Upon reflection, I kinda wonder where the OP is going. I mean, I don’t think I said anything earth-shattering; B-School is *known *to be a craft school. Financial modeling, Valuation, General Management, Decision Science/Probability, etc. - the basic stuff you need to be business person, just like Law school provides you with an overview of lawcraft.
Schools can speak to ethics, just like they can speak to leadership - but just like with, I dunno, War College, there are parts of human nature you don’t understand until you are in the field. Capitalism and the business structure shaped by our version of it is pretty damn brutal - at best, you can apply what you learn in school as a bit of craft to go with your basic nature.
I am just picturing some b-school version of the Kobayashi Maru - where the stalwart, ingenious b-school student cracks the unsolvable case by rigging some of the underlying data - thus proving themselves to be CEO material.
A War Strategy college can not turn a ill-equipped footsoldier into a Battle Strategist - nor can it, years later, keep a War-College-trained General, who is a Battle Strategist, from using weapons in horrific ways on the field of battle.
**indian **- again, what are you looking for in your OP? A specific, tactical thing, like “Social Network Business Management” or insight as to how to apply the crafts one learns?
I am interested to know what you found 5 to 8 years after your MBA, to be different from what you were taught? Or something that B-School didn’t prepare you for?
in your first 5 - 8 years, you are basically in the equivalent of “residency” - you’ve completed medical school, picked a specialty and are getting real-world experience in a hospital setting. In the case of b-school “residences” - could be in management consulting, i-banking, a consumer-products or pharma brand management/marketing rotation, whatever. Your job is to learn the basics of the industry you are working in (if in consulting or i-banking, you are learning both about the firm AND the industry the firm has you focused on) - and to learn the basics of an organization that operates in that industry.
4 - 8 years out - the back half of that residency - you will be a Manager (can be called different things depending on your path). You are leading newbies in the planning and execution of work - you are a Journeyman who has mastered most of the craft and are capable of leading Apprentices
5 years out - you must be able to demonstrate the ability to create value, to become a Master. In an i-bank or consulting firm, you have to be part of teams that sell projects and ultimately sell your own projects. If you are in brand management, you have to manage a brand to greater growth and profitability
about 5 years out, you will have a large Career Checkpoint - could be a mid-life crisis if not handled well. As you start to realize that you aren’t going to be a Manager your whole life - i.e., leading the actual, interesting work - and that you have to generate income/sell/take business risk, you will start to realize that you have an opinion about what is a good fit - do you like this profession, this industry, the type of selling/leadership that is expected of you in this particular niche?
past the career checkpoint - you stay in your industry, recommitted to it, or you make a big change and end up some place else, hopefully a better fit - then you start focusing on “achievement” - what will you definition of success be? Partner at a Firm? COO/CEO of a company? How much do you want/expect to make? That’s when you start to realize, especially if you have started a family, that life is more complicated than you first realized and maybe “Master of the Universe” is not a realistic definition of success…that’s when you start to get a reasonable perspective about what is important to you as you manage your career.
That’s a pretty broad topic. I graduated about ten years ago and have worked for a lot of different companies. I’m sure you can find a lot of posts by me on related topics if you are interested.
I would say that typically unless you already have a lot of experience, once does not typically graduate business school and take over the world. A typical path is to get hired by an investment bank or consulting firm in a big class of associates, all who are probably as smart and educated as you. Once you work your ass off for a few years and get ino management, then things start to get more interesting.
Okay, back to Kobayashi Maru (read the Wiki link above).
Dude - what is a case study? It is an attempt to illustrate 1 or more business concepts you are being taught in class in real life. So - it is helpful in that it puts academic learning *on the first step *towards being translated to real-life experience. Internships, real-world case studies with small businesses that sign up for free b-school student help, and other “real world” experiences framed within the context of a b-school education also help translate school-taught craft skills to real-world applications.
Case studies are NO replacement for real-world experience. An executive coming to an evening program and talking through a case study will get far more value bring their real-world experience to the discussion than a newbie - THAT is why, at most top-tier business schools I know of, you must have 3 - 5 years of real world job experience before attending.
Are case studies a good tool? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean that a little kid won’t use them to smash their fingers
WordMan’s timeline is pretty accurate. I’m at the point now in my career where I am looking to go beyond managing projects and teams and start getting into the business development side. Honestly, I would much rather be selling projects and managing relationships than dealing with the minutiae and bullshit of actually running them.
