Is Management Education More Art Than Science?

One academic says management experience offers something business schools can’t teach.

Yale SOM reports its strong class ever, MBAs may equalize opportunities for women in business, Silicon Valley catches up to Wall Street, and one academic pushes back on the idea that management skills can be taught as a science. Catch all the trending stories for future business leaders.

Women in business management

Even as women continue to make historic strides in areas traditionally dominated by men (law, medicine, politics, for example), one group for whom gains have been slow is that of women in business. Consider this: Just four percent of the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies have female CEOs—despite the fact that women make up 45% of those same companies’ total workforce. Some say that business school will be the great equalizer in this area, as many of the world’s most elite business schools continue to up their number of enrolled women, in turn advancing the educational qualifications of women in business. Some top-ranked programs boast of entering class in which women make up well over 40% perecent of all students. “There aren’t enough women in venture capital and there aren’t enough female founders who successfully raise from VCs. But, by having more support and mentorship and just giving feedback, we can help each other out,” said says Elsa Sze, who left McKinsey & Company to attend Harvard Business School and then launched Agora, a tech startup. (BusinessBecause)

Strongest class ever at Yale SOM

Tis the season for leading business schools to wow us with stats about their entering classes. On that front, top-ranked Yale School of Management rolled out impressive numbers last week. For starters, the average GMAT score of new students stands at 725, up 4 points from last year—a new record. That 725 score places Yale SOM in a tie with Harvard Business School, but below four others: Stanford Graduate School of Business (733), UPenn Wharton (731), Northwestern Kellogg School of Management (728), and Chicago Booth School of Business (727).The school also reported a record low acceptance rate of 19 percent, even more selective than its 21 percent acceptance rate from the previous year. Bruce DelMonico, assistant dean of admissions, says, “I’ve also been impressed with how well the class has gelled even in their short time here at Yale. I have already had a number of faculty and staff comment on this fact—as well as the overall quality of the class—so I think it’s going to be a special group.” (Poets & Quants)

Move over Wall Street

While many aspiring MBAs and management professionals still dream about working on Wall Street, with its bountiful job opportunities and high salaries, many now hold Silicon Valley in similar regard. As the tech and innovation hub of the world, home to top-ranked business school Stanford GSB, students are increasingly setting their sights on the Bay Area. “People want to work in an industry that is not just about making a difference, but is transforming the world in significant and important ways, and technology has become that industry,” says Scott DeRue, the newly installed dean of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. “It used to be that finance was not just how you could make money, but it was how you could become the currency of how the world works. Today, technology is that currency.” The increased interest in the tech sector could be traced back to 2008, at the start of the Great Recession, when lots of business students began seeing those images of Lehman Brothers employees and other Wall Street professionals leaving their buildings forlornly, with cardboard boxes in hand. (The San Francisco Chronicle)

The anti-MBA

Meet Henry Mintzberg, an academic at Montreal’s Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. In his opinion, today’s business schools are doing a few things wrong, including making graduates think that they are trained managers. In his view,  “It’s not a science, it’s an art. It’s a craft based on experience. If you put people in a classroom who have no experience in management, they can’t really understand it. They end up teaching a lot of analytics and technique, which is fine, but it’s not management.” He even wrote a book about it called Managers Not MBAs. He even took this belief one step further by creating McGill’s International Masters in Practicing Management, an alternative management program. Students at his program tend to skew older and must have some managerial experience, he says. (Poets & Quants)

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