Sarah Stuart: Better than 'management pornography'

The Auckland University Business School - Herald file pic

"The essence of the MBA is that nobody knows the answer," our Finnish and fairly intimidating Professor Kaj Storbacka began this semester proclaiming. "It's just a bunch of guys who have an opinion."

He's right about the guys - 16 months into my two-year MBA programme, I have yet to encounter a female lecturer. Of our small class of 22 second-year MBA students, four are women. I'm the sole mum in a sea of dads.

And if Kaj doesn't know the answer to those Master of Business Administration questions, then we sure as hell don't. So what are we paying for?

This first Saturday of term (six hours of lecture and workshops; filled rolls, cake and fruit supplied) was an introduction to the grandly named "Contemporary Topics in Management" course run by Kaj, a consultant and well-published academic who specializes in knowing, analyzing and managing customers. Well, as much as anyone currently knows and understands customers.

Digital disruption has caused chaos in so many industries - retail, publishing, music, media and travel to name just a few. Business practices that were once considered gospel (Porter's Five Forces anyone?) are now being thrown to the pits of fiery hell. The reason? No one has any knowledge advantage any more.

Information about everything is everywhere. Customers are in the driving seat. Every product is good enough. How we buy has changed. What we want is changing. The real growth in business is in work between machines, computer to computer, including transactions.

There are no answers, says Kaj, but there are lots of theories about how to adapt. It's these that we're here not to learn, but to critique.

"Make up your mind about what you think," says Kaj. "What is interesting to you? Be critical. You need to find out what is crap - and what do you think is good? " His course has nothing to do with truth. It is just perspectives. But he promises it will be much better than the endless shelves of "Management Pornography" books - the ones which get you excited but that's about it. An idea on page one, repeated in the final chapter, with little of real substance in between.

So in this course we're directed towards many thrilling new ideas and theories, from published research, academic journals, the august pages of the Harvard Business Review and other annals. Before each lecture we submit Key Learning Notes on each - what we understood from the article, what we think about it and how it might be applied in our own work. These are submitted through the terrifying Turnitin website, where plagiarism is sniffed from a thousand paces and any work loaded even a minute late is rejected. Marks are returned within three days.

So this week I loved Niraj Dawar's thinking on "When Marketing is Strategy": today it is not about selling better stuff, but about selling stuff better. Most gripping example? How Coca Cola can convince its customers to pay $4.50 for a cold Coke at the right place on a hot day, when they can buy them for less than a third of the price at any supermarket, anytime.

As for the new business models we'll explore over the next 10 weeks, the anything as a service model which switches Opex for Capex works for me. Think Rolls Royce installing airplane engines for free, then charging for power by the hour.

In class, it was all about real customer orientation - how to find out what job the customer really wants done, and why the most satisfied customer is not the most profitable. That last statement seems to be statistics, not opinion. But I wouldn't count on it, just yet.