M.B.A : Master of Business Analysis

Let me acknowledge that 3 weeks into the program is too early to size up what an M.B.A is all about . However, I refuse to let go of this opportunity , so here goes ! [ Disclaimer : I plan to revisit this blog entry after the course to validate my lemmas ]

So, I was initiated into thinking this up in my class on Managing Oraganizations ( "OB" as it is popularly known ). A question we posed in the course was this : " Should organizations follow a model where much of their product is developed in-house or should they follow a model where most of the development ( including core competencies ) are outsourced ? "
[ Some examples of the latter are Toyota, Bharthi Telecom . ]

Here's the problem :-
How do we answer the above query ?

Wait , let me make it glamorous :- Say you are the company executive who needs to take this decision tomorrow . Will the learnings from your b-school give you the answer ?

My Answer : Not really.
And that is exactly what I am trying to drive at in this post on the three letters M, B, A.

To me, an MBA is a course on Business Analysis ( not Administration ) . By analysis, I mean that the course teaches you exactly two things :-

1) Tells you how to analyse a given problem.

2) Hammers into you that you need to consider ALL possible options and evaluate them before making a decision . ( In this specific case, our Prof told us interesting things on how you need to account for a zillion costs - Costs of Production , Transaction Costs etc etc let me not get into those details... )

Anyway, my point is , What an MBA *does not* tell you how to do is - the vital 3rd step :

3) Making the decision !

Why ? Simply because this last step is entirely situation dependent. Had it been formulaic, somebody might have come up with a cool idea to replace Managers with slick computers already. Fortunately for the manager-types, of the several variables which go into decision making , many can never be 'quantize'd and crunched into numbers.

So decision making is much much more than that.

Enter the X factor . Call it " Experience " , " Intuition " , " Gut Feeling " or whatever you want. You might have all your grand theories in place about the Auto industry , but if you have never worked in the auto industry - you can rest assured the decisions you make will almost always go for a toss!

Let me quote Henry Mintzberg who drives the point home about MBA programs , " It is plain silly to take people who have never been managers - many of whom have not even worked full-time for more than a few years - and pretend to be turning them into managers in a classroom.......stop dumping management theories and cases on people who have no basis to judge the relevance. "

Can somebody take a comment from B-schools that advertise themselves to be creating the "leaders of tomorrow " in their classrooms ?


In the end, what does this all mean ? Are MBA programs nothing more than a burden on the exchequer ?
Not at all. There is no need to be pessimistic about the whole thing.

All we need to keep in mind is the river-horse analogy :
If we are the horses , an MBA is that which can , at the most, take us to the river.

Nope, it CAN'T make you drink water. Period.