A friend of mine recently brought my attention to an article published in Harvard Business Review by Richard Barker titled “The Big Idea – No Management is not a Profession”. Anger and intrigue led me to spend a few minutes reading the article.

The second paragraph of the article reads as follows

“An occupation earns the right to be a profession only when some ideals, such as being an impartial counsel, doing no harm, or serving the greater good, are infused into the conduct of the people in that occupation. In like vein, a school becomes a professional school only when it infuses those ideals into its graduates”

I suppose based on the above statement all Harvard Business graduates are just idiots for shelling out close to $150K over the course of two years to earn a degree in management to subsequently make a profession and career out of it. Case in point Goldman Sachs – almost everyone in the upper echelons of management is a Harvard Business graduate. While we agree that almost all of these folks were douche bags (not everyone from Harvard Business School ends up being a douche bag), was their job over the past few years any less a profession that anyone else’s? Certainly not!

While I continued to get irked by the statements strewn all across this article I came across this little gem further down

“The real issue is whether what the schools do teach qualifies students to mange, in the way that an MD qualifies someone to practice medicine. I will argue that the answer is no, and that therefore management cannot become a profession.”

I beg to differ. If this MD degree somehow qualifies this person to practice medicine, why then do we have wide spread incidents of medical negligence, healthcare fraud and other such incidents that have scarred the US Healthcare Industry? Furthermore, I haven’t heard of the human anatomy being different from country to country, yet this someone who is qualified is not allowed to practice elsewhere without a degree conferred by the particular country in question. Why is that?

There is no question that no matter what industry you work in, there needs to be a greater insistence nay demand for ethics and values but the lack thereof should not be the cause for belittling ones livelihood.

I read no further!