Number of words: 609
A story tells of two schoolboy friends, one brilliant at maths, one innumerate to the point of idiocy, who meet much later when the first is a professor and the second a multi-millionaire. Unable to control his curiosity, the professor asks the figure-blind dunderhead how he man- aged to amass his fortune. It’s simple,’ replies Midas. ‘I buy things at £1 and sell them for £2, and from that 1% difference I make a living. The business world is full of successful one-percenters who live, not by their slide rules, but by knowing the difference between a buying price and a selling price. It is also full of clever fools who work out elaborate discounted cash flow sums to justify projects and products that a one-percenter would laugh out of sight.
The clever fool syndrome would explain why one controversial study of HBS students found that, after a flying start, the alumni (presumably among the ablest young men of their day) gradually slipped back to the general level inside their chosen management hierarchies. An HBS graduate has no reason at all to suppose that he will manage more effectively than a less instructed contemporary. The HBS man can only claim that he is more highly educated: and high education and high achievement in practical affairs don’t necessarily go together. John F. Kennedy found that assembling America’s brightest brains in Washington neither got bills through Congress nor avoided the Bay of Pigs; and many companies have discovered that business school diplomas are a thin defence against incompetence.
An overwhelmingly large proportion of the highest and best American managers did study business. All this proves is that an overwhelmingly large proportion of business-minded undergraduates got the real message which is that a diploma will be good for their careers, starting with starting salaries. It does not follow that the education was of any other direct benefit either to the manager or his firm. Nor does it follow, of course, that the schooling was wasted. As a general rule, the wise man recruits the finest intelligences he can find: and good minds are far better for good training. The question is only whether academic training in subjects which seem to have some connection with management is the best education for managing – and that is something which nobody can prove, either way.
The business school is really good at teaching future business-school teachers. But teaching the raw young is only the start of the money in management education. You can detach an experienced manager for hours or years: you can attempt any form of education, from familiarising him with computers to changing his entire personality. Attempt is the critical word: for some of the objectives are very curious. They start from an odd pro- position: that management is a body of abstract skills, like those of mechanical engineering, which can be applied equally successfully to any number of practical situations.
Once you’ve built one suspension bridge, very possibly you’ve built the lot although the modern history of bridge accidents questions that. But the abstract principles of launching a new toothpaste are too loose and vague for analogies to apply: and once you’ve launched one new toothpaste, it doesn’t mean that you can launch the next in the same way, let alone that you can use the same methods for a cake-mix. The absurdity of the educational proposition is stunning when applied to personal relationships. The most successful single products in the racket are pre-packaged courses for managers designed (like mid-West evangelism) to change the behaviour patterns of the human beings involved.
Excerpted from pages 205-206 of ‘The Naked Manager by Robert Heller