No More Boring Analysis?

摘要

How do you teach managers to manage? Henry Mintzberg, a professor of management at McGill University in Montreal, has long held a contrary view to that proposed by most business schools. In this constantly stimulating book he divides his answer into two parts: first, he argues that the traditional qualification, the Masters of Business Administration (MBA), is the wrong way-he says it "prepares people to manage nothing". Then he expounds what he believes is the right way: an imprecise mix of personal reflection and the sharing of experience. Mr Mintzberg finds fault with the emphasis that many MBA programmes place on frenetic case studies which encourage students to come up with rapid answers based on meagre data. But more than that, he criticises them for their concentration on dry analysis. Such courses, he says, enable their graduates to "speak convincingly in a group of 40 to 90 people", and make them believe they can leapfrog over experience. That, though, is not the sum total of what is required to manage a complex commercial organisation.