Looking back, I’m really grateful that I had to get my degree while working full time. The experience let me apply what I learned on the job and let me perform a reality check on the theories I learned about. It was almost the perfect education for a “Doing Discipline” because learning and doing intertwined in a dance of development.
I thought about getting an MBA, but that would mean sitting in classrooms for a couple of years while racking up mountains of debt. That’s what most MBA students do today.
Not only that, for most of my business life, the letters “MBA” didn’t stand for Master of Business Administration as much as Master of Business Analysis. It was all about the numbers and not much about the real world complete with all those messy people.
There’s some movement to change things. The Economist reports that changes are afoot at the iconic Graduate Business School at Harvard.
“Fieldwork – ie, going out and talking to people – is a big change for HBS. Its students used to sit in a classroom and discuss case studies written by professors. Now they may also work in a developing country and launch a start-up. “Learning by doing” will become the norm, if a radical overhaul of the MBA curriculum succeeds.”
That sounds good, but it’s really only a band-aid solution. Getting out and talking to people from time to time may be better than what we have today, but it’s a far cry from the intertwined learning and doing that happened to me by accident.
Executive MBA programs are closer to the mark. They’re defined as:
“master’s degree programs in business that were designed to meet the needs of experienced professionals who worked full time yet wanted to earn a business degree.”
These programs address some of the issues. They usually require a minimum amount of work experience. And they allow the student to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom when they go back to work the next day. Sometimes.
The problem is that the academic program is designed as a “one-size-fits-all” formula. Some programs are devoted to specialties like finance, but even there the student peg has to fit into the program hole. We can do better.
How about programs that are less on the academic curriculum-driven and classroom-based model and more on the craft model? Why not programs that start from an individual’s needs and desires and career plans, mixing courses and on-the-job learning?
Instead of program where occasional forays into reality are grafted on to classroom programs, why not blow the whole thing up and design new programs based on what we know about leadership and learning?
