Beyond Mintzberg (excerpt)
Financial Post Magazine
Excerpt from Financial Post Magazine, March 2010 in an article on Henry Mintzberg, who wrote the book Managers Not MBAs in 2004 as an indictment of the assumption of MBA programs is the best route to a business education. As you will see below, he finds RRU's MBA program among the most promising in Canada.
...surely, though, there has to be some MBA program somewhere in Canada that Mintzberg doesn't completely disdain. "Well," he says after a moment. "I've heard some good things about Royal Roads." Indeed, the iconoclastic Victoria university's MBA program comes closest to the International Masters of Practicing Management (IMPM) Mintzberg set up at McGill 15 years ago (and subsequently at other locations throughout Europe, Asia, India and Latin America), to address the perceived shortcomings of traditional MBA programs.
For starters -- and perhaps most critically -- the Royal Roads MBA caters exclusively to working professionals: the average age of students is 39, with 12 years managerial experience. With such a mature, experienced class, learning tends to take place peer-to-peer, as much as teacher-to-student. "The teacher becomes a facilitator, another voice around the table, shaping but not necessarily dominating discussion," says dean Pedro Marquez.
Compare this with IMPM's modus operandi, which sees students spend five minutes each morning writing down their reflections and thoughts, 15 minutes sharing them with their table, and an hour discussing the more interesting ideas in a full-class plenary session. Royal Roads also makes use of the modular teaching structure favoured by Mintzberg: Students attend the university for two three-week residencies, or "experience labs," with the rest of the program being delivered online in a series of eight-week distance learning modules.
"The online component allows us to reach people who are too busy to take two years off work to get an MBA," says Marquez. "But it can be lonely, just you and your computer. The three-week residencies allow you to make relationships with other students, and form study teams, so you have a bit of a support network as you go through the 18-month program."
As with other programs, the Royal Roads MBA culminates in a real-world organizational management project. Unlike other MBAs, the company students end up analyzing most often is their own. This addresses another of Mintzberg's pet peeves: that most executive MBA programs fail to take advantage of the wealth of experience in the classroom. "EMBAs boast that they simulate real-world experience. But why simulate when the experience is sitting in the class, each manager already with 'real world' problems that need solving. Shouldn't they be analyzing what they know best?" he wrote in Managers Not MBAs.
Yet another deviation from most business schools is the nature of Royal Roads instructors: a small group of core faculty drawn not from traditional academia, but from the executive ranks of corporations.
"Faculty at most schools follow the publish-or-perish model," says Marquez. "I don't want my faculty spending long hours publishing in triple-A academic journals. You don't have to do that to get tenure at Royal Roads. Instead, I want my faculty to have an intimate knowledge of the business community and the business environment in Victoria and beyond."
Back at Concordia, MBA program director Alan Hochstein sighs, clearly frustrated with ongoing sniping from his high-profile McGill colleague. "Henry Mintzberg says capstone case analyses don't mimic the real world. We had a team do an analysis for a company, and when it was over the company in question phoned us up and said the recommendations from our students were bang-on and were, in fact, already being implemented.
"Furthermore, MBA curricula is very fluid, always changing. After the World-Com and Enron scandals, schools started to look at where the executives graduated from, and lo and behold, they came from some of the most prestigious business schools in North America. That prompted MBA programs to start adding ethics courses, so that virtually all MBA programs today teach ethics."
Indeed, Harvard University has gone so far as to have its MBA students swear an oath of ethical behavior upon graduation. To which Mintzberg laughs. "I get the feeling Jeff Skilling would have signed that oath in a flash. They still don't get it."
