फ्रॉम इन्फ़ेक्तिऔस् Greed

http://paul.kedrosky.com

Time to Fire a Few MBA Professors

Outgoing Yale School of Management Dean Jeff Garten has some sensible comments on why M.B.A. schools are failing. He's right in what he says below, but I have zero hope anything will change:

Q. Are you a critic of how your own students have been educated?

A. I think the current model of business school education needs to change dramatically. I think there should be different criteria for tenuring faculty. Right now, a professor would get tenure on the same qualifications as he or she would if they were in a department of economics or a department of history. What business schools need to do is add some criteria for promotion. One of them should be some real-world experience, in the same way that a doctor teaching at a medical school would have had to see patients.

Q. What percentage of business school professors have had experience in real companies?

A. I would say it's minuscule. This is a very radical proposal. But let me give you a second. Business schools need to have a two-track faculty, with the second track being a clinical faculty, that is, people who may not have the academic qualifications to get tenure or even do real academic research, but who would bring into the classroom the world of practice and experience.

I couldn't agree more strongly that a root of the problem is that almost all business school professors have no business experience. And the incentive system is completely cock-eyed, with it being an embarassment that business schools treat promotion & tenure decisions as if biz school profs are lab physicists. Then again, all Garten's twin-track approach will likely do is create a caste system inside schools, with the insiders hoarding power and control over the "mere" clinical faculty who, the dumb bastards, actually know what they are talking about. Craziness.