the very activities the latter have meanwhile been engaged in, not, as commonly supposed, the other way round.

Know Thyself

Last month I wrote a piece titled “The MBA Conundrum” which has subsequently appeared on more websites than I have the time or patience to continually check up but most of which are ironically disguises for cheap marketing operations for purchasable “Online MBA’s” using genuine articles on genuine MBA programmes to give the impression of authenticity.

Whether purchasing an online degree is technically fraud or just a misleading con is currently the subject of intense debate, but one thing is for certain: if it doesn’t defraud an unsuspecting employer looking to hire on the basis of academic qualification, it certainly defrauds the purchaser of the online degree.

In the midst of the current workload of my MBA programme at the BI in Oslo, there has been some considerable complaint from some of my contemporaries that it is difficult to actually “learn” anything when one is being required to read and write far beyond what appears to be a rational schedule. To this criticism, the Harvard educated teacher of our Strategy class responded last week that although it seems as if there is no actual process of “learning” taking place, there is actually far more than if courses were just structured in a steady, leisurely format with plenty of time for analysis and interpretation of every assignment. “I don’t mean to be unsympathetic,” she announced to a belligerent ochlocracy, “but this is the way it ‘goes in’ best”.

As much as I am reluctant to admit it right now, sitting up at two in the morning between three unfinished assignments, there is a degree of truth to what the Professor says, and it is the same degree of truth that separates purchasing a title and actually earning.

γνωθι σεαυτον

In another class last week, an interesting discussion concerning the epistemology of Plato’s phrase “Know Thyself” came up when I mentioned that the truer interpretation of the Greek, “γνωθι σεαυτον” was probably “learning how to be oneself”. The subject came up as a result of Jim Collins’ attribution of the quote in his management bestseller “Good To Great”, which charts the development of organisations that have consistently returned successful results over a fifteen year period and have at one point made a gigantic leap without using the dubious artificial processes of stock manipulation or creative accounting.

What makes for a great degree is much the same as what makes for a great organisation: the process of discovering oneself within the structure of the current climate. Purchasing an online degree is akin to bolstering the balance sheet of a company through illegal means – such as Enron, Worldcom and numerous others in the competitive market climate of the turn of the century: while there may be some fantastic short-term benefits, the consequence can only ultimately end in tears.

The confusion comes from people’s inability to distinguish between success and experience. Success is what comes out of experience, which is ultimately, what leading a full, complete existence is about, whether one ends up with an MBA, a PhD, or host of stories which make for fascinating telling. It is a sad fact that a competitive society spawns such vagrant hoaxes in the infrastructure, for, predictably enough, it is not the hoaxers who end up missing out – they usually pay penance and end up cashing in again at some point - but those who are hoaxed.

NETworking

On Friday night I attended an Alumni dinner for the previous MBA students who had studied on the programme before me at the BI in Oslo. Like most networking events it was supposed to be an occasion where both previous and current MBA candidates could ‘network’ – swap ideas, names and numbers, business cards and contacts etc. Pretty though the setting was however, in one of the capital’s few ostentatious venues, the Grand Hotel, which towers over the city centre just adjacent to the National Parliament, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons with a Network Marketing conference I once attended in the U.K.

At the beginning of the dinner the President of the Alumni association stood up to great applause and announced that one of the committee members was not able to be there this evening as she was celebrating a birthday dinner with the King of Denmark, where she concluded “so I don’t know what kind of contacts she has!”

There were some inevitable guffaws from the tables, but this kind of problem is typical of such networking functions. Usually the problem is that those who are the most valuable to a networking event have too many other (bigger and better) things to do than to attend these types of gatherings of hungry amateurs and wanna-be’s.

Of those that were present, again either those there were all too keenly looking for opportunities and contacts without thinking what they themselves had to contribute, or the people that genuinely did have something interesting to say and were actually doing something of some importance were badly prepared and had not thought to bring along their business cards to exchange with the others. Hence the dinner function resembled a jumbled combination of ‘feel good’ exchanges of power-maxims and meaningless condescending power talks, where just as in Network Marketing conferences, the hierarchy of those who had first completed the MBA ten years ago stood to give speeches about how the programme wouldn’t be what it was today if it weren’t for what they had been able to go on and accomplish as a result of the Master’s Degree.

