(2021-06-14) Cagan The Mba Pathology

Martin Cagan: The MBA Pathology. While the CSPO pathology is large and growing, it is relatively new compared to the MBA pathology.

in case you’re thinking that while the well-known problems with MBA program may have been true ten and twenty years ago, they can’t possible be true today, my evidence for this article was collected this academic quarter. And from the most elite programs in the country.

it’s no secret that there are many strong leaders in Silicon Valley that are absolutely allergic to MBA’s. They feel like they bring the wrong mindset, arrogant attitudes, and obsolete skills:

I’m not one of those people

many of the students accepted into top MBA programs often have the right raw materials to be coached and developed into exceptionally strong product managers

there is usually some critically important “unlearning” that needs to be done. And when that unlearning doesn’t happen, I see it leading to many of the very serious issues we see in companies today, especially those that are victims of disruption.

I’m not just talking about product managers and product leaders. I’m also talking about VC’s and other investors, Board Members, CEO’s, CFO’s, and GM’s/business unit leaders and countless other stakeholders.

I loosely categorize the problematic thinking and behaviors into four major areas:

Equating Management With Leadership

believing they are supposed to act like “the boss.”

Too many times I have had to intervene with serious coaching about how as product manager, you are actually not the boss of anyone.

Moreover, you need to earn your spot as part of the team. And this typically requires skills that you didn’t learn in business school.

Not Knowing What You Can’t Know

illusion of predictability.

The belief in predictability, the religion of business cases, the blind faith in business analytics, and more generally, the pressure to have “the answer.”

what hinders so many MBA graduates is that they believe they are supposed to know these things, and if they don’t, that speaks to their own weaknesses, rather than an acknowledgement of the realities of innovation

The Role of Technology

One of the most serious and deeply rooted problems is thinking of technology as a cost center, rather than the core enabler of the business.

Is it any surprise so many think of the engineers and designers as subordinates? Or even worse, as resources that can just as easily be outsourced?

Command and Control Leadership Style

As Reed Hastings of Netflix emphasizes, “lead with context, not control,” and work to push decisions down to the teams.

To be clear here, I’m not suggesting leaders shouldn’t lead (a common misconception in certain Agile circles). They absolutely should. It’s about how they lead.

Beyond the four problems discussed above, I blame much of the MBA pathology as it pertains to product managers on the old CPG (consumer packaged goods / brand manager) style product manager.

But today, I have a much deeper appreciation for just how fundamentally different technology product management is from those CPG product managers (which today are much more closely aligned with what we in the tech world would call product marketing managers).

even today, if you peruse the online catalogs of the major MBA programs, especially any courses specifically teaching product management, you’ll find most of the faculty are professors of marketing.

How much of this is simply a remnant of the CPG legacy?

Today, product discovery in a technology-powered product company is dominated by deep collaboration with engineering and design in order to combine enabling technology with exceptional user experience in ways that provide real value to the customers and to your business. How many MBA programs are teaching this sort of collaboration

The Perfect Storm of Bad Product

when the CSPO pathology and the MBA pathology converge in the same company, the results are especially dangerous.

the dependence on command and control style leadership and the illusion of predictability, and they meet an eager market of Agile coaches that tell them exactly what they want to hear – they can have the top-down, command and control they love, and still check the “Agile” box

Hence the perfect incubator for a disease like SAFe.