“But ma’am must have been briefed, surely?”
“’Of course,’ said the Queen, ‘but briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.”
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
In Alan Bennett’s delightful novel, the Queen of the United Kingdom stumbles into a bookmobile, and begins to read—at first tentatively, then voraciously. This causes her to begin to question, redefine, and reorient her life and the world around her. The conversation above is an early indication in the story that all of this reading is changing the Queen. The distinction between briefing and reading reminded me of the frequent question, “Why don’t you just tell students what they should know instead of making them read a messy, discursive, and often incomplete representation of a problem and then making them talk about it?” Why indeed.
The point of a great education is to prepare one for life. Sure, in giving you a degree, we are asserting that you are a Master of Business Administration. But passing tests of mastery of tools and concepts does not necessarily affirm how well you know things and, more importantly, that you can manage more ably than before.
In previous postings, I have written about the importance of learning that sticks. As anyone who has prepared for a test by rote memorization will confirm, rote learning is ephemeral—here today, and gone tomorrow or in six months. You should want the kind of learning that leaves a deep impression, so that when you need it you find it. Case learning achieves that by helping you make your own meaning out of problem situations. Simply absorbing someone else’s meanings doesn’t lock learning in place the way that sorting things out for yourself can accomplish.
The larger question is, can you manage better than you could before? A great MBA education should strengthen your game in at least seven ways:
**Leadership skills. The world is full of followers. Leadership remains the greatest constraint on our ability to achieve a path of good growth in the world. Darden’s mission statement declares that we will “develop leaders in the world of practical affairs.”
**Capacity to think critically. This is the ability to question assumptions and logic, to discount appropriately those efforts to persuade, lobby, and sell, and to consider various sides of an issue. Former UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (subsequently Chancellor of University of Oxford) said “All Oxford need teach you is to know when someone is talking rot.” Ultimately, you sharpen your critical faculties best in conversation with others.
**Ability to communicate well. The best analysis and insights will founder unless conveyed well to others. Many applicants come to Darden precisely because they want to grow in the capacity to debate and defend ideas, to enlist others, to think on their feet, and to convey ideas in appropriate ways.
**Ethical intuition. Managerial life is loaded with ethical dilemmas. A great B-school education should heighten one’s sensitivity to these, and one’s awareness of what great managers have done in response.
**Pragmatism—your ability to get to the heart of a problem quickly, knowing which tools to use and when, anticipating the limitations of tools and concepts, and sharpening your bias for action beyond mere analysis.
**Understanding how context shapes outcomes. Over the course of 600 cases that you study at Darden, you gain clarity about a wide range of industry settings, managerial positions, and administrative problems. This grasp of texture will deepen your ability to “read” a problem situation quickly. It will build your instincts in a way that no textbook can.
**Growing in wisdom. Most of the great cultures in world history have emphasized that wisdom, rather than knowledge, is the foundation for the Good Life. Cast in B-school terms, this means that a great education should train you to make wiser business decisions. Wisdom affords an understanding of the interplay of a host of tangible and intangible considerations, such as one’s confidence in underlying assumptions and calculations, the incentives and biases of key players in the decision setting, and the difficulty of communicating and taking action.
Studying and then discussing cases promotes all of these in ways that simply “briefing” the student cannot. Alan Bennett’s Queen drew the right distinction between closing and opening a subject. We teach by the case method because we really want to open the minds of our students. The way you study a subject will have huge influence on the growth you draw from it. Mastery of knowledge is very important; but there is so much more to gain from a great business school education.
Posted by Robert Bruner at 01/01/2008 06:55:32 PM