One of the few benefits of the MBA that I will admit without too much coercion: it exposed me to a lot of people from different backgrounds. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that, outside the MBA, the major failing of the current form of university education is its narrow focus on a single field or discipline.
Think about it: the main purpose of university is to bring in smart people, separate them into silos, and then equip them with an exclusive vocabulary known only to peers in their own discipline. Once their degree ends, they’re shipped off into a heterogeneous world where no one but their immediate peers speaks their language. And we wonder why it’s so hard to get anything done, be it in the corporate world or the public sector.
By and large, we never actually teach people how to work together. The majority of their education is spent being trained to only be responsible for their own work, their own success. Team projects in the world of higher education are hardly representative either – after all, you’re all in the same degree program!
What I wonder is why we don’t see universities creating courses that bridge disciplines? For example, why not have a course that brings together engineers and business students? You could have the business students write a product spec based on market research, have the engineers design and build it, and then have both present the project from a technical and business standpoint?
Maybe if we had these kinds of project courses, companies wouldn’t spend as much time learning and re-learning as an organization how to span the individual specialties. It seems to me like so much of my early career has been spent trying to figure out why every company always seems to encounter similar problems. Then again, maybe I’m completely off base with this approach. It could just be that people are non-linear, and no amount of formal education will provide a solution to the problem.