Education
Graduate Education ... the MBA

Is the Harvard MBA the root of all evil?

Burgess COMMENTARY
There was a time when HBS graduates were very capable and contributed to the performance of both company and society ... my experience in 1967 with Management Analysis Center (MAC), a consultancy created by HBS alums/faculty was like this. Bain Company, as I understand it, was like MAC doing consultancy to help companies perform better ... but Bain Capital was different. It used the HBS thinking to make money for 'me' and the insider investors rather than for the outsider client. What I find sad is that few MBAs seem to appreciate the difference between corporate performance that benefits investors and performance that is good for society ... and of course, the environment just gets in the way!
Peter Burgess

Is the Harvard MBA the root of all evil?

What we need is for the School to finally deliver on its founding premise, which is to produce enlightened people who make a positive difference in the world. ~ Duff McDonald

That the Harvard MBA has helped to make the world a much worse place with greater inequality, less accountability and a narrow definition of success based on efficiency and profitability is the only conclusion one can reach after reading Duff McDonald's impressive 672-page The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite that delves into Harvard's 109-year history and all it has wrought.

The School was founded in 1908 with the mission to treat business as a science, create a management profession on a par or superior to medicine and law, and handle business problems in a socially constructive way. Harvard Business School believed from its inception, and continues to believe against all evidence to the contrary, that it is a force for good. Duff McDonald asserts that the School is a force for good in the sense that HBS grads are good at what they do, but they rarely do good. Rather than producing business physicians who vow to do no harm, Harvard Business School has become the West Point of capitalism, producing business mercenaries driven by self-interest, beholden to no one, believing in nothing.

Given the School has over 76,000 alumni, you'd think that more Harvard MBAs would be household names. They are CEOs of 50 of Fortune's top 500 companies and have made billions of dollars of which HBS has skimmed $3 billion in endowments. But for every Michael Bloomberg there is a George W Bush; for every highly effective Stephen Covey there is a too effective Robert McNamara who helped turn around Ford Motor Company then wreaked havoc in Vietnam; for every Jeff Immelt there is a Jeff Skilling currently serving the 14th year of his felony conviction.

McDonald argues that it wouldn't matter if Harvard MBAs ate cotton candy for two years rather than simply consume its intellectual equivalent. Their wealth and influence is a result of the fairy dust of the prestigious Harvard MBA product and the vast and powerful alumni network that backs it up. Perhaps it would be better if students ate cotton candy rather than consume 600+ case studies.

Reliance on the case study as its primary teaching method is what differentiates Harvard from all other business schools save one--the University of Western Ontario's Ivey School of Business--and it is responsible for making Harvard MBAs Masters of Glibness Administration. Reading an airbrushed backward-looking case approved by the company that is its subject and discussing its content in class prepares MBAs to: 1) make lofty pronouncements without the experience of ground-level reality 2) emphasize the measurable and deemphasize the human and 3) be extremely convincing about topics about which they know little.

No wonder the majority of grads go into consulting to continue their case studies.

A glimpse of a few of this past week's headlines can be traced back to a School that goes with the flow no matter how many people may drown in a tidal wave of layoffs and externalities. It amplifies some of business's most noxious notions, the stinkiest of which is the belief in the supremacy of creating shareholder value to the exclusion of everything else.

An obsessive focus on a single number (the quarterly earnings target) that is both distorting and disruptive...

The idea that remuneration in the tens and hundreds of millions is necessary to attract able talent goes unchallenged...

To speak to their heart is Harvard BS...

In business most things don't involve heart...in fact in business you're better off without it. ~ Donald J. Trump

But there is a glimmer of hope, and it comes from none other than...

This week Jamie Dimon produced a 'Letter on Morality' acknowledging the private sector's role in addressing societal issues and announcing JPMorgan's intention to raise its minimum wage to between $12.00 and $16.50 an hour. Jamie made $27 million last year or roughly $7,417.58 an hour based on a 70-hour work week, a 530 multiple of a $14 minimum wage. It's still obscene but even the acknowledgement of a moral dimension to business is a good start.

Even more promising are Harvard MBAs such as Casey Gerald who launched the start-up MBAs Across America that links energetic and idealistic MBAs with mission-driven companies. Have a listen and marvel at the awesome rhetorical gifts of the Harvard MBA.

If you think the takeaway message of Casey's speech is that Harvard Business School is a force for good he'd tell you that you're wrong.

The tragedy of the Business School is that you can use that ability to do two things at once, to build great companies and destroy the planet in the process. We need to have a conversation about which we are doing and why we should be doing one and not the other. ~ Casey Gerard Let this important conversation begin. The most thoughtful comment gets a Golden Passport.