MBAs Aim to Reinvent Management

As part of a contest, MBA students were asked to suggest game-changing management ideas. The winners might just change the way companies operate

By Francesca Di Meglio

Free pizza has a way of motivating people. Armed with this knowledge, technology companies have supersized brainstorming sessions by creating "hackathons," intense events in which employees are divided into teams to focus on generating ideas and turning them quickly into prototypes, all while chowing down on pizza. The goal: to unearth the creativity lying dormant in employees, who might have felt stifled in traditional companies.

What if non-tech companies embraced the practice of hackathons? First-year MBA students at Harvard Business School (Harvard Full-Time MBA Profile), Alka Tandon and David Roth laid out a plan for doing just that, and it won them first place in the HCL MBA M-Prize, a new competition sponsored by the Indian tech company HCL and the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), an online open innovation project aimed at reinventing management. HCL will give Tandon and Roth $50,000 to test their winning idea with its employees.

In "Late Night Pizza: Extending Hackathons Beyond Technology," Tandon and Roth explain their idea to have teams of employees dedicate an entire day to focusing on turning ideas into proposals. The purpose is to create actionable strategies that will actually come to fruition, according to their report, which also includes a step-by-step guide on how to organize a hackathon, plus information on how to do everything from getting senior management on board to assigning teams.

"What's effective about this plan is that employees will often have ideas, but it's difficult for organizations to move from ideas to proposals," says Roth. "Once an organization has a proposal, it can act on it."

Need for Reinvention

Getting companies to act and move into a new era is the exact intent of MIX and this contest, says Gary Hamel, visiting professor at London Business School (London Full-Time MBA Profile) and director of MIX. Using such words as "old" and "musty" to describe current management practices, Hamel says management is begging for reinvention.

"Management in most companies is rooted 100 years ago in the Industrial Revolution," he adds. "It was meant to turn human beings into semi-programmable robots."

Times are changing, and a new breed of manager needs to be born, says Hamel. Creating this contest was a way to get young people to think about the "legacy of management they're inheriting," he says.

"We wanted to get the perspective of a new generation of leaders," Hamel says. "We wanted to give students a chance to share their ideas."

Specifically, Hamel and the other judges chose the winners from among 114 entries from top business schools based on whether the plan addressed a deep need in organizations, was clever, clear, and specific, helped improve the lives of those in the organization, and could be executed. Hamel says he hopes to make the contest an annual event and anticipates hosting other competitions as well.

Getting Everybody in One Room

Meantime, the winning team and the runners-up still have to prove the viability of their ideas. Among practical concerns about the first-place plan, writes Peter Cappelli, professor of management at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School (Wharton Full-Time MBA Profile), in an e-mail, is that getting all the relevant players in one room for a hackathon is never easy, given travel costs and scheduling concerns, and might not always be worth it.