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Management Myth Article in Atlantic Monthly

I just read Matthew Stewart's Management Myth article in the Atlantic Monthly. Predictably, I do not like his point of view that an MBA is a waste of time.

His credentials consist of having co-founded a consulting firm during the dot.com boom which imploded, which doesn't endear me to the point of view that he knows a ton about good management.

He basically critiques an MBA because it is unscientific and susceptible to fads. Both accusations are true, but that doesn't necessarily decrease the utility of obtaining a degree. He says he also read a lot of management books and found them to be low in intellectual content, which isn't a novel point of view.

He also disdains the emphasis that MBA's place on numbers, using as an example a poor sample selection method which someone at his own firm employed when performing a regression. His example works against him in my view; first off, poor thinking by the part of your colleagues reflects poorly on your and your firm, not an getting an MBA. And second, most people I've met in business don't know a regression from a hand grenade; learning what one is in business school is a good thing.

Maybe Stewart already knew everything from his time in consulting working with MBA's so that he learned nothing from reading management books. But that doesn't mean that most people who get MBA's know those things, nor that learning those things is a waste of time. My education was full of those "Damn! I wish I'd known that before" moments.

I agree that most management books are low in intellectual merit, but then again, most have little to do with what you learn when you get an MBA. Instead of reading books on management, Stewart should have talked to an MBA about what they actually learn, or reviewed the syllabi of different business schools, or checked out the syllabus over at the Wikiversity. Then his argument might have merit.