Talking about Tom Peters (see last edition of BRANDfaces, page 26), his deep-seated hatred for the MBA, which he would rather rename MBWA, i.e. “Management By Wandering Around," surprises me. Peters, a management guru, wonders why anyone would want to be an administrator, when 98% of what you need to know about business is to emulate Howard Schultz of Starbucks (coffee makers), who visits 25 stores (out of 11,000 globally) a week without fail (Louise Marsland 2006). Starbucks is on the top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard for having a value greater than $1 billion and also for deriving 20% or more of sales from outside its home country (United States).

My heart bleeds each time I recall National Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC) Professor Peter Okebukola’s recent disclosure that Nigeria would have to wait till 2009 before its universities could produce quality graduates (The Punch July 7, 2006). I am distraught that Nigeria could not even make the top 6,000 universities list in the world, according to Webometrics Ranking of World Universities (Spain). Ranked 6,304th the University of Ibadan is the highest-ranked Nigerian university on the list (The Punch March 3, 2006).

You will also notice that there has never been an African university on Financial Times Global MBA Ranking. Initially, I could not understand why some friends and acquaintances of mine were resigning their enviable bank jobs in Nigeria in preference for an additional MBA (they had the local version) from Harvard, Oxford, etc. until I asked one of them. I remember him saying he would never become a bank CEO without a top business school MBA.

More so, I understand that people go to business schools not for the content but to make useful contacts and get the branding of a top business school like Harvard (2nd best in the world), Stanford (3rd), Wharton (No.1), Yale (11th) or INSEAD in France and Singapore (8th). With the branding, it is much easier to get great jobs, rise to become CEOs and then you would probably become more fulfilled if you did not see your family often because you had to constantly travel round the world to close deals!

But it is ironic that the same top schools my friends are sacrificing so much for are associated with corporate scandals in America, e.g. Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Adelphia, HEALTHSOUTH, AIG, etc. At least this is the view of many revered business school professors, including renowned iconoclasts like McGill University, Canada (44th in the world) management guru Henry Mintzberg and Yale economist Robert Schiller (Maureen Tkacik 2005).

According to Schiller, MBA curricula are “so devoid of moral content that the discussions of ethics must seem like a side order of some overcooked vegetable." In his posthumously published waves-making book, Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management, late Sumantra Ghoshal of the London Business School (world’s 5th best) agreed that “business schools do not need to do a great deal more to help prevent future Enrons." He wrote that “they need only to stop doing a lot they currently do."
In October 2005, the Wall Street Journal published an embarrassing letter entitled “Are MBAs Really Learning to Do Things?" which was contributed by Wharton marketing professor J. Scott Armstrong. Apart from asserting that the MBA is a worthless degree, Armstrong concluded that business schools “have convinced students that they have no responsibility for their learning." If you monitored events during America’s crackdown on corporate greed, you would have noticed that Wharton products played no small role, e.g. IPO king Frank Quattrone, Adelphia’s Timothy Rigas, junk-bond king and ex-con Mike Milken, corporate raiders Ron Perelman and Saul Steinberg (Maureen Tkacik).

Of course the list also paraded Donald Trump himself, Mark Yagalla, Jeremy Kraus and Dick Grasso (notorious ex- New York Stock Exchange chief who exploited a lethargic board to set his own pay over $ 188 million!). According to Tom Peters, “business schools do not teach leadership. They can teach you how to cook the books….anyone with an MBA degree can mix the numbers."

Okebukola’s description of the knowledge of teachers in Nigeria’s education system as “shallow" is only analogous to BMW’s experience with INSEAD which it engaged for leadership trainings. The BMW managers could not take the INSEAD professors seriously because it was obvious that the professors had no real experience and insights of the topics they were teaching. Asked about the importance of an MBA for leadership, Ernst Baumann, BMW’s HR VP says the MBA degree does not have any effect on promotions or salaries in his company. He further states that it is the actual skills that matter. BMW, 16th on the top 100 Global Brands Scorecard, is especially keen on soft skills like the ability to work in teams, business ethics/conduct, communication, etc.
Most of our universities are not able to attract good faculty because the brilliant ones prefer the corporate sector which pays very well. Most of our MBA faculty members lack industry experience.

According to a recent survey of marketing executives from 32 consumer-products companies which included General Mills, Kraft Foods, Nestle, Pfizer, Clorox Co., Reckitt Benckiser, Energizer, Alberto Culver Co., Hasbro, Cadbury Schweppes, Kodak and Dunkin Donuts, a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree is not only worthless, it can work against a marketing company! The study, done by consulting firm Ken Coogan & Partners (US), shows that apart from the MBA, all other master’s degrees are okay. Of executives from underperforming companies, 90% were found to have MBAs compared to 55% at outperforming companies (Jack Neff 2006).

The out-performers in the survey recruited about a fifth of their marketing executives from undergraduate programmes and another fifth from advertising or marketing agencies or other industry outlets. The study also shows that though out-performers do not value MBAs as much, they place a much higher value on personal and professional development once they employ people. On the other hand, the only professional development incentives supported more by the under-performers were executive MBA programmes. It is therefore not surprising that countries like India are already looking beyond business schools and stretching their nets wider among departments of commerce and economics. With a per capita GDP of $3, 100, a literacy rate of 65% and 65% of its population in the rural sector, India is, today, an information technology superpower.

Americans believe MBAs and the business community harbouring them are to be held responsible for their scandals, the bear market, the layoffs, etc. (M. Tkacik). For us, they should be blamed for the multiple bank failures, round-tripping, capital flight, failed economy, corporate greed, indolence, insolence, insubordination, insecurity, shallow knowledge, etc.

According to Tom Peters, saying “thank you" is another skill that should be taught in MBA programmes. I agree with him that ‘recognition’ and ‘gratitude’ are basic human needs, which, unfortunately, go most unfulfilled. He wants such programmes to teach commonplace good values, elegance, charm, loveliness, benevolence, benefaction, compassion and kindliness (Louise Marsland).

But we do not need the MBAs because they are liabilities! Take a look at the list of the richest people in the world- most of them do not have an MBA! Bill Gates, Paul Allen (Microsoft), karl and Theo Albrecht (ALDI, Trader Joe’s), Sam Walton (Wal-Mart), Larry Ellison (Oracle), etc. And if you are already thinking they inherited a fortune, then you are dead wrong. They created their fortunes from scratch.

Can we pay more attention to producing quality engineers and computer scientists, like India and China? South Korea, with one-sixth of the US population, graduates as many engineers as the United States. In this age of digitization, we need engineers and computer scientists more than we do MBAs especially in our marketing communications industry. And economists, commerce graduates, psychologists, sociologists, etc. should replace the MBAs.

Could the MBA be the biggest fraud ever implemented by our universities? You could mail your comments to: danesi@yusuf-danesi.com

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