Visionary: somebody of unusually acute foresight and imagination

Tool: One who lacks the mental capacity to know he is being used.

I graduated from an MBA program this year. It was an unconventional route for the likes of me: someone with a ten year track record of being a human rights proponent. MBA and human rights don’t normally break bread together. When business crosses paths with human rights advocates, it’s often at the wrong end of an angry press release. I went looking for a new bag of tricks for innovative thinking. I wanted to get outside of my box but are MBA programs poised to break new ground or are they just a different kind of box?

I’ve been reading “From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession” by Harvard Business School’s Rakesh Khurana. I would seriously recommend this book for every MBA, especially those who fall into the “unconventional” bucket like myself.

Beach reading, it ain’t. It’s way more academic and dense than the typical MBA article/case but it’s brilliant and thorough. Presumably most MBAs will never bother to wade through it and many have zero curiosity about the social transformations and controversies that created the modern MBA curriculum. But that might just prove the author’s thesis: MBA programs have deviated from their original purpose of producing thoughtful intellectual leaders with broad business acumen, and instead have become vocational factories for corporate managers.

He has some good points. I’ll share as many as possible on future blog posts because, like I said, not everyone likes to read 500+ pages on this kind of thing. One of them relates to me as a liberal arts college graduate. We’re a bit against the grain in business school. We like controversies, critical thinking and chasing interesting experiences (even when we don’t get paid for it).

Turns out MBAs were originally conceived as liberal arts poster children. Instead of learning formulaic thought, they were supposed to ask probing questions and think different. Is this true for MBA programs today? If not, what does the change from “higher aims” to “hired hands” indicate about contemporary business leadership?