OPINION
Asif Saad
Let’s Shutdown the MBA program
rewarding disciplines. The highest paying jobs in the world are increasingly reserved for people with specific skills – such as data science or biotechnology or artificial intelligence or virtual anything! Second, there is an entire new working life patterned loosely as the ‘gig economy’. This is the world where people get to do specific projects or “gigs” for a certain time and then move on In a world spurred by technology, where to something else. I know so many bright, young and well- educated people who just don’t want to follow the 9 to 5 routine and specific skills are more in demand, the MBA are the happiest to move from one gig to another or do multiple is a waste of time and money ones concurrently. Some of them will eventually settle with one of these and build their entrepreneurial venture from it. ack in the eighties when I did my MBA, if you were not too Third, the entire concept of value creation has been transacademically inclined and therefore unable to study medicine formed over the years. The definition of success is much wider and or engineering, or ill-suited to the monomania associated with it is misleading to box it in traditional financial KPIs’. Marketing accounting (yawn), the MBA was a safe route to completing is not just about 5 Ps’ as digitalization has made it much more your education. sophisticated and as far as HR is concerned, it cannot do enough Doctors and engineers are still relevant, and so are accountants, to attract the most capable people to the corporate world. thanks to the ever-increasing bookkeeping demands of regulators. But I am Freedom, autonomy, creativity and similar values are more not so sure where the MBA fits in the current world and what we envisage sought after than before. It’s not that money is not important but of the future. people seem to be discovering new and different ways to acquire The MBA was a product of the heydays of industrial manufacturing wealth. Real financial value creation is now seen as the forte of and finance when post world-war 2, the western world developed via start-ups and entrepreneurs instead of c-suite executives. investments in industry and banking. General management was considered What about general management then? And leadership? important to run factories and operate businesses which cloned each other Don’t organizations want employees who are trained to be better in terms of business models. leaders? Of course, they do and should. But having an MBA is no The MBA allowed its finished product to have a common business guarantee of better leadership. Leadership skills are built over the parlance and equate performance with preconceived ideas of value creation years with diversity of experience and knowledge gained from measured by ROI etcetera across different sectors. It was also an age when doing multiple roles as well as working across different sectors. large corporates attracted the best talent and people stayed with one orIn fact, leadership role models now follow entrepreneurial ganization for their lifetimes. HR was thus required to fit individuals into success stories – people who have probably never even imagined a standardized regiment. Marketing was about the 4 Ps and more in sync doing an MBA. Just ask Elon Musk or Bill Gates. Many of the with the world of advertising and corporate communications. famous ones don’t even have college degrees! But this is not the world we live in today! To top it all, the advent of covid 19 has fast-tracked the To start with, we are now participants in the information age. Mantransformation of the education perhaps more than any other ufacturing and banking are still around but their position in the economy sector. Even as the world reopens, higher education is being has been relegated to a distant third or fourth or even lower depending conducted in a hybrid model coupling various online or distance on one’s perspective. Even within these industries, general management learning options with the physical classroom. Hence the value cannot add as much value as specialized skills developed by pursuing more associated with building important networks via the MBA is also losing ground. What then is the response from the business schools? While they probably still believe in the archaic education model, their recent impetus for executive eduThe writer is a strategy cation shows they are also feeling the winds of change. By developing more executive programs, they are consultant who has themselves showing the path forward for any specific knowledge which the MBA imparts, can be accessed previously worked at various via executive education. This is a positive trend and we should see it grow to replace the MBA in future. C-level positions for national The issue is even more significant for developing countries like Pakistan. It is absurd to continue to and multinational spend precious resources on qualifications such as the MBA. As a policy, these countries should instead corporations invest in decent liberal arts undergraduate programs and promote science, research and technology related specialized fields-of-study. Allowing business schools to continue to churn out plain MBAs’ who find it difficult to be meaningfully absorbed in this new world is no favor to their citizens. n
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