MBA: Looking back,
looking ahead
You have heard the story before. In 1907, when asked to consider devel- oping a business school, then Harvard
University president Charles
William Eliot said, ‘There’s no
market for it.’ Against that notion,
the MBA program began in the
early 1900s in the United States. It
started as an educational response
to the demand for increased
supervisory and management
cadre triggered by the active pace
of automation and industrializa-
tion taking place on shop floors
across the country. Therefore, as
was obvious then, and quite as rel-
evant today, the industry and eco-
nomic practice in mainstream
United States and its physical and
virtual shop floors have been key
influencers in the demand for
management talent and hence in
the development of this education
program.
If you pursue the preceding
argument, it is easy to relate the
evolution of the MBA pro-
gram, content and peda-
gogy to three main devel-
opments. These include:
1. Theincreasedlevelsof
automation and engineer-
ing progress witnessed in
the early 20th century
enabled increase in scale and throughout
of operations. This resulted in the need
to develop personnel skills beyond shop
floor practices to supervisory and man-
agement skills that facilitated oversight
and guidance of larger, more sophisticat-
ed and distributed work environment.
For example, the notion of capacity uti-
lization evolved from basic labor capaci-
ty assessment to an interdependent bal-
ance between labor and machine capaci-
ty and level of automation. Hence, the
early MBA was built off the traditional
managerial accounting, book keeping
domains coupled with industrial human
resource practices. The Tuck School of
Business, one of the first such programs
in the US, began awarding master’s
degrees in the commercial sciences, a
curriculum at most schools.
Impact of this includes the
branding by schools around this
theme, for example INSEAD in
France is now the Business
School for the World.
PRASHANTSHANKARPATHAK
precursor to the MBA.
2. The MBA program of
today was substantially
influenced by the 1959
Ford Foundation report that characterized the programs as ‘vocational’ in content and ‘indefensible’ in quality. The
report suggested making the program
more entrenched in disciplinary knowledge, analytical practices and experiences. This is still the model that shapes
the curriculum of business schools and
MBA programs worldwide.
3. The emergence of the Internet and
its adoption in the commercial domain
resulting in the birth of the Internet
entrepreneurialism triggered the
demand for entrepreneurial focus within
the MBA programs. The reach and
boundary-less nature of the new enter-
prises that emerged from this phenome-
non also brought into greater focus the
need for a globally conscious and aware
