Today’s MBA educational paradigm is simply not fit for its purpose any more. As the business management guru, Henry Mintzberg, said: ‘today’s MBA is a 1908 degree with a 1950s strategy.â€
Mintzberg’s curse over the MBA has now been broken by the first research-based revision of the MBA since the 1950s.
Research at the Unisa Graduate School of Business Leadership has taken today’s MBA educational paradigm away from criticisms, such as the pursuit of one dimensional quick-fix solutions to complex problems and an inability to break free from a 60-year legacy of amoral business education. These are pillars of today’s world of destructive globalisation.
The research, titled A Social Contract with Business as the Basis for a Postmodern MBA in a World of Inclusive Globalisation — is a critical synthesis that places the MBA qualification at the centre of the global challenges facing humanity.
It anticipates the next deflection in the evolution of the MBA arising from the impact of powerful socioeconomic and geopolitical mega-trends shaping a new post-World War II world order.
The wisdoms and insights of 145 global leaders and thinkers have been synthesised and can be summarised as follows: Society aspires to a world of inclusive globalisation in which its security is assured and where extreme poverty has been eradicated. It requires:
- A society that finds its greatness in protecting both its humanity and its economy;
- World-class businesses that are financially robust across business cycles and have a global stewardship as the dominant business logic; and
- Global business leaders with an ability to envision inclusive globalisation and then lead in an entrepreneurial and path-breaking manner.
This is a collective answer to business management expert Peter Drucker’s assertion that business has become a construct of society. The postmodern MBA is aligned with this vision.
It cultivates a personal passion and competence to deliver world-class businesses that are a value-added service to humanity. It aligns global business leadership responsibilities with the following two mega-variables on a global scenario-planning game board:
- To make globalisation inclusive by creating the world’s largest new market by taking about three billion people above the US$2 a day poverty line. This may be seen as the privatisation of poverty; and
- To increase societal security by implementing solutions for humanity’s problems beyond national borders, such as global ecological degradation.
Two fundamental prerequisites needed in the education of the postmodern business leader are:
- A mind-set reoriented towards the social contract, in which business is part of a triad — a responsibility towards society, politics and the planet. This is beyond corporate social responsibility and is in compliance with the UN’s Global Compact — global stewardship-in-practice as a corporate strategy to ensure an inter-generational stable business environment; and
- An educational context aligned with the values and aspirations of an inclusive society. To achieve this, a new vocabulary as well as guidelines for a new canon of knowledge for business education have been developed. This academic leadership challenge has been designed as a set of interlocking priorities for the academy, namely: to discover, integrate, apply and teach the new canon of business science required for a turnaround to a new world.
The postmodern MBA stands ready to educate a new breed of enterprise leaders. Perhaps the world’s new generation of chief executives and entrepreneurs should take the lead, with enlightened business school academics, as a gift to future generations.
Dr Jopie Coetzee teaches strategic international business at the Unisa Graduate School of Business Leadership. His research will be available from bookstores worldwide from November 2009