Rakesh Khurana, the young Harvard Business School professor who made a splash five years ago with his book Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs, is back. This time, in an interesting choice for a guy who doesn’t have tenure yet, he is taking on his employer (and its ilk) with From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession.
The book is large and dense, and I cannot claim to have read more than a few intriguing little bits of it. (We’ll have to wait until after Rakesh gets tenure for him to start churning out breezy business bestsellers.) But I did go to a lunch for journalists Monday where Rakesh talked about the book (mealtime conversations will be a major theme in the Curious Capitalist this week). Portfolio.com blogger and occasional Curious Capitalist commenter Felix Salmon was there too, was the only attendee with enough courage to order a glass of wine (go, Felix!), and has already posted at length on Rakesh’s arguments:
This idea of the role of management has become delegitimated over the past 30 years (roughly since George W Bush got his MBA from Harvard in 1975), to the point at which MBA students now speak of creating shareholder value as though there were no other conceivable purpose to management. …
Without this higher purpose, business schools have become cast adrift … The professors, most of whom do not have MBAs themselves, find themselves more the servants than the masters of their aggressive and ambitious students, who generally aspire to end up in whichever sector will make them the most money. As a result, says Khurana, there is now “an implicit contract between students and faculty: if you don’t push us, we won’t push you”. There is no exam at the end of the degree which tests knowledge or ability, and there’s certainly nothing analagous to the Hippocratic oath; rather, business schools have become credentialling factories, advertising themselves on the basis of the wealth of their graduates and the value of the contacts one receives there.
Rakesh clearly wants to do what he can to turn this around and establish/reestablish management as a true profession. This will be very hard to do, though, as long as most of the students at elite business schools don’t want to go into corporate management. As Rakesh himself says, the bulk of Harvard MBA students plan to either become agents for others (consultants, investment bankers, private equity managers) or professional speculators.