The darkness of Japanese MBA school

No one knows the name of an MBA. However, most people don’t know what they actually teach and what the benefits of getting them are. First, I would like to introduce the MBA of Wikipedia.

“The MBA is a higher education course that emerged at the end of the 19th century with the idea of ​​taking a scientific approach to corporate management in the United States and advancing management modernization. The Wharton School was the first business school in 1881. In the 1920s, Harvard Business School developed an educational approach called the Case Method to train the ability to analyze situations and make business decisions, and was adopted by many business schools.

The MBA program was adopted by many business schools. Since the aim was to train practitioners of corporate management rather than researchers, course development was carried out from early on considering the convenience of practitioners. Completion of 2 years is standard, but a short period of 1 year There are various forms of programs, such as courses, night and weekend part-time courses, and correspondence courses, many of which are designed to allow practitioners to learn without interruption.

With the growing value of finding value in entrepreneurship, MBAs have also strengthened the meaning of entrepreneurship training, and MBA programs specializing in entrepreneurship development have also appeared. As a recent trend, emphasis is placed on diversity and internationality. European business schools are gaining in popularity as an option.

”As mentioned above, MBAs have evolved to run businesses and foster entrepreneurs. Here, I would like to talk about some impressive past events (although it is a little off topic). A few years ago, I happened to reopen locally as a former president of a former business partner. The former president went bankrupt ten years ago and has since disappeared. He later ate and told him why he went bankrupt and how he lived after that. The reason for bankruptcy seems to be complicated, so I will omit the explanation here, but after bankruptcy, I spent a spectacular life as if I thought about bankruptcy, divorce, cancer onset, and suicide for a while.

It was said that it was. And finally, he said something like this. “Well, it’s better to have a license for the president, you need to study for company management and entrepreneurship.” think. In the MBA course, you will comprehensively study management strategy, marketing, finance, HRM, etc. in general. In addition, there is a case study, and practical simulation training is conducted, such as “what kind of breakthrough measures would you make for this problem if you were yourself” using actual examples from various companies. The good thing about MBA is that you can learn the basic ideas of management through such training.

I hear and hear a lot of domestic managers who say that management should be done by intuition, but the ownership rate of MBA holders in successful overseas companies is very high, and if you look overseas even once, “MBA” If you don’t have enough, you won’t be able to talk.

” If you are confident that you are a genius manager, you can ignore the MBA, but as a mediocre person, it is best to improve the success rate of business management and entrepreneurship through studying MBA. * There are various other merits to obtaining an MBA, but I will introduce them in the future if I have the opportunity.

There are various reasons why MBA acquisition is not so popular in Japan, but I think the following two are the main reasons.

Even at the business school I attended, there were cases where it seemed unavoidable to have prejudice. It is a type of group that works for a major company and aims to advance in the future by obtaining a degree. I’m good at studying because I should have graduated from a certain university.

This type is not positive for studying on the premise of practical application, as long as you get a degree. I will graduate by acquiring an MBA by making full use of my memorization ability, learning technique, and desk logic.

I don’t know what happened after graduation, but I can guess that these people are probably the “head-up type”, and as a result, they are being criticized by business owners. An MBA is a qualification to study management knowledge, information, and know-how and put it to practical use, and human resources who can master it are “true MBA” holders. The point is the difference between studying and not studying for management. At overseas companies, if you do not have an MBA or higher degree, you may not even be invited to a meeting, let alone promote to an executive.

The difference is clear even in the study awareness survey of high school students in Japan, the United States, China and South Korea. The future outlook for Japanese high school students is that the number of high school students who want to go on to “up to fourth grade university” is overwhelmingly high, and the number of high school students aiming to “become a leader” is in the single digit range in Japan, compared to more than 50% in the United States.

There is a lot of water in China and South Korea. In the first place, Japanese people have low motivation to study, and it can be seen that they have almost no desire to become leaders. Because of this trend, Japanese businessmen rarely study after graduating from university. If you enter a good university and enter a first-class company, you may think that it is safe, but it is already clear that the idea is an illusion in Japan, where lifetime employment is at stake.

It has become. However, they tend to have the ultimate goal of joining the company. If you can join the company, all you have to do is think about how to survive in the company. In Japan, there are few leaders, that is, business people who aim to become managers or executives, and other than those who require special qualifications or have a small number of aspirations, study where the goal of finding a job at a first-class company has been achieved. Will stop.

Western managers know how important it is to hone their management skills through higher education such as MBA, and have put it into practice to this day. In the past, Japanese people had the diligence, honesty, brains, and wisdom and skills to create high-quality products. For example, Sony’s “Walkman”, Nichia’s “Blue Light Emitting Diode”, Toshiba’s “Flash Memory”, and so on, there are many examples where Japanese ideas and technological capabilities have shocked the world.

After the war, the era of losing everything and growing through high economic growth has been managed with wisdom and technology, effort and guts. The managers at that time have a track record of challenging the world with their unique intuition, skills, and ability to act. However, such a period may be nearing the end.

Even if you are not a manager, the number of young people who want to contribute to the company as a leader and learn to improve is small, so the number of people who actually stand at the top is smaller than in other countries. It is natural that only one is born. Elites from ASEAN countries, such as China, South Korea, Singapore, and the Philippines, speak English and engage in business negotiations as a matter of course. I hear that Japan is rather inward-looking and the study abroad rate is lower than before.

