Thursday, May 24, 2007

Not enough MBAs

Yeah right.

This is what's known as talking your book:

Canada is experiencing a serious gap in management talent that is a major contributing factor in its lagging prosperity compared with the United States, says a new study co-written by one of the country's leading business school deans.

The study, produced by Ontario's Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity and co-written by University of Toronto management dean Roger Martin, says Canada is placing undue emphasis on science and technology talent, while neglecting management skills that are in short supply.

[...]

One shortfall is the lack of MBAs at the top of major Canadian companies, the report says. Figures for 2004 show that 37 per cent of CEOs for the 100 largest U.S. companies had MBAs, compared with 24 per cent of CEOs for the 100 largest Canadian companies.

To that, all I can ask is what if Bill Gates got an MBA instead of starting Microsoft?