Marketing Profs

Most businesses just don't get it. And that goes for their marketing, too.

We all know that businesses recruit heavily from B-schools to groom future leaders for their executive suites, but it seems there's an inherent problem with that. B-schools seem to be more interested in teaching their students the compartmentalized aspects of running a business than they are in imbuing them with real life experience.

How does that help future managers and executives to see "the big picture"? How does it mold leaders? Even worse: personnel management courses are given short shrift in most B-schools, so most MBAs have been graduating without much-needed people skills for quite a while now.

Jack Welch was asked by a B-school professor what he should be doing to prepare students "for the global business environment." In his Business Week column a few months ago, Welch gave his customary straight-from-the-hip response:

We'd make the case that the nitty-gritty of managing people should rank higher in the educational hierarchy.... [W]e've visited 35 B-schools around the world and have been repeatedly surprised by how little classroom attention is paid to hiring, motivating, team-building, and firing. Instead, B-schools seem far more interested in teaching brainiac concepts—disruptive technologies, complexity modeling... We'd say that's backward. Strategy and finance matter, of course, but without the right people running them on the ground, they're nothing but theories.... We hope you have the clout to make sure people management is front and center at your university. If you do, you'll launch your students' careers with a real head start.

Love him or hate him, Jack Welch makes a very good point. Part of the culprit here has to be the incredible emphasis that business places on delivering for its shareholders. Hence, the huge attention paid to innovation, new product launches, sales goals, quarterly financial statements, and competitive strategies. Though nobody can deny the importance of running a profitable company (read: accountability to shareholders), what about companies' accountability to employees and customers?

How can management—from CEOs, CMOs and the rest of the alphabet soup of corporate executives—run successful companies if they lack people skills?

Establishing connections, caring about people, and training and mentoring them can only strengthen the whole company. These qualities go right to the heart of leadership. Business executives, especially human resource people, are fond of saying "our people are the key to our success," yet it seems that very few companies truly live this credo. If they did value their human capital, wouldn't there be less turnover and much more productivity and connectedness in Corporate America?

Where is the leadership?

Marketing experts point out that a strong corporate brand identity must be embraced internally by every employee—starting at the top—before it can be successfully projected to the world at large, and to the company's core customer. How can that happen unless management believes in the company's raison d'etre and leads by example?