By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff, 5/16/2004

When it comes to educating managers, American business schools have it all wrong.

They have designed their MBA programs for students without managerial experience. They stress analysis over experience. They teach management as a science when it is really a practice, and seek to apply universal theories to situations that vary across industries.

That stinging critique comes from the management studies heretic Henry Mintzberg, professor at McGill University in Montreal. His new book, "Managers Not MBAs," released this month, already has raised hackles on some academics along the Charles River.

"Case studies are a perfectly fine way to learn from other people's experiences," Mintzberg said in an interview, swiping at the case study method pioneered by Harvard Business School and widely emulated. "But people should learn from their own experiences."

Mintzberg, who hasn't taught MBAs for 20 years, has developed degree programs for practicing managers taught in Canada, England, France, India, Japan, and South Korea.

These programs usually involve six-person teams of managers bringing in problems and issues their companies are facing, and dissecting them in a real world context.

"You can't teach management to people who aren't managers," Mintzberg said, criticizing professional executives who carry their MBAs from company to company.

"The overwhelming majority of leadership should arise from context. You need people who understand the business and the problems. Only rarely do you need outsiders."

In his book, Mintzberg, who earned a master's in science from MIT's Sloan School of Management, casts a jaundiced eye on the US style of management development -- maintaining it trains the wrong people in the wrong way, with the wrong consequences for business.

"Every decade in the United States alone," he wrote, "almost 1 million people with a credential called the MBA descend on the economy, most with little firsthand knowledge of customers and workers, products and processes. There they expect to manage people who have that knowledge, which they gained in the only way possible -- through intensive personal experience. But lacking that credential, such people are increasingly relegated to a 'slow track' where they are subjected to the 'leadership' of people who lack the legitimacy to lead."

Not surprisingly, many at America's top business schools, which incubate the majority of Fortune 500 CEOs, would beg to differ.

Mintzberg's views are "a mischaracterization of both our students and the way we use the case study method," said David A. Garvin, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, who has taught MBAs as well as senior executives since 1979.

Garvin noted that the average age of Harvard's MBA students is 26 or 27, with a large share coming directly from the management ranks.

"In my experience," Garvin said, "I can recollect very few classes where the analysis wasn't followed by very specific discussion about implementation. . . We use the case method frequently to trigger people's reflections on experiences they have already had. The case study method is the most important feature of our educational program."

Garvin said some famous Harvard-trained MBAs, such as Rick Wagoner at General Motors, have spent their entire careers at a single company, while others, like Louis V. Gerstner Jr., have been able to bring their management skills to bear serially on the problems of several different companies -- in Gerstner's case, on McKinsey & Co., American Express Co., RJR Nabisco Inc., and IBM Corp.

Mintzberg, for his part, acknowledged that the financial performance of US corporations has outstripped competitors in most other countries, which place less of a premium on job-hopping MBAs.

But he attributed that more to the energy and creativity of American workers, who propel their companies in spite of their managers.

Many professors are fed up teaching MBAs, insisted Mintzberg. He said his ideas have also begun to gain traction at management consulting firms, which are hiring fewer MBAs.

As to whether elite business schools might take his criticisms to heart, Mintzberg said, "I hope so, but I'm not holding my breath. . . Harvard has been so attached to the case study method for so long."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.

This story ran on page C2 of the Boston Globe on 5/16/2004. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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