Curriculum changes over the past decade - and there have been many changes that have been over-sold as "revolutionary" - have begrudgingly nodded to the expressed frustrations with MBA's who can't manage, not to mention lead, fellow employees. But in most of these celebrated curriculum revisions, it's amounting to not much more than a nod. The faculty and administration of most graduate business schools are trained to deliver the first outcome cited above, analytical skills, not the second, people skills, and they are not about to retool in soft skills or abandon their tenured posts to those who have those skills.
As it turns out, both faculty and MBA students are more comfortable with the traditional preoccupation with analytical and technical skills training. A majority of MBA candidates have technical backgrounds in fields like engineering, finance, accounting, and the sciences. This makes the adoption of soft-skills curricula ever more challenging, since it takes both the consumers and suppliers outside of their comfort zones. What we've been teaching in MBA programs is easy for professional engineers; what we haven't been rcs data teaching is not.
So the challenge for an aspiring MBA student is to identify that relatively small set of suppliers who are responding to what the ultimate consumer of MBA talent, the employer,
Whether we feel comfortable with soft-skills training or not, our failure to effectively help our students to develop and strengthen those skills represents a considerable diminution of the value of our MBA curricula. It's not good enough to see ourselves as ill-equipped and ill-trained to deliver a soft skills curriculum, and hence sidestep the issue in favor of ever more hard-skills training. The reality is that as business managers rise in their organizations and take on ever-greater responsibilities, the percentage of their time devoted to "people problems" increases exponentially. The CFO of one of the world's largest soft-drink giants (one of only two), whose training had been in accounting, once told me that 95 percent of his time was spent dealing with people problems; the financial issues had to be compacted into the remaining 5 percent.