The Suite Spot
Book Nook: Dissing Business school
Throw out that business school application and get a job. Getting an M.B.A. is just about the worst possible way to learn how to manage, argues McGill University management professor Henry Mintzberg in Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development .
The fact that M.B.A. programs churn out so many managers has many adverse consequences, writes Mintzberg, from outlandish executive pay to the outcome of the Vietnam War, which was "managed" by Harvard Business School grad Robert McNamara.
Management, says Mintzberg, is neither science nor profession; it is a practice picked up only through experience. Business schools teach analysis (an old B-school joke says M.B.A. stands for management by analysis) plus functions like marketing and finance. They can't teach the soft skills--leadership, vision, strategic thinking, team building, and politicking--that make great managers. They're also teaching the wrong people: inexperienced 20-somethings who have yet to make a single management decision.
The case-study method, made famous at Harvard, is held up by Mintzberg as particularly reprehensible because it reduces complex business situations to a few pages of text and charts and then encourages students to propose quick and easy fixes, which are often simplistic and impractical. -Matthew Benjamin
Grabbing a bite: Carb free
SACRAMENTO, CALIF.--Sean Harrigan steelily ignores the fresh chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies set before him and asks for a Diet Coke during a mid afternoon break from the California Public Employees' Retirement System board meeting. "No carbs," he explains. The 57-year-old board president has quit smoking and lost 35 pounds in the past year.
If you listened to America's CEOs, you'd suspect Harrigan, who has spent 31 years climbing the ladder at the United Food and Commercial Workers union, of getting fighting trim to battle them. Since taking over at the nation's largest public pension fund in 2003, Harrigan has led investor revolts that forced Michael Eisner from the chairmanship of Disney (though he remains the CEO) and pushed Richard Grasso out of the New York Stock Exchange.
But it is the skyrocketing cost of health insurance that wakes Harrigan up at night. CALPERS, which oversees the benefits for 1.4 million public employees and retirees, has had to absorb a 50 percent cost increase--$1.2 billion--in the past two years. "The biggest challenge we have is the cost of healthcare," he says.
After rising at 3 a.m. to catch up on reading for his day job as the UFCW vice president in charge of legislative affairs in the West and then meeting at mid afternoon with a reporter, Harrigan was scheduled to dine with investment advisers eager for a piece of the $166 billion CALPERS has to invest.
The grueling schedule made Harrigan realize "I'd better take better care of myself." His new regimen isn't all drudgery, though. A glass of California chardonnay has just 1 1/2 carbs, he notes. -Kim Clark
This story appears in the September 13, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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