An elite business school can get Scotland working ON THE VALUE OF

Sunday Herald, The, Jul 9, 2006 by KEN SYMON

HOW much value is a Master of Business Administration degree? Not too much is the answer if you are Marc Benioff, now the chief executive of a company called Salesforce. com and a former head of the Oracle Education Foundation, the software company's charitable arm.

His is an interesting viewpoint given that Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder and CEO, has just withdrawn a previous plan to donate dollars115 million (GBP62.5m) to Harvard, which would have been the biggest ever donation to an institution of learning.

Benioff argues that MBAs in particular and business schools in general are severely lacking in preparing students for the real world of business and its wider responsibility to society.

In a recent interview with Forbes magazine, he said : "I really think the problem is with the business schools.

I think the MBA programmes have not done a good enough job of educating our corporations' CEOs.

They're really lacking this approach to looking at the world in a broader view. That results in ignorance.

"Basically, MBAs for the most part are really automatons, or lemmings, and I mean that in a nice way.

Because they're doing what they've been taught to do: how to create a successful business as defined by the business school. But if we could broaden the consciousness of the school, you're going to have a more successful MBA and a more successful CEO or business leader."

Benioff is not alone in attacking the MBA. In a 2005 Harvard Business Review article, Warren Bennis and James O'Toole summed up the case against the MBA thus: "MBA programmes face intense criticism for failing to impart useful skills, failing to prepare leaders, failing to instill norms of ethical behaviour - and even failing to lead graduates to good corporate jobs."

It was just this kind of attack that led Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Business School and previously chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers under George W Bush to mount a stout defence of business schools in general and the MBA in particular.

He wrote: "Countries today prosper or fail to the extent that they embrace basic business principles. The task of the business school is, then, enormous - to apply knowledge to transform financial markets, to convince other societies of the benefits of transparency and to remind our own opinion leaders of the value of basic business principles. We have largely succeeded in the US, which is seeing sustained increases in growth of about 3.5per cent a year with little inflation - a full percentage point above what economists once thought possible."

Hubbard's case is that what lies behind America's growth performance is improvements in productivity and that in turn is down to the performance of American management.

As he puts it: "US companies did not become more productive by simply buying faster computers. They became more productive by having managers and entrepreneurs who knew how to integrate these new business models to raise productivity.

These abilities to think strategically are teachable; and the central classroom for teaching leaders to 'pick the locks' is the business school."

Raising productivity has long been seen by Gordon Brown as a central challenge for the UK economy, which is why the Treasury has recently produced its sixth report on the subject in the time he has been Chancellor.

As chance would have it, I read Hubbard's words travelling back from IMD, the International Institute ofManagement Development in Lausanne, where I had been one of a handful of journalists (and the only one from the UK) along with 560 managers from around the world taking part in its Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP) course.

If Benioff and Bennis give the case against business schools, IMD is the embodiment of the case for them.

Having said that, IMD is clearly a cut above most business schools and OWP, for which all the IMD faculty produce new research each year, is far from being a "bog standard" MBA course if it is fair to use such a phrase.

If some business schools lack "the approach to look at the world in a broader view", that cannot be said of IMD. This can be evidenced in its classes like the thought-provoking one on 'How Should We View Harmreduced Products?' taken by John Walsh. Or, in a different way, in a whole stream of classes on "Balancing Family And Professional Life In A Changing World". Or the course by Stewart Hamilton on "Greed And Corporate Failure: Lessons From Recent Collapses", based on his just published book of the same name.

Those are, of course, subjective impressions (and I have not done the MBA course at IMD) but they are borne out by the school's place in the business school rankings conducted by Financial Times and Business Week, where it regularly features near the top among the European schools.

Just last week, its MBA programme was named top in Europe for the third year running by Junge Karrier, part of the leading German business newspaper Handelsblatt, a ranking that was based on research on the top 33 European business schools.