Looking at that point alone, we can see how Japanese cannot become an international human resource. The gap between ASEAN countries and Japan is widening year by year, and it can be expected that Japan will eventually become a “developing country in higher education” and that Japan’s corporate management skills will steadily decline. In the future, if you want to run a business that keeps up with the world, Japanese managers themselves must learn higher education such as MBA and acquire the ability to formulate management strategies. .. In that respect, the difference in study motivation between Japanese and overseas executives is clear, and they are already lagging behind.

The MBA acquisition rate of overseas managers is very high, and as with English conversation, MBA exists as a “common language” and “common understanding” among managers, and it is becoming an essential condition for becoming a manager or executive candidate. I have. The MBA is no longer like a driver’s license for business owners. Many people may not be familiar with it, but overseas, the acquisition of a doctor of business administration (DBA) qualification, which is a higher-level concept of MBA, has become more active as a degree for business owners these days.

I am. If the MBA is an ordinary driver’s license, the DBA can be regarded as a second-class driver’s license or a large special driver’s license. Over time, DBAs may become an essential requirement for business owners to reach even higher levels in companies that span the globe.

There is a similar doctor of business administration (Ph.D.) in Japan, but the reality is different even for the same doctor. Ph.D. is an abbreviation for Doctor of Philosophy, and especially regarding management, it is called Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration or Doctor of Philosophy in Management. Philosophy, a PhD derived from philosophy, has a strong meaning as a researcher and is very different from a DBA that targets practical work.

Japanese managers will not only hone their personal skills, but will eventually lag behind other countries if they do not work more aggressively on their degree as a proof.

So far, I’ve talked a lot about the importance of MBA, but I would like to share with you another inconvenient truth about MBA education in Japan. There are many universities and affiliated business schools in Japan where you can get an MBA without having to study abroad.

It seems that there are more than 30 schools at present, but only 5 of them have been officially certified by international certification bodies such as AACSB, which is an international certification and evaluation body for MBA education (220 years). As of July).

The five schools are Keio University Graduate School of Business Administration), Furuya University of Commerce Graduate School, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University Graduate School of Business Administration, International University Graduate School of International Business Administration, and Waseda University Graduate School of Business Administration.

Other universities have not yet been officially certified. Although it is a very famous university in Japan, it is not certified. Even if you call yourself an “MBA holder”, you can say “I got an MBA!” Only after learning when you meet international quality standards. By the way, the name of MBA is not unified in Japan. I will omit the names of the universities, but there were actually 11 names, such as “Master of Business Administration”, “Master of International Management”, and “Master of Engineering Management”, even if I confirmed them.

Moreover, since they have not received international certification, even if they call themselves “MBA”, the content taught is not an MBA that has reached the official standard. I don’t know the true reason why these are called “MBAs”, but the reality is that “self-proclaimed MBAs” are widespread in Japan, and no one has any doubts about this. Third-party certification is so necessary.

You may think that, for example, even if my friend Tanaka opened a “Tanaka Driving School” that is not certified by the government and got a driver’s license pouched there, everyone has the courage to drive on public roads. Is not it. (Laughs) Unlike a driver’s license, the above non-certified MBA school may not be said to be in violation of the law. (Although there is a risk of violating the Basic Consumer Law, etc.) Since we drive the important business of management, schools that have not received international certification cannot argue even if they are called “selfish teaching methods”. You won’t be able to.

There is also such an example. A person who is looking for a job explained his MBA when he took an entrance examination for a foreign-affiliated company. This school was a Japanese MBA school that has not received international certification. The desperate appeal was also empty, and the person was told that he was “not worthy of evaluation” and was struck back by his resume. Several of my friends who completed the same domestic MBA were very disappointed to find out about this fact.

When I got angry at the school, neither the professor nor the secretariat knew this fact. Furthermore, many Japanese Master of Business Administration professors are researchers via Ph.D., and few have experience in business strategy practice. As a result, lessons have a higher academic component and are becoming more and more divergent from business.

It’s not hard to see how you don’t want to trust your MBA when you’re faced with this reality. And it’s understandable that if there is an MBA that can’t actually be used in the company, the distrust of the MBA by the management and executives will turn into conviction.

What I feel most in the field of strategic planning is that the literacy of “business strategy and management” varies greatly from company to company. It is often difficult to unify the languages ​​used as well as the way of thinking about management.

Previously, when I was on a business trip, I was seated next to a Mexican on board the plane. He doesn’t speak English and I can’t speak Spanish either. No conversation was established at all, and I had to give up communication after that.

(Laughs) Not having a common language for management is like this case, and I imagine that corporate managers, executives, and other managers of business planning will definitely be left behind in the current business field.

Isn’t it not difficult? In managing a company, at least books are fine, so study MBA, or if you go to an MBA school, choose a certified school and study to improve your company’s management ability. increase.

(This column is excerpted from “The World’s Easiest” Management Strategy “Planning Course by Hiroshi Ashida”)

The article in the Hiroshi Ashida column is scheduled for the 1st of every month.
Column contents scheduled to be released in December

・ What is project management where miracles occur?