The MBA For The Anti-MBA Crowd

Martin Schamberg, now the head of supply chain management at Ameco Beijing, participated in the program between 2010 and 2012. At the time, he worked for Lufthansa, the largest airline in Europe, and was nominated by the board to attend IMPM.

For him, the module in China was especially influential. In Chinese businesses, he says, relationship management is based on analysis and a deep understanding of power structures, and he learned to keep his sympathies and personal relationships separate.

“I reflected about my own style of managing stakeholders and learned that I underestimated this part of management in the past,” Schamberg says. “I developed a map of relevant stakeholders for my business at that time and tried to develop strategies for how to approach them, depending on their relevance and structure.”

Schamberg says the IMPM was different from other business programs because it not only taught content, but also gave him the opportunity to understand himself better. “To a certain extent you are not the same person after IMPM, at least I am not,” he says. “But don’t worry, it is not about being brainwashed. Everything you learn is coming from your own insights, and you can choose how far you want to go.”

OTHER ‘ANTI-MBA’ PROGRAMS BEGIN TO APPEAR

Since Mintzberg created the IMPM, not many schools followed suit. “I had the guts to say the emperor’s not wearing any clothes,” he says. “But it’s hard to convince people to go to the IMPM instead of Wharton or Harvard.”

But there are other programs that have been founded on the idea that management skills can’t be developed by getting an MBA. The Executive Global Master’s in Management (EGMiM), for example, run by the London School of Economics, is quite different from the IMPM, but also bears resemblances: It is an international program, and it approaches management in an uncommon way.

Saul Estrin, former dean of London Business School, was asked to create a management department after he stepped down in 2008. “LSE is not a business school, it is a social science university, it only teaches in the social sciences. So how would you fit management into that?” Estrin says. “It’s not a place for MBAs. We would want to teach management from the perspective of the social sciences, understanding how people relate to each other, understanding incentives.”

So Estrin created the school’s first management program, the Master’s in Management (MiM), a pre-experience program for students from any background. Four years later he created another degree, the EGMiM, moving from pre-experience to post-experience.

“It was a challenge to think about,” Estrin says. “Were there people who did have experience who might want to do an MBA or EMBA, but who have a more academic orientation and who would prefer to learn about this from a more conceptual standpoint?”

MANAGEMENT AS AN ACADEMIC SUBJECT

The EGMiM approaches management as an academic subject. Students study traditional topics like finance and marketing, but they focus on theories and history and lean less on case studies. The program emphasizes not just how things are done in management, Estrin says, but why.

“There are people who really want to understand management in the broader context of global economics, migration, and foreign investment, rather than just maximizing today’s business or getting the most efficient supply chain,” he says.

The program has about 45 students from all over the world, Estrin says, all with different reasons for getting the degree. “They’re united because they’re pretty smart, they’re petty ambitious, and they’re interested in learning from a global — and slightly more academic — perspective. So what we’re not doing is telling them, ‘Here’s the newest gizmo.’ We’re not telling them, ‘This is the latest buzzword in strategy.’”

EGMiM has seven one- to two-week modules. Two, like IMPM, are overseas, in China and India. In China, students focus on foreign direct investment and emerging markets, while in India they study marketing and entrepreneurship. The rest of the modules take place at LSE, where Estrin says there are events every evening, keeping students busy from 9 a.m. until 9 or 10 at night. “And then they have to prepare their case studies for the next day,” he says. “They’re absolutely the walking dead by the end of the module.”

FROM DAY ONE, EGMiM CHALLENGES STUDENTS TO THINK CRITICALLY

Brian Scullin actually left an MBA program to join the first EGMiM cohort in 2012. He heard about the new program while at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business and he couldn’t resist the opportunity to be part of something new and transformative.

To Scullin, the EGMiM was very different from his MBA program. On day one, he says, a professor challenged the class to think more critically about what they’d been told about business and management, stressing that the vast majority of management and business practice today is “based on the thoughts and methods put into place a century ago by Anglo-Saxon men in the Northern Hemisphere.”

Scullin says his professor was inviting students to identify biases and work toward a more thoughtful, well-rounded way of thinking about management. Throughout the program, he says, he was pushed to think more broadly, something that had a lasting impact on him that continues to this day.

A SEPARATE PROGRAM FOR MANAGERS IN THE FUTURE

While Henry Mintzberg says he doesn’t think alternative programs will ever replace the MBA, he does see the need for them. “In management, if you don’t have the practice, the science doesn’t take you very far,” he says. “And if you leave the MBA program with the impression that you can manage, you tend to lean on technique and numbers, and so you’ve got all kinds of people mismanaging because of that.”

Mintzberg says people are beginning, and will continue, to realize that MBAs are specialized training for certain jobs — but not management. “It’s starting to happen,” he says. “I see a separate program for managers in the future.”

DON’T MISS: HENRY MINTZBERG’S UN-MBA MANAGEMENT PROGRAM