By Davide Sola, Director, ESCP Europe – London campus

Former journalist and Harvard MBA Philip Delves Broughton recently wrote: "Business schools have shown a remarkable ability to miss economic catastrophes unfolding before their eyes."

In his article 'Harvard's Masters of the Apocalypse', Delves Broughton, author of What They Teach You At Harvard Business School, lays the blame for the current global recession squarely at the feet of MBA graduates, a group he described less than flatteringly as a, "swollen class of jargon-spewing, value-destroying financiers and consultants [that] have done more than any other group of people to create the economic misery we find ourselves in. 

As the UK director of ESCP Europe Business School, my first instinct was to defend the MBA: our own Executive MBA is well respected and ranked 1st in the world for career progression by the Financial Times' 2008 league tables. With that in mind, a debate was proposed, and on 20th May I was delighted to share the discussion panel with not only Delves Broughton, but also Jeanette Purcell, the Chief Executive of the Association of MBAs. The debate was moderated by Lindsay Williams, a media trainer and former television and radio business correspondent.

What was immediately apparent was the bias of Delves Broughton's criticisms: as a former student of the Harvard Business School MBA programme, his views were entirely formed due to the American model of education. While Harvard's programme has become a standard for schools in the US, it remains very different to that taught by equivalent schools worldwide such as ESCP Europe. As written in his own article, Delves Broughton points out that while 500,000 people each year take an MBA course, 150,000 of those are based in the USA and just 900 at Harvard itself.

This leaves around 350,000 students studying at schools that follow a distinctly different approach to the Harvard MBA, justifying Purcell's insistence that, "Harvard doesn't represent what most people at business schools go through."

Debate attendee Bill Williams, an MBA graduate from Cranfield School of Management in the UK, agreed. "My sense is that Philip's very much focussed on the Harvard experience. To me, that's 24-25 year old youngsters going off very little business experience, very low salaries, and they come out two years later having been moulded and shaped in a particular way … my experience at Cranfield School of Management was that the average age was 32. There's a raft of experience and maturity in that cohort of 200 students … it's a world apart from the world which Philip seems to be suggesting applies to all MBAs."

Indeed, the Harvard MBA student demographic does not match that of the ESCP Europe intake. The majority of our European Executive MBA students come with a decade's worth of business experience behind them, the average age being 35. Most are sponsored by their companies, keen to add to their employees' skill sets rather than shape them from scratch.

The relatively new course on Leadership and Corporate Accountability taught in Harvard's MBA programme also came under fire at our debate. "The leadership and ethics courses [at Harvard] were an obligation at best, a bore at worst," Delves Broughton said. "People didn't take them seriously."

But the argument can of course be made that ethics are not something that can be taught per se. While programmes can guide their students towards taking ethical approaches within their working practices, they are unable to change the innate personalities of those students. In other words, if an executive wishes to behave in an unethical way once their MBA is complete, they will do so regardless of any classes they might have taken. As I said on the night, leadership isn't a course – it's a journey.

I by no means believe that the teaching of MBA programmes is perfect, whether in America or in the rest of the world. What is evident from this debate is that there is a real need for regular reflection on the role of management schools in society at large, in the corporate world and in the world of finance. This means that we, managers of the world's best business schools, need to constantly engage in defining and redefining the knowledge, skills and mindsets that are required of leaders and decision-makers in the current times. While it has served to provoke a fascinating debate and a fair amount of introspection, Delves Broughton's Harvard Business School case study alone is not enough to condemn the programme in its entirety. What we need is constructive change driven from an international perspective.

www.escpeurope.eu/mbadebate