Peter Pre­vos, 7 May 2010.

After two years of intense study­ing, writ­ing more than 75,000 words, many exams, hun­dreds of hours of lec­tures and a fas­cin­at­ing exped­i­tion to Hanoi, Ian and I have finally form­ally gradu­ated for my MBA.

When start­ing this jour­ney I asked myself whether I would be wast­ing my time. Well, it def­in­itely was not a waste of time — learned some inter­est­ing things; vis­ited a fas­cin­at­ing city; met great people and did some inter­est­ing research. Dur­ing my two years of intens­ive study I have, how­ever, also cul­tiv­ated a crit­ical atti­tude towards the mater­ial gen­er­ally touted as man­age­ment theory.

One import­ant aspect that seems to be for­got­ten in many man­age­ment books is that run­ning a busi­ness is first and fore­most about the actual pro­duc­tion pro­cess and/or pro­vi­sion of ser­vice. Man­age­ment sup­ports these activ­it­ies, but can­not replace them. Study­ing man­age­ment does, for example, not teach you any­thing about how to make the best horse saddles or provide world class healthcare.

If man­age­ment the­ory is sep­ar­ated from what the busi­ness is actu­ally about, the organ­isa­tion can fall vic­tim to fads that only achieve to ali­en­ate the people it is sup­posed to help.

Henry Mintzberg, copi­ously ref­er­enced in gradu­ate schools around the world, is crit­ical of the MBA phe­nomenon and argues that no edu­ca­tion can teach intu­ition, cre­ativ­ity or insight:

Man­age­ment is not a pro­fes­sion, nor is it sci­ence. It is a prac­tice that depends mostly on craft and sig­ni­fic­antly on art. Craft is learned by exper­i­ence. Art can, of course, be admired in a classroom–think of all the vis­ion­ar­ies you read about in cases. But voyeur­ism is not man­age­ment, either, nor does it develop creativity.

The Frugal Law Stu­dent refers to a New York Times art­icle about the favour­ite books of the most suc­cess­ful Chief Exec­ut­ive Officers. Inter­est­ingly enough, they do not seem to read books like From Good to Great, Seven Habits of Effect­ive People, Six Think­ing Hats or any other self help book. Their favour­ite books are fic­tion, poetry, philo­sophy and bio­graph­ies. To become a good man­ager it is import­ant to be well roun­ded and read the classics.

The title of this post is inspired by the tra­di­tional Zen koan attrib­uted to Zen Mas­ter Linji:

If you meet the Buddha, kill him.

What Linji is try­ing to say is that those who are on the road to enlight­en­ment should ignore all their per­ceived con­cep­tions of what enlight­en­ment is. This also applies to the halo some people seem to apply to them­selves after com­plet­ing an MBA.

Now that I have been adorned with aca­demic robes myself I will decon­struct everything I have learned at the Gradu­ate School of Man­age­ment and share my thoughts on hypotheticorp.org. Ian and I invite you to join us and share your thoughts on this jour­ney of cre­at­ive destruction.

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