Online

In the excellent book, “The Rise of the Creative Class”, social economist Richard Florida opens with a somewhat critical appraisal of the “tech-utopians” who propose that technology will change and better our entire future as technology erodes “the powers of despots and bureaucracies, powers and principalities”, and concludes sceptically that “I haven’t seen a technology yet that cures the dark side of human nature”.

In the same way many assume today that the internet, by the very fact that it is a massive platform for knowledge-sharing and networking, will necessarily fulfil this purpose. What such tech-utopians miss, however, is exactly what the organizers of the function of the MBA Alumni dinner missed in preparing for Friday – that unless the participants are willing enough to part with their information, (that is assuming they have anything useful to part with at all), and unless they are even willing to be there to participate in the first place, a platform has the net result of serving no purpose but to reinforce what most of the participants already knew anyway and merely wastes time which one might have used to do something genuinely constructive had the platform not been put up to begin with.

And indeed, as most of us will testify, this is absolutely true of the Internet itself. While it can be used as a great platform for any kind of research and exchange of information, it can equally be an endless portal for time-wasting activities that contribute little to the constructive thinking or working process.

It seems that whenever a novel technology hits the scene we tend to get very excited about how it is going to improve our lives and enhance our effieciency and capability, without thinking about how we already use our existing infrastructure. A new communication platform is not going to make those who previously had no interest in knowledge-sharing at all suddenly start opening up and networking.

When consultants and managers start talking about “knowledge-sharing” as a solution to efficiency performance then, as you commonly hear today, they should also think about the potential downside. In order for any kind of networking platform to function well, the inputs remain the same, no matter what the platform, and those inputs are age-old: a mixture of the right people, at the right time, in the right place. Get any of those wrong, and the platform is pretty much worthless, whether it is real or virtual.

The MBA Conundrum

A colleague on my MBA programme here at the BI in Oslo questioned me somewhat aggressively the other week: “You seem very relaxed about the process of studying. Is this something you really want to do?”

Over the last few years, there has been a lot of scepticism surrounding the true value of MBAs once inside an organisation. As the first term of my MBA programme comes to a close, and I begin to look forward to a week absent of work and full of long Mediterranean dinners and hot evenings, I can’t help reflect as I sit in class now on the validity of all the scepticism. First of all, I am sympathetic to the cynics. For a long time I was a cynic myself of the validity of MBAs – after all, they are usually twenty-somethings like myself who think they know all the answers based on what has to be a fairly limited amount of real, practical experience.

From my experience on this MBA programme here at the BI in Oslo, the scepticism is not unjustified but it is misplaced.

When I chose to study an MBA, it was predominantly for the intellectual process of reasoning and studying that I wanted to do it. Unlike some, for me graduating in the top ten of the class is not an all-consuming goal – it is rather the acquisition of knowledge and the opportunity to be back in one of my favourite places, the classroom, again that are the pivotal reasons I am studying for this degree. It seems I am part of a minority, however. I may be fortunate in not finding the task of getting high grades overly demanding and actually enjoying the process of studying, but putting it diplomatically, there are certainly a number of less than congenial individuals on the programme who are clearly studying an MBA for one sole purpose: because they can’t rise any higher in their careers without one. The problem with these individuals is that studying an MBA is not what they need: what they need is a lesson in how to get on with people. Most of the types I am speaking about ironically have quite outstanding qualifications already; it is certainly not for lack of academic kudos that they have encountered a limit to how far they can rise within their respective organisations.

The problem is in the classification of “MBA’s” as a general categorical statement. It is immediately evident on this programme at least that those who are going to climb the ladder in an organisational context would do so anyway, without an MBA. All the programme does is to sharpen the intellectual process so that those who have been “winging” subjects like accounting for the past four years, like myself, can now talk about it with a sense of meaning. On the other hand, an MBA won’t teach those who have a personality disorder how to acquire a personality. Ironically, it is these students who are the most “grade” focused, and who therefore immediately, at least, come across as the most ambitious: because they have found themselves in the unenviable position of having to be. However, once these individuals assume management positions, they quickly find themselves at square one.

Management is more of an intuitive process than an intellectual one. The problem with studying an MBA for the students who are doing it with the sole purpose of advancing their careers in mind is that, while being somewhat more intuitive perhaps than most degrees, it is still predominantly an intellectual pursuit. MBA’s are great degrees, they are just being used for the wrong purpose.