Wisdom from Stanford's Jim March on the Numbing Effect of Business Schools

There is a great interview on leadership with Jim March (probably the most prestigious living organizational theorist) by Joel Podolny (current head of HR at Apple, but also a very accomplished academic researcher) in the current edition of the Academy of Management Learning and Eduction journal (Vol. 10, No. 3, 502–506.)  The link is here, but someone will likely make you buy it. 

March, as always, looks at things differently than the rest of us.  For example, he does a lovely job of arguing -- using historical figures like Aristotle and Alexander the Great -- that the time frames used in most leadership research are often too short to be useful.  But what really caught my eye was a line that reminded me of that old Pink Floyd song :

        We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control.

March laments on page 503 :

My experience with business school students is that those who possess an instinct for joy, passion, and beauty often learn to suppress their expression by virtue of a sense that such instincts are unwelcome both in business schools and in business, thereby making the sense self-confirming.

I found this depressingly accurate for too many students, who often seem to lose their spark.  It doesn't just happen in business schools, to be clear, it is a danger in any school or institution that has strong norms, where people are in close physical proximity, and they have a lot of contact with each other (Indeed, Apple especially needs to guard against this now).  I do believe that the d.school -- at least at its best -- sometimes serves as a countervailing force, as the best teachers and classes there do encourage joy and self-expression.  But as much as I love being a professor, I do think that Jim raises an implicit question that every educator needs to keep asking him or herself:

"What am I teaching my students? Am I teaching them to think for themselves and to be themselves? Or am I teaching them to a perfect imitation of each other, or of some other idealized and emotionally cold model of humanity?" 

I am not saying that conformity is all bad, but too often we teach it unwittingly. I am curious about your reactions to March's point.  Is he (and I guess me) too hard on the educational process?  What can be done to educate people without turning them into emotionally repressed and joyless clones?

P.S. BY the way, after I posted it, I realized that March's comment actually is another example of the issue I raised in my last post about how roles can change what do and believe so much.

Comments

[Nick M.]

I considered getting my MBA after 5 years in the workforce. I spoke with a handful of people and specifically two entrepreneurs I know. One runs a small tech company in Seattle and the other has started numerous telecoms in the Bay Area, one of the telecoms sold to Cisco for $7B.

Their message was pretty much the same - my work experience was more valuable than an MBA. Their argument was that my experience and results said I accomplished something and had an impact versus a certificate saying I was able to learn stuff.

This doesn't address the particular question, but it does support the idea of "just doing it" if you have the passion and desire to start a company. Even if you fail, that experience may be more valuable (and possibly less costly) than an MBA.

[Ellie]

I think you can pretty much drop the "business" part of this and apply it generally to all school. I think I'm starting to see the beginnings of change though, so fingers crossed for the future.

[Larry Ford]

When we speak of "culture fit", are we not really speaking of thought control, or the kind of mindless conformity that all organizations, be they corporate, academic, or otherwise always seek to instill? If one of the purposes of any organization is to decrease randomness, then the pursuit of mindless conformity is inevitable. Indeed, one might claim this to be a hallmark of civilization.

[SK]

My experience is that the pressure to conform comes more from students, not from the professors.

When I was working on my dissertation in Computer Science, I once asked my advisor if he would follow a particular line of research I was considering. His response was astounding to me at the time and it has stayed with me: "I'm not here to turn you into a copy of me. You are here to share what you uniquely can contribute." (Remembering that kept me going through all the times he didn't seem to appreciate my unique contributions on any given day. ;-) )

When I did an EMBA program, I found little pressure from the faculty to conform to a norm. In fact, many seemed to appreciate the diversity and unique points of view brought by different students. They were eager to explore each perspective brought up during classroom discussions in a mostly analytical way, without being personally judgmental. (Being a prestigious EMBA program with many accomplished students, this experience may have been different from what one finds in a typical full-time MBA program. I don't know.)

This is not to say that there was no pressure to conform. There was peer pressure both within study groups and the cohort in general. This resulted in a fair amount of cliquish behavior and explicit social pressure. For example, at one point one student told me that there were many people in the class who wanted to befriend me but couldn't because I was friendly with a member of my assigned study group whose behavior was a few sigma away from the norm. My less than politic reply was that I had no interesting in befriending anyone who wanted me to ostracize someone else in order to be their friend. In some ways, this impressive cohort was not socially that much different from the average Jr. High School class.

[BryanB]

I think its a valid concern, particularly for graduate school, where students are trying to understand what it means to be a professional in the field. The best schools, and teachers, don't teach conformity. They teach ways of thinking and taking advantage of natural talents.

Business school seems particularly vulnerable to the squelching of right-brain activity because, at least in the U.S., business is seen as a serious, analytical, bottom line profession. Which it is. But as great leaders show us, its about a lot more than that.