Learning and Change - Roger Martin

First Change Yourself

Roger Martin always had a hunch that he might end up in academia one day. But he figured that this was something that he would pursue later in life -- probably as an exit strategy from consulting. So he wasn't quite prepared when a member of the board of a Canadian company that worked with Monitor approached him two years ago about the vacant dean's position at Rotman. Martin thought it over and wrestled with two related issues, both of which he knew he had to resolve in his mind if he were going to succeed in improving Rotman.

The first question was whether a business-school dean could ever be in the best position to have a large effect on people. After all, the most obvious move for Martin to make after leaving consulting would be to take the CEO's job at a large, troubled company, turn that company around, make it a better place to work, and make the stockholders rich. To Martin, however, that seemed like a boring path for an experienced consultant already rooted in the world of change. "I had worked with CEOs for 17 years," he says. "As a CEO, if you do your job well, you can have some influence on one group of people in one organization. But I wanted to do something that would affect a larger number of folks."

The second question was more personal -- and partly patriotic. Given Martin's reputation, he probably could have landed the dean's job at one of the top-ranked business schools in the United States if he had set his mind to it and was patient for a few years. But he also happens to be Canadian, born and bred in a small town 70 miles west of Toronto. So part of the pull of the Rotman job had to do with Martin's passionate feelings about Canadian competitiveness. "Overall, I have an underlying confidence in Canada and Canadians," he says. "But Canada's history of restrictive trade policies has left its people not quite entrenched enough in the mind-set of the global market. For decades, people here benchmarked themselves against other Canadian companies. But there is no value at all today in asking whether you're the best company in Canada. There's certainly no value in asking whether you're the best business school in Canada. All that matters is how you're doing globally. I felt that by coming back, I could draw more attention to that fact and pump out Canadian MBAs who would understand it."

Then Change the Product

What made Martin so supremely confident that the skills he had mastered as a consultant equipped him to run a business school? Martin's own experiences with business schools in several different settings directly influenced his diagnosis of management education's ills.

For one thing, he is a 1981 graduate of Harvard Business School -- even though, according to Martin's own account, he attended HBS under "suspicious" circumstances. What he really wanted to do after finishing his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1979, he says, was to stick around for a few years, hanging out with his girlfriend (who was starting graduate school there) and coaching the men's volleyball team. His parents didn't consider coaching volleyball to be a worthy pursuit, so he enrolled in the business school largely in order to give himself a legitimate reason for staying in Cambridge.

Having entered HBS under spurious, if not false, pretenses, Martin didn't have the best attitude when he started its MBA program. But the school didn't even live up to his low expectations. "I loved Harvard -- the institution -- because I thought that it stood for the right things academically," he says. "So I was surprised by how anti-intellectual its business school was. Whenever people tried to ask a question in a new way, or to think about a problem in an unorthodox manner, other students would literally hiss at them, as if they were trying to be showy. That's not the way students should be treating peers who are trying to peel the onion one level deeper."

Later, as a recruiter for Monitor, Martin became a consumer of MBAs. Within what was then a 900-person consulting firm (it has grown to employ more than 1,000 employees), he became the head of Monitor University, the firm's training program. What he saw in the new recruits confirmed his growing belief that there was something fundamentally wrong with MBA education.

"By 1991, we had determined that the people we hired from high-end business schools were no better at integrative thinking than the undergraduates we hired from top-notch liberal-arts programs," he says. In fact, the newly minted BAs were more fun to work with. "The BAs and the MBAs are equally driven and equally smart," he says. "But unlike the BAs, the MBAs show up on their first day of work with their heads all crammed full of stuff that they believe is important -- but that really isn't. By the time people were done with business school, they were generally less open to using their minds the way we needed them to."

The problem, according to Martin, is this: Business schools teach eight or nine subjects, ranging from finance to strategy to marketing to organizational behavior. Each discipline exists in its own silo, even though students take some of the courses simultaneously. But as an approach to learning the skills needed in business, this method isn't very useful -- a realization that most business-school students recognize soon after they begin their graduate studies.