Most incoming MBA students want to get immediately into their disciplinary classes. This is understandable. They’ve been planning this major transition in their lives. They’ve saved up or borrowed to make it happen. They’ve moved and they’re ready to go. Some of them may even be laboring under the old North American stereotype, fire, fire, fire, ready, aim. But students and administrators who design and deliver their programs without some context setting at the outset are bypassing a major opportunity, the opportunity to set a very important frame around their business education.
Every cohort of MBA who move through an MBA program will be facing a large number of society-wide issues and challenges. One wonders how many of them will address these challenges and how many of them will “just” focus on enhancing their own wealth and influence. You and I could come up with a list of these challenges pretty easily. We could also poll the students to find out what they, en masse, think is facing their world. Either way, the list will surely include the following:
1. How can we meet the world’s energy demands?
2. How can learn to do business in a sustainable way that doesn’t destroy the place where we live?
3. How can manage an increasingly diverse labor pool effectively?
4. How can we contribute to a stable environment in which we can do business in peace?
5. How can we help an increasingly aging population get fair and distributed basic health care?
6. How can we manage graft and corruption that sucks billions of dollars out of a productive global system?
7. How can we manage socio-economic disparities with aplomb and in ways that ensure the continuity of society?
Surely there are other issues on our collective tables, but this is a reasonable starting menu.
I believe that incoming MBAs should wrestle with these questions before they get mired in the differences between debits and credits, the calculation of weighted average cost of capital, the ways to encourage people to buy things they may or may not need, and the intricacies of derivatives. They should be asked questions like:
1. What do you plan to do with the new-found information and skills you will develop in your program?
2. How can you use your talents to better society?
3. How can you use your skills to become a net contributor rather than a net taker?
4. How can you, with your skill, talent, and education, address the issues that face your generation?
Every generation of course will face different issues. Each cohort that graduates from business school annually will face their own challenges and issues—and over time that agenda will evolve and migrate.
So why is it that we invite people to business school and have them jump right into the basics of disciplinary detail in finance, accounting, marketing, operations, economics, decision analysis, strategy, and management without pausing to consider why they are being endowed with this education in the first place?
I’m not saying that we should overlook or ignore the internal inside-out desire to better one’s station in life. Fair enough. Let’s add to that though a perspective on an MBA education that tees up a set of issues confronting our society in which these people will function and flourish and extract their livings. Let’s invite them to be conscious in the backs of their minds that the MBA education they’re receiving brings with it some social responsibility. I would even argue that it seems clear after sixty years of living that the religious leaders and the political leaders are not producing a safer world and that our future lies in the hands of international business people who, for the sake of doing a stable deal, will overlook characteristics that seem to drive the other two groups nuts.
I think incoming MBA students should be asked to read the Atlantic article on the “Shipbreakers” in India, view the related CBS Sixty Minute segment, and then talk about where all the junk in the world is going. They should know that according to one of my students from Nigeria that central Africa is becoming the automobile junkyard of Japan. Japan has a law that you cannot own a car older than ten years. This helps pollution and the car industry no doubt. So they load these ten year old cars on boats and ship them to central Africa where the people are delighted to have well made cars at a discount. The problem is when the cars breakdown, they can’t afford to fix them, so old Japanese cars are piling up in central Africa.
They should read the Scientific American article describing how the United States could derive all of its energy pollution free from the sun within the century if it chose to do so and ask why isn’t this happening?
They should read the article “Why Doctors Make Mistakes,” add the insight that more people die in the US from medical mistakes than from car accidents, and discuss how to reform the healthcare systems used in the world so that fair and evenly distributed health care is available to all who need it.
They should read about how graft and corruption are draining the productive efforts of countries, not companies, and discuss the need to fix that. They should listen to Gordon Gecko in the film Wall Street declare that “greed is good” and discuss the pros and cons of that assertion, especially in the maelstrom of today’s economic melt downs.
They should understand that racism, sexism, bigotry, prejudice and bias are alive and well in the world and the private sector appears to be the only place where humans seem modestly able to overcome them.
We tried creating such a contextual frame for our MBA program for three years at my school. It was a challenge. First, the invited interdisciplinary faculty instructors were reluctant to lead discussions on topics on which they were not experts. My reply was, “You don’t need to know the answers; you just need to facilitate a lively discussion about the issues. This is the beginning, not the end.” Most were distinctly uncomfortable with that set up. The students were also impatient. They wanted to dive straightway into the “real” classes and begin learning the disciplinary details. Spending five 90 minute classes over the course of week creating a backdrop and a foundation for their studies seemed, in today’s sound byte world, too long.
Maybe we assume that since we often ask on admissions forms for an essay about what you plan to do with your MBA that we’ve covered the context issue. Maybe we grow faint at the prospect of inviting young ambitious people to pause and get in tune with their, and our, social context. Maybe we think it’s not our place to ask people to consider these questions. Maybe we think someone else will deal with the challenges and issues. Maybe we fear to appear to be too idealistic or value based. (At the same time, though, we purport to teach, even to inspire, them to be leaders.)
On the other hand, we all live in this increasingly Friedman-ian flat world and the behavior of these hordes of graduating MBAs will affect us all. Is it too much to ask them take a time out in their Pamplonian charge to riches, fame and glory and consider what’s happening around them? Is it too much to invite them to think about how they might become net contributors instead of net takers in society? Is it too much to invite them to use their collective prodigious power to address and perhaps resolve some of the major issues facing all of us in the global community? Why shouldn’t the business education institutions of the world prime the experience they deliver to their students with a few moments of context setting introduction? Let's orient them to their upcoming studies in a challenging world. They will get precious little of that once the “real” program begins, working as they do ‘til past midnight every night trying to find the right number.