Source: The Times
by Steve Coomber
September 5 2006
Mandarins march on the MBA
“REORGANISING the Civil Service is like drawing a knife through a bowl of marbles,” Sir Humphrey Appleby says in Yes Minister. If that is the case then there are a lot of marbles rattling around in Whitehall as Sir Gus O’Donnell, appointed to the position of Cabinet Secretary in 2005, pushes through the latest package of Civil Service reforms.
Last month, a report by the Institute of Public Policy Research highlighted a lack of professional skills in the Civil Service. It is a situation Sir Gus hopes to rectify through the new Professional Skills for Government (PSG) initiative, aimed at raising standards and promoting a culture of lifelong learning.
Business schools are playing a crucial role in the development of public servants better equipped to implement policy. “As part of the PSG agenda, staff identify their development needs against a framework of skills and agree plans to address them, which can include internal training or an external academic provision, including MBAs,” a Cabinet Office spokesman says.
Cranfield School of Management has a longstanding relationship with the Civil Service, and, in particular, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and its Defence Academy. While Cranfield accepts civil servants on to its general MBA course, it also runs an MBA (Defence) programme, launched this month to replace its Masters of Defence Administration.
“In the first part of the programme, participants from the Armed Forces take the general MBA core with students from the private sector. Only then will they do specialist electives, such as defence economics and procurement in the defence industry,” says John Glen, director of the full-time MBA programme. “Our proposition is that if you come to us from the Cabinet Office, from the MoD, you will need the same type of management competences . . . that people need at the top level of organisations in corporate life.”
Another business school with close connections to government is Warwick, which partners with the National School of Government to run a targeted MPA. The civil servants study nine core modules alongside participants on the MPA programme, and then four electives, two developed in partnership with the National School of Government.
With the drive to professionalise the Civil Service, the number of civil servants taking MBAs is likely to increase. Civil servants such as Ian Gardner, taking time out from the MoD to study for an MBA at Tanaka Business School: “The Civil Service needs to become more professional and delivery orientated, to make sure what we do is cost-effective and efficient. We need to adopt best practice from the private sector where it is relevant to do so,” he says. “An MBA allows you to develop many of the skills you need to do that.”
David Richards, head of public sector practice at Whitehead Mann
“In the Civil Service there is a growing focus on certain skills. For example, the senior Civil Service is beginning to recognise that there is a people leadership component to what it does: helping people to understand why they are there, helping them to develop the skills that they need to achieve personal growth and to increase the organisation’s capabilities.
These so-called softer skills — how to inspire, motivate, and communicate, as well as subjects like performance assessment — are increasingly important to the Civil Service and are covered in the leadership component of most good MBAs.
There is also a generic set of management tools that the Civil Service, until now, has not valued particularly. If you head a multifunctional team in a big organisation, how do you manage remotely through other people, how do you set objectives or choose key performance indicators, how do you implement a balanced scorecard to weight the various priorities? These things are bread and butter in the MBA syllabus.
So when I bring in an external candidate, I look for the intellectual strength and flexibility to be able to cope with the challenges the public sector presents, as well as the interpersonal skills that allow people to influence. In other words, the skills you get through an MBA, particularly around business cases, programme management, deriving strategy and taking strategy through to implementation.”
