How much are business schools to blame for the recession?

Writing in The Times, Phillip Delves Broughton says MBA should actually stand for Master of the Business Apocalypse.

Broughton writes: "Harvard Business School alumni include Stan O'Neal and John Thain, the last two heads of Merrill Lynch, plus Andy Hornby, former chief executive of HBOS, who graduated top of his class. And then of course, there's George W Bush, Hank Paul-son, the former US Treasury secretary, and Christopher Cox, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a remarkable trinity who more than fulfilled the mission of their alma mater: 'To educate leaders who make a difference in the world. It just wasn't the difference the school had hoped for. Business schools have shown a remarkable ability to miss the economic catastrophes unfolding before their eyes. In the late 1990s, their faculties rushed to write paeans to Enron, the firm of the future, the new economic paradigm. The admiration was mutual: Enron was stuffed with Harvard Business School alumni, from Jeff Skilling, the chief executive, down. When Enron, rotten to the core, collapsed, the old case studies were thrust in a closet and removed from the syllabus, and new ones were promptly written about the ethical and accounting issues posed by Enron's misadventures. Much the same appears to have happened with Royal Bank of Scotland."

As he says, the business schools are showing no remorse or sign of self-reflection. It's a case of onwards and upwards. But then, if doctors or lawyers caused so much destruction to their profession, surely we would be asking questions about what's taught at law and medical schools.

As Professor Ken Starkey from Nottingham University Business School recently told The Independent , business schools have to shoulder much of the blame. "Our current problems started in Wall Street and rolled out to the rest of the world. But where did Wall Street do a lot of its recruitment? Until recently, the majority of Harvard's MBAs went into jobs in investment banking, private equity or hedge funds. These were the careers of choice. You can make long lists of high-profile MBAs who brought us to this state: Henry Paulson, Dick Fuld of Lehman Brothers and George Bush all went to Harvard, for example. The management mentality that has informed this crisis thought of businesses primarily as economic entities, and emphasised the obscene rewards you could get. Greed is good: you are supposedly there to maximise the shareholder value over the long term, but more important is your own short-term bonus. It's true that you can't purely blame business schools for this model of capitalism, but they are clearly implicated and were a key part of it. This kind of culture - get in there, get rich very quickly and then get out - was embedded in the MBA and rarely challenged."

As this piece in Forbes points out, one of the key problems with business schools is that they teach little in the way of self-awareness and most of their grads tend to be self-absorbed and ego driven.

All that suggests is that some of courses need to be changed and that there needs to be more focus on connection students with the real world. Perhaps a few courses in charity work, or manual labor might do the trick.