I think you will also see that MBAs have a very different attitude about work and career. The expectation is that you have a more control over your career and your work environment. For example, I work for a rapidly growing startup. My roll is professional services manager - basically working directly with our clients and running my engagement team(s). Not only am I responsible for the success of my project, but I’m also responsible for generating new work to a certain extent and bulding up the practice. If there is something I don’t like about work, I can’t just bitch about it. I have to make sure it gets fixed.
It’s a bit circular. People with drive and ambition go to top busines schools because the top business schools want people with drive and ambition.
I am curious to know if any Business Schools even offer courses titled
Quality, Quality Assurance, Quality Control or something equivalent.
About 25 years ago I strongly suspect they had not. A good friend of mine
attended the Stanford 3-year MBA program (the extra year was for Engineering),
then ranked best in the country. I myself was a QC/QA technician. Some
time after he graduated I brought up the name W. Edwards Deming in a
conversation, and he said “Who is W. Edwards Deming?” That is as bad as
a physicist not knowing who Eisntein was, and it suggests QC/QA may not
have been the subject of a single required lecture in the Stanford program.
At the time my friend was in Japan had been kicking our asses for a good
ten years as the result of superior QC/QA practices, and here our goddam
best school apparently ignoring the field. Our position vis a vis Japan has not
gotten much if any better since, and I will always wonder if one reason is a
fatal educational inattention to QA/QC, mixed with a heavy dose of aversion
to manufacturing as a profession (not that Quality is relevant only to manufacturing).
**colonial **- I tend to agree with **msmith **here - Deming/Six Sigma-type process control is a specialty-track that one can either pursue as a concentation within b-school or as part of the “residency” path you pick coming out of b-school.
The program at Stanford is NOT “how exactly should engineering concepts be applied in a business setting to achieve Operational Excellence” - which is what you expected. It is “I am an engineer; what business tools should I know?” - and, for whatever reason, they picked tools like Financial modeling/valuation, marketing/brand management and other tools in front of TQM - I suspect because, as I state above, TQM is seen as a concentration - a next-level of specialty after you’ve been grounded in business basics.
To be clear - I have experience in this area: my current role includes building out Process Control as a central pillar of the Operational Strategy I have been championing in my company (it isn’t easy to teach experienced, succesful dogs new tricks so they can scale their work to fit a larger company’s operational needs). I am, slowly but surely, imposing Process Control, project management and other TQM type disciplines throughout our organization. As a quasi-engineering major undergrad (CompSci), coupled with working at HP before b-school, I was immersed in project management and received a lot of TQM training. It just so happens that the company I am at right now will benefit from streamlining it’s Business Model to embrace Operational Excellence to drive leverage and therefore profitability. And since Operational Excellence in this particular setting translates to TQM-type Process Control, I didn’t have to work hard to fit my experience in to this setting - I am not a random hammer trying to turn what I see into a nail - it happens to be a nail I am well-prepared to hammer in. So far I have only nailed my fingers a few times
**msmith **- ah, interesting; I hadn’t fully understood your situation - a Journeyman Manager who is overseeing a few junior Managers and who is stepping into the Master role via your relationship management and having to be where the buck stops. As I like to say it to my direct reports: you are the adult in the room. If you see a mess or an upcoming conflict (or a cool opportunity), who is going to deal with it but you? That’s transitioning from Managing to Leading - very different. Best of luck.
[COLOR=black]So the answer to my question is “No”.[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]QA/QC should be a vital concern to each department in any [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]business. I would think that our business schools would be [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]well advised to require at least one course-length study of [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]the field, preferably earlier than the graduate level, but certainly [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]by then.[/COLOR]
Addressed above.
[COLOR=black]Are you seriously suggesting that this concept is completely [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]untouched? I certainly did expect it to be part of the program, [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]and I am dismayed to learn it may not have been. I will have [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]to ask my friend how he perceived it. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]I am not sure what you mean by this. Although my friend had a [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]technical education and work history (Physics, Math and Architecture) [/COLOR]
I am not sure he took a single engineering course prior to Stanford.
[COLOR=black]I therefore assumed the extra year for engineering study was meant [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]to cover ground such as you describe in your previous sentence.[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]This strikes me as a seriously bassackward approach given [/COLOR][COLOR=black]the [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]importance of the subject of Quality. I wonder how the [/COLOR][COLOR=black]Japanese[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]educational system sees it.[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]The unfavorable conditions you are working under are, precisely, [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]the result of deficiencies in our educational system which I have [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]been pointing out. If these experienced, successful dogs had been [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]required to learn something about scientific QA/QC when they were[/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]in school, then you would not have to waste time convincing them. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]Honestly I wish you Godspeed, good luck, and complete success. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]But really, these tools were available 50 years ago, and should have [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]been implemented decades ago when it was clear that the Japanese [/COLOR]
[COLOR=black]were onto something, and we were not. Places like Stanford should [/COLOR]
have been leading the way on the academic side. They did no such thing.
