David Garvin: Rethinking the MBA

MBA programs have received a lot of flack due to their inability to produce students that not only have knowledge, but understand how to apply that knowledge in the real world. David Garvin, a professor at the Harvard Business School, does not deny this. In fact, his research supports this.

After canvasing schools with case studies, talking to business school dean’s and interviewing real world executives, Gavin found that MBA students were struggling with putting what they had learned into practice. Garvin argues that there are three things schools should strive to achieve through education: knowledge, skills and purpose/identity. The problem with schools today, though, is that they only focusing on this first item, knowledge.

Garvin contends that education needs to begin to involve structures that support more applied work and real life experience to see how the roles of business leaders today truly function. And if we are going to do this, people need to begin to recognize the problem and get on board, which luckily they are.

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