PSU Magazine Spring 2005

.I eorge W Bush has one. So does Nike founder Phil Knight and noted mutual fund manager Peter Lynch . Microsoft chairman Bill Gates does not. Neither do billionaire business leaders Warren Buffet and Michael Dell. ln fact, Gates never graduated from college. lt's a Master of Business Administra– tion degree. Depending on whom you talk to , an MBA is either a prestigious key to reaching the higher rungs of the corporate ladder, or an unnecessary and often ill-conceived degree that guarantees nothing. On the one hand, business schools in the United States are pumping out more than 100,000 MBA grads per year, and businesses are hiring them (although at a cautious rate that parallels the country's slow economic recovery). On the other hand, there is a growing list of detractors-not only of the people coming out of the busi– ness schools, but of the way business master's programs are traditionally taught: with an overemphasis on the technical side of accounting and man– agement and a woeful lack of exposure to the human element of real-life business. he United States alone now pro– duces upwards of a million MBAs per decade who believe that they have the capacity to manage by virtue of having spent two years in an academic school of business," writes Henry Mintzberg in Managers Not MBAs (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, lnc., 2004) , a 460-page critique of the degree. "The MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences." Aware of this prevalent criticism, administrators of Portland State's School of Business Administration reformed its MBA program in an effort Lo break the mold of this degree with the stodgy reputation that's been around since 1900. The new program, now in its first year, is called MBA+. The "plus" stands for the teaching of core personal attributes such as integrity, listening skills, and creativity. Business school dean Scott Dawson says other schools teach some of these 10 PSU MAGAZINE SPRING 2005 Business schools are breaking out of the traditional MBA mold. skills, but are not integrating them into their core classes to the extent PSU is. onland State's reform process started three years ago when the School of Business Administration took a hard look at how its MBA program was serving the economic needs of the region. A commiuee of faculty mem– bers was formed to look at some of the common criticisms of business degrees and also look at successful, creative companies. What kinds of people were they attracting for key managerial posts? Whal attributes did they have? Could they be provided by the typical MBA7 As it turns out, the answer to that third question was "no," according to Rodney Rogers, the school's associate dean. Wall Street)ournal articles, books, and at least one highly critical academic study showed that there was little in the "typical" MBA curriculum that provided the kinds of personal qualities companies needed to thrive in the highly competitive world of business. One study the committee looked at asserted, "We have built a weird, almost unimaginable design for MBA– level education that distorts those sub– jected to it into critters with lopsided brains, icy hearts, and shrunken souls." By John Kirkland The school put together focus groups that included local business representatives, then hired a company from San Diego, Organizational Sys– tems Imemational (OSI), to identify the kinds of "competencies" they wanted their MBA graduates to have. OSI works with Nike, Dow Coming, Wendy's International and other major corporations, but had never before helped a university with such a pro– ject, according to OSI operations man– ager Crystal Jeffers. "We wanted to make our program distinctive. There are people coming out of MBA programs who can recite chapter and verse how to read a bal– ance sheet, but they don't have the an of managing a business," says focus group member Roger Rollins, a project manager for Freightliner who earned his MBA al PSU. he an of good managemem is a product of the kinds of compe– tencies the new MBA+ program is requiring of its students. Incoming stu– dents are given a "360-degree assess– ment" by their peers, as well as people who have worked above and below them, so studems and their academic advisers have a benchmark on where they stand. The rest of the two-year MBA experience is taken up with