Mintzberg's MBA Critique

The MBA became the dominant management credential by promising that management could be taught the way law was taught — through case analysis, at a remove from practice. Mintzberg spent a significant portion of his career arguing that this promise was structurally false. His critique, laid out most fully in Managers Not MBAs (2004), rested on the distinction between analysis (decomposing situations into components) and synthesis (combining components into coherent action that accounts for context, politics, and contradiction). The case method develops analysis. Management requires synthesis. The gap between them is the gap between the MBA classroom and managerial reality. The MBA produces, in Mintzberg's diagnosis, a manager who is analytically confident and practically naive — who approaches every situation as a problem to be solved through the right framework rather than navigated through judgment and relationship.