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About That MBA

By Donald Christiansen

Many of our engineering colleagues have earned MBAs as a follow-on to their baccalaureate or master’s degrees in engineering. Most of them are glad they did. They confirm that pairing an engineering and a business education makes good sense. Engineers who intend to follow a research career path may disagree, believing that time spent in further education might better be devoted to specialty studies in a technical area.

Notwithstanding their generally good reputation, business schools are coming under criticism, and not only from employers of their graduates, but from some of the business school leaders themselves. It seems that the curricula have become increasingly focused on business and management theory and research, and less on real-world considerations like leadership methods, ethical concerns and multidisciplinary issues. Some business school deans feel that business schools wrongly try to mimic the curricula of academic disciplines like physics, biology or mathematics. Instead, they say, business administration is a profession, like medicine, law or engineering, not an academic discipline, so its curriculum must address not just technical but professional issues.

Until the post-World-War-II years, business schools were notably heavy on practice and light on research. Then, spurred by critics and aided by foundation grants, they turned their attention to scientific research. Perhaps the pendulum swung too far in that direction.

Symptoms of the situation today include the difficulty that otherwise qualified professors face in getting appointments to top-rated business schools unless they have a record of publishing in scholarly journals. Therefore, they find they must eschew writing articles for unrefereed business publications or discussing anecdotal experiences in the classroom. Neither gains them career points. Warren Bennis and James O’Toole, professors at the University of Southern California, writing in the Harvard Business Review, commend the practices of law schools, where a well-written, well-documented book or article, published in a serious, practitioner-oriented review is deemed as valuable as an arcane, quantitative paper published in a journal read only by researchers in the specialty. In many business schools there seems a widespread discounting, if not disdain, of articles published in a practitioner-oriented business magazine.

There also is a trend away from the case-study teaching methods, made so popular by the Harvard Business School. Instead, hypothetical situations are mathematically analyzed. I was once invited to be an “expert commentator” when Harvard B-school students tackled a case study in which I had been a real-world participant. The spirited discussion and analysis by the students was commendable and thought provoking. (I have often wondered why engineering schools have not experimented with the case-study method of teaching.)

Business schools tend to avoid discussions of “messy” interdisciplinary problems. The result, or perhaps the cause, is that it is possible, as Bennis and O’Toole noted, to find tenured management professors who have never set foot inside a real business, except as customers.

The critics are clearly not calling for a return to the days when business schools were seen as trade schools, not scientific institutions. They agree that management is both an art and a science, and that neither should be shortchanged in the educational process.

Running a business

There is also the notion afoot that it might not be a bad idea for business schools themselves to operate businesses. A rare example might be the Cayuga MBA Foundation, established by Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and run by students. An example from another calling is at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where students, rather than being confined to learning writing and reporting skills, are challenged to research, design and produce prototype magazines. They are professionally crafted and equal in quality to that of many commercially published magazines, and thus might easily catch the attention of a publishing house.

Birds of a feather?

Is there a parallel in the evolution of engineering and business education? I think so. The origins of both were largely practice-based. Both evolved to a strong science base. But now educators in both professions see the need for curriculum redesign. The goal is to graduate students able to enter today’s complex workplace without facing undue surprises and many unfamiliar options, and to make them more immediately valuable in their first assignments.

In engineering, ABET's Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC2000) concepts are designed to do just that. The notions advanced by business school educators appear to be similar. If both are successful, the value of a dual MBA/EE education will be enhanced accordingly.

Resources

For more about MBA programs, see:

Mintzberg, H., Managers Not MBAs, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004.

Overview of U.S. Business Schools, Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, 2004.

Bennis, W. G. and J. O’Toole, “How Business Schools Lost Their Way,” Harvard Business Review, May 2005.

Barnes, L. B., C. R. Christensen, and A.J. Hansen, Teaching and the Case
Method: Text, Cases, and Readings, 3rd Ed., Harvard Business School Press, 1994.

Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent publishing consultant. He can be reached at donchristiansen@ieee.org.