What do the British foreign secretary William Hague, former US treasury secretary Hank Paulson and Indian home affairs minister P. Chidambaram have in common? They are all MBA graduates who have reached public office. And they are not the only ones, reports Britain’s Financial Times.
In Europe, the current Dutch finance minister, Jan Kees de Jager, is an MBA from Nyenrode, which also produced former Prime Minister Wim Kok. Jean-Louis Borloo, French minister for ecology and energy until last November and higher education minister Valérie Pécresse are graduates of HEC in Paris. In the UK Cabinet office minister Oliver Letwin and former shadow home secretary David Davis both studied at London Business School. The US has also seen several MBA politicians in recent years, for example former president George W. Bush who studied at Harvard Business School and former secretary of commerce Donald Evans, who has an MBA from McCombs. In Asia, Singapore’s deputy prime minister, Wong Kan Seng holds a degree from LBS and Indonesia’s vice-president, Jusuf Kalla one from Insead.
The explanations for the prominence of such politicians are obvious: the need for greater professionalism in government and the fact there are more business school graduates in circulation these days.
Harder to explain are the reasons why some business schools are incorporating elements of the public service in their curriculums. Several schools in the UK, including the London School of Economics and Cardiff and Liverpool universities, have launched public administration programmes. Warwick Business School which opened the UK’s first Master of Public Administration in 2000, attracts between 50 and 70 students a year, marketing it as “the public sector MBA”.
The public sphere is normally thought to have more to learn from the private sector than the other way round. But some schools are adding courses in diplomacy and international studies. They believe that diplomacy and business are directly linked and that both should have a greater understanding of each other.
Meanwhile, schools that have traditionally taught diplomacy are attracting business managers Tufts’ Fletcher School opened its Master of International Business three years ago, combining an MBA with areas such as trade, geopolitics and NGOs. Bhaskar Chakravorti, senior associate dean at Fletcher says the aim is to prepare students for the “bumpiness” of the modern world. “There is a lot of overlap of business decisions with the public policy arena and issues like international trade, peace and conflict, humanitarian issues, inclusive growth issues. These are not the kind of topics that business schools normally talk about.”
Whether the growing interdependence between business practices and politics is a good thing though, is heavily debated. Depending on one’s point of view, MBA politicians either offer technocratic common sense, or are symptomatic of a creeping “managerialism”.
True, analytical skills and being able to think clearly are important for politics, but disciplines such as accounting, marketing or finance are not going to be directly relevant. The types of things that politicians do need might be better attained with things like history or even philosophy.
Rajeev Gowda, chair of the Centre for Public Policy at IIM-Bangalore and a Wharton MBA politician, disagrees. He says India needs the skills and perspectives that MBAs can offer. “As democracies mature, you need different types of people. You go from wanting people who can lead political agitations and write constitutions, to people who can manage a budget and improve the efficiency of programmes. That’s where an MBA training comes in useful.”
Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/96d634f0-1ffd-11e0-a6fb-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Bu8GZ2hq
