links for 2009-04-27

“What you get from Harvard Business School,” says Radio 4's In Business presenter Peter Day, “is a wonderful network of people who were there with you and a set of tools that you can then use and bamboozle people with for the rest of your life. It is a habit of thought - conventional responses to conventional situations. Harvard teaches very much on a case-study basis, so it is always telling people how to respond to things that happened in the past. No wonder that when something like the credit crunch comes along, huge numbers of highly skilled people in compartmentalised worlds are unable to respond to it.”

But the critics say there's an even deeper problem at the heart of the MBA degree. The MBA is all about putting careers on a fast-track to the top, whereas in the glory days of American industry there were no fast-tracks. MBAs, in other words are fundamentally anti-meritocratic.