Good managers only from B-schools?

The debate on the relevance of business schools refuses to die down. In the past, various academics -- including Henry Mintzberg of McGill, Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford-GSB and Warren Bennis of University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business -- have trained their guns on B-schools and the value of MBAs. So far, Mintzberg has been the strongest critic. His grouse: "An MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways for the wrong reasons."

Three US-based professors have jumped into the fray. In a paper titled 'What's Really Wrong With US Business Schools?', Harry DeAngelo and Linda DeAngelo of Marshall School of Business, and Jerold L Zimmerman of Simon School of Business take a potshot at another B-school staple: Annual rankings.

The paper, posted on the Social Science Research Network's website on August 1, has already been downloaded more than 2,000 times, making it one of the most popular papers on the site. "We are managing B-schools in a myopic fashion analogous to corporate managers' fixation on quarterly EPS -- a danger that we as business professors, of course, warn our students to avoid in the business world. The myopia at B-schools is engendered by the pressure to move up in rankings published by the media,"Harry DeAngelo said.

The three professors said that instead of competing on the basis of the long-run value of the education they provide and the research they do, schools are fixated on "looking good"in the next media survey. "The pressure to score highly on measures that are poor proxies for true quality creates strong incentives to adopt dysfunctional policies. For example, it translates into curriculum changes that emphasise appearance over substance, less time spent on rigorous foundational training, research,"DeAngelo said.

The paper has evoked strong reactions in the academic community both in India and abroad. The most common grouse is regarding the methodology of these surveys. David Lampe, spokesperson for Harvard Business School, said: "Not only are the differences in the scores among many schools statistically insignificant, but the different formulae used to derive them -- a different one for each publication -- seem to have little to do with the true quality of the institutions."

Damned if they do and damned if they don't. "If schools submit to ranking, they are accused of pandering to the masses. If they don't, they are running away from comparison,"said Ajit Rangnekar, deputy dean, Indian School of Business (ISB). In the US, Harvard and Wharton stayed out of last year's BusinessWeek rankings. In India, ISB has decided not to participate in any rankings. The IIMs have also decided to stay out.

Harvard's Lampe said: "Regardless of their shortcomings, ranking surveys will not go away because of the continuing popularity of lists of all kinds."Clearly, it looks like this debate is not going to die out any time soon.