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Management and the MBA

The great myth is the manager as orchestra conductor. It’s this idea of standing on a pedestal and you wave your baton and accounting comes in, and you wave it somewhere else and marketing chimes in with accounting, and they all sound very glorious. But management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.

Henry Mintzberg, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, 20091

In a nutshell

The need for skilled managers has never been greater, and globally the number of people in management is set to grow in the coming decades. The MBA reigns supreme as the badge of quality in business administration, yet only 1 in every 200 managers will get to do one. A business degree is a great thing, ...

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