Does Your Business Really Need More MBAs?

Before you pony up $50,000 or more for an MBA degree, it makes sense to check out what you can expect back for your investment. Recession begs us to rethink business schools, and to consider if the value of degrees dropped along with home prices and salaries. As Joe Gerstandt reminds us We need a new kind of leader, and yet that requires a new kind of MBA, one that few business schools currently offer.

How so?

Imagine if   MBAs, suddenly added  innovative tactics for a new era to your organization. Well equipped leaders facilitated cutting edge initiatives with more brain in mind. Your organization would know these new MBA leaders by sharply increased profitability and worker morale where they worked.

In a brain based program transformed  graduates would come into your organization with current business plans patterned after highly successful local, national and global leaders, such as:

  • Talent – Bill Conaty leads business talent management.  Conaty raised the level of HR internationally, and convinced other business leaders to spot credibility of HR as an answer to unleashing talent as human capital?
  • Finances – Jeffrey Sachs calls for a complete change in economic strategies for a crowed planet. In spite of the wonderful insights of President Obama, Sachs offers, we are still dealing economic lies and abuse in the back rooms of government and Wall Street.
  • Curiosity – Ursula Burns leads Xerox from tired traditions that sagged in sales to position it back among top organization, with the challenges that come from asking Where to from here? By stirring curiosity for answers in co-workers, Burns finds answers that many CEOs tend to miss.
  • Innovation – George Lucas for creative insights and for the future of cinema. George Lucas never really wanted to make money, but passionately wanted to make art.  In art you make an emotional and innovative connection to people. Innovation for Lucas, is a way of telling stories to the population in a meaningful and emotional way.
  • Tone – Eric Massa solves business problems with statesman tone that engages opposing views, while finding courage to speak out against cynicism. Only by using tone skills for tough times, can leaders facilitate innovative ideas from diverse angles so that all can both teach and learn from others who differ.
  • Organization – Gary Hamel with unique management innovation plans. Hamel stated in the world business forum 2009,  To succeed in the future, organizations are going to have to find ways of energizing people, so that they bring not only their skills, expertise and diligence to work, but they bring their passion and their initiative as well.
  • Change – Ann Mulchay faced critics and cynics to embrace the changes it took to bring Xerox back from the brink of disaster that held it in archaic practices and exclusive privileges for a few leaders at the top. By launching innovative change, Xerox is back in the race as a strong global player.

You likely have leaders in mind that qualify even more for some of these slots and we’d love to hear about them. But back to the opening challenge of why buy an expensive MBA. We are drowning as a business community,  and to revive we need to create a new kind of leader,  and pass it on to the next generation of business school grads.

Many old school skills taught in current MBA program, remind us that  a new kind of leader is urgently needed. In future posts look for innovation suggestions for for teaching MBA programs with brains more in mind. It won’t be easy, it’s not for the faint hearted, and yet it compels us to rethink how we develop leaders for a new era.

Could reconfigured MBAs carry our business world back from rags of broken banks back to riches of human achievement?  Could a renewed leadership that uses a new tone for tough times, offer Wall Street’s answer to an innovative future for management? Perhaps more importantly, could MBA’s become main street’s surest segue to creative progress?

Imagine MBAs building brilliant inroads for reconnecting to humans and to innovation through technology, management,  social media, and institutional change. How so?

We’d begin to address the narrowing gates to resources.  Innovation is tenaciously blocked currently by bureaucrats with power, or dismissed by politicians without vision of  innovation’s new roles for humanity.

Caught in hierarchies where vision fades to the right or draws to the left, but rarely reaches progressive greens, Hebbian leaders tend to prevent innovation’s steady trajectory toward future wins.

Opposite innovative MBAs, stand Hebbian counterparts,  who appear unable to renew with the brain in mind, and incapable to override the brain’s default to ruts. What’s the solution?

Imagine the active place innovation would leap to within a facilitation style leadership, that came to business from cutting edge MBA programs, armed with innovation  in your area.

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