Daring to Ask: Why Are MBAs Increasingly Incomplete?

This is the third in a series of four “Daring to Ask” posts related to the state of business, capitalism, and CEO leadership (or lack thereof).

The answer to the title question for this post is the fourth word of this graduate degree: Masters of Business Administration. Why aren’t B-schools producing Masters of Business Leadership? An MBL is in sync with the needs of today and for tomorrow.

Leadership contains administration, whereas administration does not include leadership.Yet this month, B-schools are graduating hordes of freshly minted MBAs who are ill-prepared to lead because their education is incomplete. Their deans and faculty, who fiercely champion innovation and design thinking, are guilty of perpetuating an educational ecosystem mired in a dehumanizing Industrial Age philosophy based on the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor (see Daring to Ask: Why Are People NOT a CEO’s Greatest Asset?).

Unfortunately, graduating MBAs who enter the workforce look to CEOs as their role models.Their indoctrination into the heartless rule of management science continues. For all the good the CEO system of management created, its narrow definition of success as financial returns is corrupting far too many souls occupying or aspiring to be in the C-suites of Corporate America with a “get mine” attitude of avarice. Worse, these same managers use public relations ploys like Environment, Sustainability, and Governance (ESG) to hide or self-deceive their personal agendas of greed. They say one thing in public, but act another way behind closed doors. These elitist managerial mindsets and actions are efficiently and effectively perverting the high and noble purpose of business and depressing our standards of living as they enrich themselves.

The dictionary in Apple products reveals a fascinating historical whitewashing of the word management (see screenshot). Management is an archaic word for “trickery; deceit.” Could it be that in the early years of the Industrial Revolution when labor and ownership were embattled that workers referred to their manipulative bosses as “management” as an insulting pejorative? Over the decades, the term stuck and gained “respectability” for those charged with “the process of dealing with or controlling things or people.” Today, managers control as executives execute at an even higher level of trickery and deceit.Would you sooner be controlled and executed or led and inspired? Chief Leadership Officer: Increasing Wealth so Everyone Profits makes the case for a corner office business reform. Since the release of the book, however, I’ve learned most CEOs are too busy and too wed to their business traditions and are unlikely to rise to becoming CLOs. The majority of academics are risk-averse theorists subject to backward-looking peer review publishing pressure to earn their tenure or remain comfortable in their chairs. We can’t count on them to step up and revise their curriculum and rename their degrees.

I’m daring the MBA Class of 2024 to reframe their degrees and mindsets to become and behave as MBLs and CLOs. Your elders are failing you. Forge your leadership mettle and reverse the decline of our business ethics and society. The future is yours. There is a better way!

Let the Business Reformation Begin!

Kevin

Tip: Know a graduating MBA? Gift them Chief Leadership Officer:
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