Is the creativity monster descending on B-schools?
An article in the latest issue of Business Week Magazine had me chuckling. “MBA Applicants Are MIA” tackles the decrease in applications to business schools, a pretty sound reaction to soaring tuition rates and stagnating salaries for B-school graduates. It was not, however, reading about the plight of MBA students that made me smile -I rarely take much pleasure in other people’s hardships - but rather the article’s suggestion that MBA programs need to churn out more “creative” graduates, and not just efficiency-maximizing Six Sigma drones.
Oh yeah, good ol’ creativity comes riding into town.
“Creativity” was a dominant buzzword in my Old Country in the early and mid-90’s. It was pretty much a matter of desperation that brought about its prominence. Decades of inflationary policies had come to an abrupt end and large chunks of the manufacturing industry, as well as housing construction, were wiped out as a result. The era of 1% unemployment rate was super-quickly replaced by exploding unemployment (in 1990 there were jobs everywhere, in 1991 there were almost no job openings, and by 1992 many of the old jobs were gone as well). Out of this grew the idea that the future was in “creative” fields: Media, design, pop-culture, the arts, and similar industries (if they can be called that). Sweden was going to become a nation of pop-artists and writers! “Creativity” was bandied about so much that an architecture-student friend of mine almost punched me when I suggested that his was a “creative” profession.
Interestingly, Sweden has a GE-style company in mobile-phone-and-almost-everything-else-maker Ericsson, which back then prided itself, loudly, on hiring nothing but engineers. It didn’t need any business students because it felt it was easy to teach engineers what little they needed to know about such trivial matters, and design was a total waste since people only cared about functionality. And who would want anything other than a black-brick phone, anyway? Ericsson’s days as a world beater ran smack into a wall when Finnish competitor Nokia churned out piles of styled and stylish phones that made Ericsson’s offerings look like a Model-T Ford. But before the financial bloodletting that followed set in, Ericsson’s rapid expansion and gargantuan profits actually had fueled scores and scores of tech start ups that did celebrate and revel in “creativity.” One of those “creative” companies was Boo.com, if you care to remember that slightly over-hyped e-comm phenomenon. Those heady days were best captured in an article in the European edition of Newsweek, where Sweden was proclaimed as Europe’s, or perhaps the universe’s number one high-tech center, or something to that effect.
The BizWeek article that brought a smile to my lips has a sidebar article that illustrates a “creative” curriculum in action, namely a fourteen-week long interaction between French B-school students and California design students aimed at practicing the development of new products. Bringing together students from top schools on two different continents is no doubt state of the art in luxury education, but the concept itself, while sound, doesn’t seem all that earth-shattering, does it? Surely MBA students are drilled in the art and science of product development and innovation? Perhaps not. I really don’t know.
Either way, I think some prudence is in order here before we all carve the letters “c-r-e-a-t-i-v-i-t-y” on our chests with a dull razor blade. MBA students may not be the best at driving product-innovation processes, but they should be the best at making sure those processes don’t spin out of control. One of the things the Internet shaboom, shabust taught us is that people who look down on the tyranny of numbers do so at their own peril.
Six Sigma ain’t crap, dog.
Disclosures: I buy my cellphones from Nokia. A Doctor in Physics friend of mine works at one of Ericsson’s four gazillion subsidiaries. I once worked at an e-comm startup that went bust in a most spectacular fashion (actaully, it lived a most spectacular life, then died with a whimper). I am super creative, yet I like numbers, too. 92 is probably my favorite number.
