Universities loom large in my life at the moment. I've done a talk today at Manchester Met Business School, and I'm judging a start-up competition at Leeds Met on Tuesday. And yesterday I came across this from Leeds University Business School:
"Take the Leeds MBA and you will greatly enhance your career prospects. That is the message from the 2009 annual Global MBA rankings of the Financial Times, which will be published on Monday 26 January. LUBS has maintained a good mid-position in the world's top 100, being ranked 57th equal.
This year's survey is of the graduates of 2005 and shows Leeds alumni achieving an average increase of 105% in salary over their pre-MBA situation. Leeds again is highly ranked, 3rd in the world, for value for money: the relationship between salary today and the costs of taking the programme. School performance indicators, indirectly related to the MBA, account for 35% of the overall score.
LUBS is 11th among the UK schools in this survey. We are listed above several well-regarded schools including those at the universities of Durham, Aston, Birmingham, Bath, Bradford, Edinburgh and Nottingham."
I don't know why, but it just made me laugh. There's something funny about being pleased with being 57th. And the focus on the increase in salary is to be expected, but is highly depressing. I'll look forward to reading next year's report :
"Leeds alumni were responsible for wiping £8.7 billion pounds off the value of their companies as a result of the outdated management models that ours, and similar MBA programmes, encourage. This ranks 63rd in the world and 4th in Britain."
Will Business Schools radically alter their MBA programmes in recognition of the allegation/fact that the management styles that they tend to promote are largely responsible for the mess we're in? There's a very good piece by Simon Caulkin (yes, him again) in this month's Management Today magazine where he makes it very clear:
"The bomb that has blown up the heart of the world's financial system was not primarily financial. It's true that finance provided the high explosive in the shape of the structured vehicles, collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and derivatives devised by the rocket scientists of Wall Street and the City. But it needed a detonator to set them off: the unfit-for-purpose management model that has governed the way our companies work for the last 40 years."
The piece is well worth a read. He, and the people he quotes, such as Gary Hamel, sense that there's a real opportunity to throw out the discredited Management 1.0 model and come up with something far more progressive.
I'm reading Wikinomics at the moment and I'm very excited by it. Concepts such as trust, openness, generosity, collaboration - right at the heart of successful businesses. Now an MBA in wikinomics is something that I'd consider.
Rob
Much of the problems lie in the basic assumption that it is all about knowing how to manage the 'business'. It isn't. It is all about knowing how to manage (develop, coach, train, listen to, respond to, engage with) all of the people who work in, for and with the business. Get this right and the business will be taken care of - by people that care for it.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Chitty | January 24, 2009 at 10:55 AM