DePaul University professors Robert Rubin and Erich Dierdorff are presenting a paper today (8/6/07) at the Academy of Management conference in Philadelphia. Here's how the core of the paper is described in the Financial Times.

"The authors had access to a US Department of Labor database of surveys of more than 8,600 managers, across a broad spectrum of occupations. Using the data the authors identified six behavioral competencies that “best described the essential requirements for all managers”; managing human capital, managing logistics and technology, managing decision-making processes, managing administration and control, managing strategy and innovation and managing the task environment.

The authors then examined how these competencies compared with the course requirements of 373 MBA programs and the perceptions of 118 business school administrators. They discovered wide differences between what were considered by managers to be the most important skills and the amount of coursework in these areas required by programs.

For example, whilst managers ranked managing human capital as second in importance, in terms of course coverage it was ranked fourth. Whilst managing administration and control, ranked top in terms of course coverage at schools, but was ranked fifth in importance by managers"

If you want to be successful at running a business, those soft skills are vital. Managers at all levels should master them. But it could be that the MBA students call for less soft skills and more analytics in their MBA curriculum makes sense.

If you're going after an MBA for the money, analytical skills are more valuable. I don't believe those figures published every year about how the average MBA graduate starting salary is $80,000 or so. But I do believe that the MBA grads who get the highest salaries are the ones going to analyst positions in the financial industry.

If you want to spend your classroom time productively, courses in analytical tools make more sense than courses in soft skills. That's because you don't learn how to manage people in class. You learn on the job.

We've created an MBA education system that trains students to analyze companies, not to lead them. As long as that's true, the students are right to demand that their high cost classroom time be devoted to material with the highest payoff.

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