The Future of the MBA

The Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree is a currently a very successful North American-originated cultural artifact and socioeconomic phenomenon that has gained worldwide acceptance, consisting of a two-year educational experience in which college-trained students with typically two to four years of work experience get the opportunity-on passing through a selective fi ltering process-to "train for managing a business."

Demand for the MBA degree currently exceeds supply by a healthy margin, and the top "producers" of MBA trainees are large, profit table, and growing enterprises. However, a number of vehement critiques of the MBA degree have emerged. They raise questions about its economic, intellectual, practical, moral, and "all-things-considered" value and about its relevance and viability that translate into questions about its near and long-term future. These critiques-which we review and discuss here-are pursued along different lines and on different grounds, but they share a focus on the "future of the MBA"-about which they are pessimistic on the basis of their evaluation of various current trends.

Discourse about the "future of X" is, of course, predicated on the assumption that X-or some essential set of characteristics of it-will endure, such that X-in-the-future will still be recognizable as a continuation of X-now. There is, however, no reason to assume that the future-ofthe- MBA will result in the MBA-of-the-future-it may, for instance, end up in extinction. T

herein lies a dilemma the critiques jointly face: because they criticize the MBA phenomenon vis-à-vis a set of goals and objectives that are presupposed by the current institutional, economic, and intellectual framework in which the current MBA phenomenon lives, they cannot simultaneously criticize the MBA and the very presuppositions in which the phenomenon is grounded and thus do not enable us to consider an MBA-of-the-future that may be radically different from the MBA-ofthe- present.

The task of revaluation of core values that must precede de novo design work, therefore, still lies ahead. It represents an unaddressed challenge. We argue that the "problem of the MBA" must be posed in new terms in order to register real progress on the current version of the MBA; that the problems of the future manager and organization will be different from the problems that the current MBA graduate and his or her training addresses; and therefore that conceptualizing the manager of the future must precede the design of the MBA of the future.