MGL..said '
' said 'How many of the europeans who are Chief Executives and Finance Directors of FTSE 100 companies gained their positions by working in a "small one man shop or hotdog stand" and how many of them are sending their children to work in a "small one man shop or hotdog stand" to prepare them to run multi-billion pound businesses?

Interesting question..Quite a few actually if the Harvard Business Review Special Edition and other things I have read are true..


Please tell us which ones.

MGL..Don't want to be rude but if you actually knew your subject with any real mastery you would know what I am talking about and would know the literature...As I mentioned a few examples above..but apparently you don't.

Here is the issue I mentioned. In fact I actually confused the issues of the Harvard Business Review in question by merging several special editions into one. The Issue I actually mentioned was the August 2003 entitled Leadership in a Changing World. But there are three over special editions and I shouldn't have to tell you the internet search king that it would take all our ten seconds to search the Harvard Business Review resources to find the debates about the relevance of an MBA compared to other forms of hands on training and examples of that. So you are just a lazy man with a lazy man argument.


But you ask me to name you one company and this edition I am citing is not on the education and training of corporate leadership, you will find that in other editions, where MBAs are being slagged off by those who actually run those programmes as well as leading business leaders. But here is what Stephen Green, CEO of the HSBC banking group one of the world leaders has to say about the issue:

'Most of our recruits are recent university graduates. We tend not to go out of our way for to look for the MBAs or people in their thirties. In fact, I think it's a mistake for companies to have too much of their top talent join their organizations in mid career. Our recruitment process is sophisticated involving a complex process of tests, interviews and exercises. We don't look so much at what they or where people have studied but rather their drive, initiative, cultural sensitivity and readiness to see the world as their oyster. Whether they have studied classics, economics, history or languages is irrelevant'.

By the way HSBC is famous in the global executive world for what they call their international officers and why I invest my hard earned in them...