and application of business and management principles. The primary goal of management education was, as originally conceived, to impart knowledge that could be applied to a variety of real-world business situations. That remains starkly true to this day when the need for “deep generalists” on the faculty, for our students and professional clients, is more essential than ever. By “deep generalists,” I mean faculty grounded in one discipline who connect and collaborate with others: computational biology, neuroeconomics, bioengineering, or behavioral economics, to take a few examples.


As I look at the recent ups and downs of enrollment at management schools, it’s now time to double-down on the irony. Coterminous with the decline of the traditional two-year MBA program and the uptick in specialized degrees is the amazing increase in interest in Masters in Management (MiM) programs, which are far more attractive in Europe right now than in the U.S. MiMs are given to newly minted college graduates with no work experience and allow students to specialize in just about anything.


The two degrees are strikingly different. With one you get a younger, inexperienced person with a dash of management theory. Most regular, two-year MBA programmes provide both experience and the capacity to link together the essential elements of management such as finance, marketing, organizational behaviour, and operations.


Which leads me to the title of this blog, “trained incapacity,” a phrase introduced in 1914 by the quirkily brilliant socio-economist Thorstein Veblen. He reasoned that one’s expertise can function as “blindlessness,” which leads to a skewed and distorted vision of reality.


That’s what concerns me about the proliferation of the new management programs, often


with M.S. titles. Mastering management, to repeat its significance, means and requires an overview and integration of the many theories and functions of management. Specialized management courses are useful but should come well after the complexity of management and business are understood. This leads to a punch line that makes Veblen’s apt phrase more resonant, from a person of the same era


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96