This morning, Charles Warner of the Huffington Post, dedicated his blog entry to indicting the world’s MBAs, claiming that the media has missed the story behind the financial meltdown — namely that MBAs constructed the complex derivatives that he feels are at the root of the problem (not PHDs in finance?). Warner cites two books by business school professors (From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: the Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession by HBS’s Rakesh Khurana and Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look a the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development by McGill’s Henry Mintzberg) as being prescient in calling for “MBA reform,” well before the financial bubble burst. Warner then stops short of calling on Congress to hold an inquiry into MBA education but holds it out as a possibility.
Thus far, top-MBA programs have been teaching students about the financial meltdown as a live lesson. It is worth noting that after the Enron debacle, many schools rushed to incorporate the teaching of ethics into their curricula. It is probably too early to know if the bursting of the real estate bubble will result in any curricular changes, but we will follow the story…