Yuko Shimizu on Harvey Mintzburg’s new book: Managers not MBA’s

Congratulations! You have a sparkling new degree, highly prized in this world. You have learned a great many things about business. You have invested two years of your life, not to mention lost wages and a small fortune in tuition, in this impressive undertaking. As a result, you are fully qualified to go out and become a menace to society.
Granted, this isn’t fully the fault of your school. Nothing personal, but full-time MBA programs by their nature attract many of the wrong people–too impatient and analytical, with little experience in management itself. These may be fine traits for students, but they can be tragically ill-suited for managers.
Conventional MBA programs then compound the error by giving the wrong impression of management: that managers are important people disconnected from the daily work of making products and producing services; that managing is largely about decision making through analysis; that managers pronounce deliberate strategies for everyone else to implement; and worst of all, that by sitting still in a classroom for a couple of years, you are now ready to manage anything.