MBA Scepticism III

"The Classical literature projects the image of strategists as managerial professionals, dedicated to their firms, impersonal in their judgements and promoted on their merits. These are the expectations and attitudes embedded in every MBA degree: managerial skill and hard work can take everybody to the top."

 Whittington, R. (2008) What is strategy – and does it matter? Thomson, London. (p. 41)

MBA Scepticism

...we do not know how effective strategists are made. This is despite huge investments in business education, especially MBA degrees, in which strategic management is typically the central core (Pfeffer and Fong 2003; Pettigrew et al. 2001). If MBA sceptic Henry Mintzberg (2004) is right, this education industry is probably producing the wrong kind of strategists. 

Whittington, Richard (2006), “Completing the Practice Turn in Strategy Research”, Organization Studies, 27(5): 613-634

What is Strategy -

"and does it matter? diye devam ediyor Whittington'ın sorusu, klasik stratejik yönetim teorileriyle dalgasını geçmeden önce.

Giriş cümleleri biraz fikir verecektir, ben çok güldüm:

Amazon.com lists forty-seven books available with the title Strategic Management. Most are thick tomes, filled with charts, lists and nostrums, promising the reader the fundamentals of corporate strategy. .... These texts generally sell at around $50. 


There is a basic implausibility about these books. If the secrets of corporate strategy could be acquired for $50, then we would not pay our top managers so much.

Whittington, R. (2008) What is strategy – and does it matter? Thomson, London. (Chapter 1)