This is a special Lesson contributed by Günther Ogger (author of best-selling books on business management) who settles accounts with ‘The Firm’ by reference to the newly published When McKinsey Comes to Town.

MBAs do not promote business leadership, innovation or entrepreneurship. The author rejects the claims of academics that MBAs are key to business success. In fact, MBA schooling encourages management malpractice. This thinkpiece describes the causes and some cures.

For over thirty years now, business management teaching – while claiming to be professional and scientific – has simply been a follower of fashions and trends. It is surprizing how many managers, organizations and well-established corporations have been fooled. This essay gives a first-hand account of the guru game: it exposes the guilty gurus, their disciples, the willing victims, and most important – offers essential, unique and valuable lessons for today`s executive managers.

Parasitic embrace and wealth extraction by consultants, investment bankers, auditors and other 'helpers'. Organic growth is sustainable and healthy, whereas tumor growth is parasitic. This can progress in different ways: by using processes and systems purposely made increasingly complex, by using constantly changing concepts, by willfuly destroying that of proven worth. One kind of tumor growth is parabusiness: what this includes, what business models are used, and how the entire parabusiness branch can be trimmed to a healthy size, are dealt with in this Thinkpiece. Further essays on the topic will follow.

Abuse of trust is always shameful, wherever and whenever it happens. But there are different degrees of abuse. It is especially scandalous when leaders of organizations are involved: trust abused by those claiming to be custodians for their clients. Take a look at this hidden, unbelievable story.

Unlike hardly any other discipline, business studies have come to reflect the proliferation, leveling down, and regimentation of the education system. To this negative list can be added Americanization, loss of reality, over-emphasis on the nominal economy, and 'value-free' objectivity. How this came about and why business studies/management theory ignores the crisis affecting the real world of business is explained. However, still more important, practical proposals are made for reforming the discipline. Plenty of material for a short Thinkpiece.