Just Teach Me To Think, Please!

One complaint I have about my MBA program is that it felt like a bunch of disconnected courses and assignments that  didn’t gel together (at times). I wanted more help “seeing the big picture” that drives success.

For example, how companies choose an HR strategy to win talent in their specific industry and why. Or which marketing techniques are best at promoting a new product vs an existing product. In essence, I wanted help thinking about my options, not necessarily learning each one.

In the book Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads, the authors offer eight unmet needs that business schools must focus on to better prepare future leaders. All relate to critical thinking.

Here are the book’s proposed unmet needs:

• Gaining a global perspective: identifying, analyzing, and practicing how best to manage when faced with economic, institutional, and cultural differences across countries.
• Developing leadership skills: understanding the responsibilities of leadership; developing alternative approaches to inspiring, influencing, and guiding others; learning such skills as conducting a performance review and giving critical feedback; and recognizing the impact of one’s actions and behaviors on others.
• Honing integration skills: thinking about issues from diverse, shifting angles to frame problems holistically; learning to make decisions based on multiple, often conflicting, functional perspectives; and building judgment and intuition into messy, unstructured situations.
• Understanding the role, responsibilities, and purpose of business: balancing financial and nonfinancial objectives while simultaneously juggling the demands of diverse constituencies such as shareholders, employees, customers, regulators, and society.
• Recognizing organizational realities and the challenges of implementation: influencing others and getting things done in the context of hidden agendas, unwritten rules, political coalitions, and competing points of view.
• Thinking creatively and innovatively: finding and framing problems;collecting, synthesizing, and distilling large volumes of ambiguous data; engaging in generative and lateral thinking; and constantly experimenting and learning.
• Thinking critically and communicating clearly: developing and articulating logical, coherent, and persuasive arguments; marshalling supporting evidence; and distinguishing fact from opinion.
• Understanding the limits of models and markets: asking tough questions about risk by questioning underlying assumptions and emerging patterns and seeking to understand what might go wrong; learning about the sources of errors that lead to flawed decision making and the organizational safeguards that reduce these risks; and understanding the tension between regulatory activities aimed at preventing social harm and market-based incentives designed to encourage innovation and efficiency.

(Book excerpts taken fromhttp://www.mbauniverse.com/article/id/3380/Rethinking-MBA-Exc-Excerpts-II)

What do you think?  Do you agree that these are unmet needs in current MBA programs?