The Harvard Business Review published an article in 2005 with the bluntly dismissive title, 'How Business Schools Lost Their Way', when authors Warren G. Bennis and James O'Toole mapped out a damning litany of cardinal shortcomings.
The schools were 'failing to impart useful skills, failing to prepare leaders, failing to instil norms of ethical behaviour - even failing to lead graduates to good corporate jobs'. The kernel of their case was that business was being taught as a science, or academic discipline, rather than as a profession such as medicine or law. As such, the schools could not fulfil their core mission of preparing managers for the diverse and inexact rigours of corporate leadership.
If that analysis rang true in 2005, it bears little, if any, resemblance to the teaching methodologies of most case-study-based business schools today, where the emphasis on developing skills and putting the lessons of theory into practice is paramount. However, the question remains: can you actually learn to be a leader? Jeffrey Gandz, of Ivey School, is in no doubt that you can. 'Leadership can be both taught and developed. The innate ability to lead is widely, not narrowly, distributed. However, the combination of ability to lead, aspiration to lead and preparedness to put in the very hard work to become an effective leader, and sustain that effort through good and bad times, is fairly rare.'
Jaco Lok, of the Australian School of Business at University of New South Wales, stressed the value of experience, however relevant the methods learned. 'Leadership is not a matter of simply applying some basic rules, techniques or frameworks in a mechanistic way; effective leadership is extremely context-dependent. Some basic principles and techniques can be taught in business school, but lots of practice is required to really be able to master them across different situations.'
A criticism frequently directed at business schools is that MBA graduates often develop inflated opinions of their own leadership abilities, expecting to leapfrog more experienced colleagues into senior management positions.
Dr Lok argued that a more valid grounding for leadership was in getting students to reflect on their personalities, recognising their skills and weaknesses. 'A good MBA programme should teach you to become much more self-aware in your interactions with others so that you can adjust your own behaviour when needed and become a more effective manager.
'Rather than gloss over any weaknesses and giving students a false sense of their leadership abilities, I believe a good programme should actually do the opposite. Overconfidence and arrogance hamper one's ability to continue to learn and develop. They are also unwelcome leadership traits. After all, who wants to be led by an overconfident and arrogant leader?'