What is the mba for today?

14 Oct

  
    <a href="https://rss.com/podcasts/work-is-weird-now/3231968/">E68: What Is the MBA For Today? With Dr Richard Lo | RSS.com</a>

With Dr Richard Longman, Head of The Open University Business School

Everyone knows someone with an MBA, and almost nobody can tell you what it's for. So we asked the man who runs the UK's largest business school by enrolment, who did the qualification himself at the lowest point of his working life, and who opens the conversation by telling us what it isn't for.

Not mastery, judgment

Richard's answer to our core question arrives in the first minute. The MBA, he says, "is not here to teach people how to master a changing world. It is here to help them act responsibly in a world that cannot be mastered." The letters themselves, Master of Business Administration, carry a promise that anyone who has worked inside an organisation knows to be false: gather the information, apply the framework, control the outcome. People respond unpredictably, technologies fail, governments change. What a good MBA builds instead is judgment in conditions of uncertainty, curiosity, critical thinking and the ability to learn with other people.

Who it's for (and who it isn't)

The head of a business school tells us that "not everyone should do an MBA". Historically the people who benefited were already wealthy, mobile and confident enough to step away from work for a year. Richard's version is for people who are genuinely curious, who notice things in the places they work and the communities they live in, who are a little dissatisfied and want to make a difference but don't yet have the tools. He is also, by his own admission, "not typically a fan of management or of managers", and doesn't think the world's problems are solved by producing more of them.

An MBA rebuilt for messy reality

The Open University is replacing its MBA with an entirely new qualification, live in under six months. The old model chunked learning by academic field: a marketing module, a strategy module, an HR module. That isn't how anyone experiences a career. Someone working in marketing needs to understand the financial implications of their project now, not in term six. The new course brings those subjects together, with the trade-offs and compromises of a real workplace built in. Seven in ten OU learners are already in full-time work, so the course is designed, in Richard's phrase, for people who "study at a distance, not distant from learning".

The questions AI can't ask

Alice asks the obvious question: if AI can produce the analysis and the financial model, what is the qualification certifying? Richard's answer is the best stretch of the episode. If the MBA only ever trained people to retrieve information, reproduce frameworks and analyse the same predictable cases, AI would be a real challenge to its value. But that was never what workplaces needed. What's left is judgment, responsibility, collaborating across difference, and spotting the weak signals that precede organisational failure. Above all: "If we leave the question asking to the technology, it will ask questions of the past, not questions of the future."

A pivot nobody planned

Richard trained as a musician and worked as a conductor and pianist until, at thirty, a brain tumour and a stroke cost him half his hearing and some of his mobility. Asking himself what he was good at (curiosity, creativity, teams, high-performing individuals), he did the OU MBA with a plan to take those skills into boardrooms. He then decided "working with people like that would be the worst thing I could do", stayed in academia, did a PhD, and now leads the school that taught him. He uses the story, he says, shamelessly.

The bottom rung

Dan reads the headline figures from the OU's Business Barometer 2026: 57% of UK employers report a skills shortage, 42% expect it to worsen, 51% say AI is already changing how they hire, and 19% cut early-career recruitment in the last year, with 42% of those blaming AI for taking on entry-level tasks. Dan's own career began on a placement year, and the person who hired her then hired her again five years later for her first management job. "Now there is no bottom rung on the career ladder." Richard's response: parts of the country are higher-education cold spots, and some organisations "appear to have forgotten how to recognise and develop the talents of the people that are already there".

Is it worth it?

Asked whether someone unsure should do an MBA, Richard reminds us he's already said not everyone should: "I think that's why I never made it as a salesman." Then the honest version: if you're curious about how business knowledge is structured, want to learn from other people, and would use the confidence to change something or build a network or pivot again, it's worth considering, self-funded or sponsored by an employer who wants to keep you.

About Richard Longman

Dr Richard Longman is Head of The Open University Business School, the UK's largest business school by enrolment, with alumni in more than 120 countries and more FTSE 100 CEOs educated to MBA level than any other school. A former conductor and pianist, he joined the OU in 2023 after four years at UWE Bristol and chairs the Critical Management Studies Division of the Academy of Management. His research explores how organisations are shaped by sound and who gets heard at work.