Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Its the people, stupid

I read in the Financial Times yesterday that Warwick University are revamping their MBA course to increase the element of soft skills.

(As an aside, is it just me that thinks the FT and it’s sibling the Economist are obsessed by MBAs? – maybe this isn’t surprising as they are both owned by Pearson publishing. Anyone whose ever done an MBA will have spent a lot of money books published by Pearson. Before I put ideas of a conspiracy in your mind I’m not saying this. There may be some greater underlying course, e.g. Pearson tends to hire MBA’s as managers perhaps. Anyway, back to my subject...).

(And by the way, the other people who are obsessed with MBA are people who are about to do one and those who have recently done one - sorry, that’s me! - the first group asking “Why do one?” the second group asking “Why did I do one?”)

I don’t know how much emphasis Warwick puts on soft skills and I don’t know how it compares to what I did a few miles up the road at Nottingham University. However I understand their point and think they are doing the right thing.

An MBA course may fill your head full of new ideas, and tools such as IRR, NPV, Real Options, Four Forces, Cash Cows and other such ideas but this isn’t the stuff a manager needs day to day. Day to day you need to work with people; you need to make your operation tick.

Once in a while you will calculate IRR for a project, perform an SWOT analysis and draw up a new strategy but once you’ve done this you have to make it happen. And making it happen is more difficult. It allcomes down to people in the end.

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