How to manage without the MBA
By Nick Easen for CNN
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(CNN) -- Many in business still believe that if you want to make it to the top, an MBA is just the ticket -- a jumpstart to a rich and rewarding career.
With fewer jobs for life, demand for the Master of Business Administration has never been greater, with the offer of more marketable skills and greater career choice.
But not everyone thinks the MBA is all that helpful for those who want to be managers.
Professor Henry Mintzberg of McGill University, Montreal, Canada, is firmly in this camp -- he thinks an MBA can give you a distorted impression of management.
"You can enhance the characteristics or qualities of people who are managers, but you cannot create managers in the classroom," he told CNN.
This is a theme he takes up in his book "Managers not MBAs," to be published later this year. However, he does believe that the specialized course does have something to offer.
"(The MBA) can teach all sorts of things that improve the practice of management with people who are managers," explains Mintzberg.
"What you cannot do is teach management to somebody who is not a manager, the way you cannot teach surgery to somebody who is not a surgeon."
The author of 10 books including "The Nature of Managerial Work" has seen his views hotly contested by some MBA graduates, who view the experience as highly beneficial.
"The experience of working in a classroom with people of various ethnicities developed my multicultural business skills," says Enrique Escobar Gattás from Santiago, Chile, who did his MBA in California.
"This helped me establish successful alliances with U.S. manufacturers."
And with more positive reviews, demand for MBA places at European business schools has also reached an all-time high.
Last year, the IESE, an international business school with campuses in Barcelona and Madrid, reported a massive 60 percent increase in applications, according to the European Voice newspaper.
It helps that "there are a lot of MBAs out there who are just hiring a lot of other MBAs," explains Mintzberg.
So if the academic and researcher is not entirely positive towards the MBA, what does he actually believe in? Well it is another acronym -- the IMPM.
For the past seven years he has been fine-tuning the International Masters Program in Practicing Management, or "alternative MBA."
Mintzberg and Jonathan Gosing, of Lancaster University, UK, founded the program back in 1996. It offers novel ways to help managers learn from their own experiences.
"I have my own prejudices about what effective managers do," says Mintzberg.
"I think (good managers) are humble, open and good listeners, something we are getting completely away from these days -- I think this is destroying management."
The Canadian management thinker became famous in the early 1970s with his study "The Nature of Managerial Work."
He found that managers spend about 15 minutes per task without interruption. When repeated in the 1990s the time had almost halved.
-- CNN's Andrew Carey contributed to this report