Well then, I guess you’re right. Sorry for troubling you with some real world experience. :rolleyes:
Seriously, you are both singing to the choir and limited in your perspective. You don’t have to convince me about the power of TQM - I am bringing it to my company, remember? But to portray it as the end-all, be-all is to assume that all businesses depend on Operationally Excellent Process Control as their core competence. They don’t.
And that clearly must not be the case, or the Japanese would not have been in the prolonged recession - the “lost decade” - that they have experienced and were only recovering from when the natural disaster struck.
TQM as a discipline is best-suited to high-volume manufacturing. Parts of it can be applied to some Professional Services capabilities, but you are starting to transition from literal “manufacturing processes” to conceptual “business development processes” where literal six sigma process control goes out the window.
Have you read Porter’s What is Strategy? While I happen to think a lot of what Porter writes about is smoke, in this case he makes a point: you can push the boundaries of business performance by controlling Operational Excellence, but you can’t use it to make Innovation happen - that is the Strategic Frontier that comes from other sources. You use TQM when the basis of competition is scaling up high-volume processes - after the innovation has happened.
As for the Engineering / MBA program - ask your friend.
What is your background? How did you come to be a TQM Fundamentalist? Again, to be clear: it is a critical tool in specific applications, which is exactly why I am using it. But to claim it is the core of all that is Good Business is limited in scope at best.
upon relection, I am going to elaborate: TQM is a second-order strategic question. It comes after the first-order strategic question: how do you make money / what is your core competence?
To paint with a broad brush, you can have extremes in your business model - An Operationally Excellent company measures success a completely different way from a Product Innovator company and also completely differently from a Customer Intimate/Account/Relationship-based company.
For each Business Model, the processes you must have in place are completely different - ONLY when you have figured out WHICH model you are going to pursue can you then proceed to apply TQM techniques to perfect the processes you have *chosen *to commit to.
In the entrepreneurial stages, is it easy to know which business model your business should commit to? Yeah, right - that’s why so many businesses are successful ;). In the beginning all you care about is cash flow - you engineer in a point of view about your core competence when you have the luxury of enough profits to step back and think about it - when you have moved from innovating based on new Functionality to innovating on consistency and reliability. And *that’s *when TQM starts to make sense. Have you been an entrepreneur?
TQM is a critical tool, but is not the be-all, end-all. No need to beat business schools about the head and shoulders for not making it their raison d’etre.
You are the one who is now having the real world working experience
trouble, not me
I wish I was, but no I am not.
My thesis is that courses Quality/QA/QC (let’s call the subject Q)
should be required by at least graduate school level, and you are
fighting me every step of the way.
Strawman: I have not suggested that Q is sufficient, although
I do insist it is necessary. Don’t you?
Nor have I said that one approach such as that for manufacturing
is suitable for all types of business.
Nonsense.
While Japanese manufacturing has not missed a beat that I know of,
disaster struck because Japanese financial institutions abandoned
rational Q procedure in their real estate sectors, leading to a bubble
whose collapse has not been made good to this day.
As you know, the US went through much the same thing, despite
Japan’s example: Q procedure was abandoned to the extent of trillions
in loans to borrowers who should not have been considered risk-worthy.
Addressed above.
No.
Addressed above.
I said I would. I am trying to devote as much care as possible in reading
your posts. I would appreciate it if you return the favor.
BA English Lit and Political Science (Phi Beta Kappa)
CQT
17 years manufacturing Q/Process Engineering inspector/technician.
I guess I must repeat myself:
I do not insist that the specific approach TQM is appropriate in all
business. I DO insist that some form of Q core attention IS essential.
The performance ca.1990-present of our financial institutions, and
Japan’s should be all the proof we need on that score.
I believe I will now go further than I have to this point. The only way
to secure Q is its vital role is to make it a required course of study in
all business schools at the undergraduate level- The MBA level is not enough.
And although they may never have to use it professionally, TQM should
be part of every business student’s course requirements because of the
core importance of manufacturing, which touches initmately upon every
life, every day, everywhere.
