Let’s Shutdown the MBA program

OPINION

Asif Saad

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