I remember, when I was an undergraduate student, reading job advertisements where companies such as IBM were deliberately seeking out and recruiting people with Ph.D’s in subjects such as philosophy or pure mathematics.
IBM weren’t, mind you, hiring in these areas because they thought these philosophy or pure mathematics skills would be directly useful. They were deliberately hiring for a different skillset – specifically good analytical skills.
While (as far as I’m aware) this phase of IBMs recruitment strategy did not last, the principle has been resurgent in a different form – as part of the drive for success in innovation. For example, a 1997 Harvard Business Review article by Leonard and Straus argued that successful innovation requires a diversity of thinking styles in a ‘creative abrasion’:
The manager successful at fostering innovation figures out how to get different approaches to grate against one another in a productive process we call creative abrasion. Such a manager understands that different people have different thinking styles: analytical or intuitive, conceptual or experiential, social or independent, logical or values driven. She deliberately designs a full spectrum of approaches and perspectives into her organization—whether that organization is a team, a work group, or an entire company—and she understands that cognitively diverse people must respect the thinking styles of others. She sets ground rules for working together to discipline the creative process.
That is: people who think differently are valuable as part of a creative team. If you have a team of all corporate accountants or a team of all designers, each team will work well by itself – but it will have a single point of view. If you mix the two teams together however, you have the possibility of creative sparks.
Bearing the above in mind, I was grateful to get a comment from Julie Fleischer of the Innovation Ecosystem in relation to my Different Box of Tools post. What the Different Box of Tools discussion brought to mind for Julie was an observation that (as a generalisation) MBA schools tend to produce graduates with similar skills, training and mindset – “MBAs from the same universities, being taught the same curriculum, feeding into the same training programs.”
However, Design Schools are now turning out Design School graduates, who are being taught to think about business problems in a different way – from a design perspective. This is well illustrated by a design image from the Logic + Emotion blog:
MBAs will always be useful and have a role in business. And, to be fair to MBA teachers and students, there is indeed a certain level of diversity of thought within the MBA curriculum across different institutions in different countries. But nevertheless, it has to be valuable to have a different skillset to throw into the mix.
But why stop there? Perhaps it is also valuable to hire people with Ph.Ds in English Literature or Pure Mathematics or Social Anthropology – not necessarily because you will need to use their specific skills, but because your organisation will gain from adding a different way of thinking to the mix.