I don’t think that understanding accounting principles nor the ability to read accounting statements is the problem.

We don’t have a financial crisis; we have a crisis of character.

Very interesting post! I think one of the problems -- that I see -- with what you're proposing is simply that "business" takes in so many elements. You mention accounting (one of my only 'c's in college, I confess). But how much accounting do business majors actually get? My sister is an accountant and she's convinced the next big scandal is going to be in pensions -- she said the execs all trust the accountants and have no clue as to what's really going on. (This nicely backs up your point, obviously.)

I do think more education is needed, but I also think that people who are successful in business simply have, frequently anyway, that hard-to-define factor, an "it" factor, if you will. Steve Jobs has it, Walt Disney had it. Bill Gates has the business acumen, but he lacks Jobs' genius (in my opinion, anyway). I'm just reading a great book on women who have been successful in business, Power of Women United. They found their own secrets and ways to success and offer their lives as inspiration to others. And through their stories -- their insights as to how they became successful -- they offer tools to help other women do the same. It's simply more than accounting and balance sheets ...

Hi Dr. Ariely,

I just finished reading your blog post on the value of business education, and one statement of yours stuck out in particular. You stated that, in many cases, business executives do not know how to run their own experiments and/or how to analyze the data once experiments are run. As a result of this statement, you left me wondering whether or not you've ever heard of MASP programs (Masters in Applied Social Psychology). The curriculum is supposedly similar to an MBA, leading some of the professors at the university that I attend to state that the MASP program is, in essence, a specialized MBA program of sorts.

The program (at least at the university I attend) requires an undergraduate Psychology honors degree, and takes two years to complete (3 semesters per year). Of those 6 total semesters, 2 are work terms in an area of the student's choice (normally government, health, education, or business).

What the program does offer, is a business oriented scientific method, as well as multiple courses on advanced statistical procedures, something that apparently, most MBA programs do not.

I have not yet enrolled in the program (as I am doing my fourth and final year of my undergraduate honors degree at this time), so I do not know many specific details on the program.

If you're interested, feel free to email me at the address provided (I hope you can access those) and I would be happy to provide you with a link to the site explaining the university's MASP program.

Thank you kindly for your time.

Business management now relies on a lot of specialties which must be taught, and upon the generalist's knowledge of how to manage, monitor, and control the activities of specialists whose activities other managers, necessarily, do not fully understand.

If the MBA programs can be faulted for anything, in my opinion, it is that they don't spend enough time on practical approaches to monitoring and control and spend too much time on subjects that professors are comfortable teaching, like strategy.