More Than Implementers: Why Go Beyond an MBA

On October 18, the New York Times published an op-ed with a provocative headline: “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.” Its author, Christopher Marquis, writes from experience. He is a professor at Cambridge Judge Business School and has spent more than twenty years teaching at Harvard, Cornell, and Cambridge.

His point of departure is a simple question: “What, exactly, is an M.B.A. for?” It is by no means an insignificant question. In the United States, nearly one in five undergraduates majors in business, and the MBA remains the nation's most popular graduate degree.

By way of comparison, in Spain the figures vary only in their exact proportion, but Business Administration and Management is likewise the country’s most popular undergraduate program. It accounts for just over 11% of the entire university student population in Spain, with more than 133,000 enrolled students. MBA programs are also the most sought-after among domestic graduate degrees.

The argument, therefore, holds just as true for Spain as it does for the United States. Beyond the statistics, the profiles of students entering business school are strikingly similar in both countries: engineers eager to bring clean energy to market, physicians determined to reform the healthcare system, or nonprofit leaders who have watched worthy causes falter for lack of management acumen.

There are also managers who need a credential to climb the invisible corporate ladder where they are “building a career,” of course. Yet they are in the minority, and they tend to cloak that ambition in loftier language. By and large, people enroll in an MBA program for noble reasons. Marquis speaks of “people who enter wanting to do something that matters.” Yet within a single semester, they see those ambitions steered toward a far more pedestrian question: who will secure the internship at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs.

Their life and professional purpose is thus thwarted by the very institution to which it was entrusted. An MBA, Marquis writes, often ends up “undermining the very ambitions that brought them there.”

At TheNomba, we read his article with a mix of recognition and relief. Recognition, because it describes something we encounter often: brilliant, well-educated individuals who, at some point, feel that their work has lost its compass. Relief, because it validates what has been clear to us at TheNomba from the outset: the challenge is not so much—or not merely—learning how to manage. It is pausing to ask why.

Marquis is not the first to raise this question, as he himself notes in his piece. He cites the sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who a century ago was already reproaching commerce-focused university schools for their lack of regard for a “sense of service to the common good.”

“The challenge is not so much, or not merely, learning how to manage. It is pausing to ask why.”

The most influential critique of this neglect by design came years ago, in fact, from within the discipline itself. Two decades back, Henry Mintzberg, one of management’s preeminent thinkers, published Managers Not MBAs. His thesis was that the conventional MBA classroom overvalues the science of management while neglecting its art and craft. Mintzberg was not proposing to shut anything down. But he did argue that those who already manage—those already engaged in entrepreneurial, cultural, or social endeavors—learn best by reflecting on their own experience. Like Marquis, Mintzberg viewed education as a companion to professional life: grounded in it, yet leading it toward more profound questions. Why do I do what I do? How? And for whom?

More recently, the Italian scholar Nuccio Ordine championed the same idea in different words. His book The Usefulness of the Useless, published in 2013, resonated across the globe. In it, Ordine maintains that in a society that values only what yields profit, we forget that seemingly useless knowledge is fundamental to the cultivation of the human being. And that includes one's professional life. One's vocation.

Thus, the final picture reads almost like a fable: a sociologist, a management professor, a humanist, and a business school scholar converge, across a century of distance, on the very same insight: educating solely for efficiency diminishes both individuals and the organizations they lead.

Ever since the 1920s, when Harvard borrowed it from its law and medical faculties, the case study method has been the hallmark of business education. Anyone who has stepped inside an MBA or executive education classroom is familiar with the premise: a ten- to twenty-page text lays out a business dilemma that culminates in a decision, and the room debates what the executive ought to do. Marquis concedes that it works reasonably well. The discussions are rigorous and effective. The decisions tend to hold up within the theoretical framework.

“Educating solely for efficiency diminishes both individuals and the organizations they lead.”

Yet he also points out what this methodology leaves out. By asking students to step into the chief executive’s shoes, the case method “narrows their imagination to the decision facing a single top manager.” In medicine or law, by contrast, case studies confront students with the messiness of reality, and the aim is entirely different: “fostering a disciplined skepticism: asking what’s missing, questioning assumptions.”

Marquis encapsulates this void inherent to MBAs in two questions that the business classroom rarely asks: “Who made this person the rightful protagonist? What knowledge is missing?”

It would be difficult to find a finer definition of what the humanities accomplish. History teaches us to distrust the narrative of the victors. Philosophy, to examine our assumptions. Literature, to step into the shoes of those who have no voice in the story. None of this replaces the ability to read a balance sheet. But whoever knows how to ask what is missing from the report before them makes better decisions than one who merely knows how to decide.

Furthermore, this debate carries a contemporary dimension today that Veblen or Mintzberg could not have foreseen, and which Marquis highlights: “in the age of A.I., the kind of thinking cultivated by the arts and humanities is increasingly urgent.” What is at stake, he argues, is our ability to cultivate “historical memory, moral judgment, and democratic imagination.”

“Whoever knows how to ask what is missing from the report before them makes better decisions than one who merely knows how to decide.”

An increasing number of voices in the business world share this view. Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, asserted in February that studying the humanities “is going to be more important than ever.”

Her rationale is straightforward: the more capable machines become at technical tasks, the more valuable uniquely non-automatable qualities become. Along the same lines, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has noted that emotional intelligence and empathy grow in importance as AI assumes analytical workloads.

This perspective is not unanimous. Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, stated at Davos this past January that AI “will kill humanities jobs.” Curiously enough, Karp holds a doctorate in philosophy. Perhaps his case illustrates the distinction that truly matters: humanities jobs are one thing; a humanistic education for those working in any sector is another entirely. The former may well be in jeopardy; the latter holds more promise than ever.

That is why at TheNomba we say we do not train executors—AI is already here for that. We cultivate individuals capable of creating. Of judging. And of seeing beyond the next decision.

At Cambridge, Marquis recently introduced a required course on sustainability for future bankers, consultants, and tech executives. Many arrived skeptical. Yet coaxing them out of their bubbles “sparked the kind of debate that is so often missing in education today.”

“We do not train executors—AI is already here for that.”

Marquis found in a single course what we have set out to build over the span of an entire year. That is the raison d'être of TheNomba: a school of humanities applied to life, conceived for those whose careers lie outside the humanities. Executives, entrepreneurs, lawyers, engineers, physicians. People who do not wish to abandon their careers, but rather to pursue them in a different light.

The name says it all: No MBA. Not because we oppose the MBA, but because we offer what an MBA cannot provide. An MBA teaches how to organize and manage. We seek to help you see beyond organization and management: to understand who you are, where you come from, what ideas shape the world, and for whom you work.

For this reason, the curriculum is conceived as an itinerary. As a journey. Before addressing leadership, participants spend time with anthropology, philosophy, history, science, and the arts. For no one can effectively lead what they do not understand, beginning with oneself. And each of these domains is paired with a virtue, from order to prudence, from magnanimity to austerity, because sound judgment is not learned merely through reading: it is practiced.

What most closely mirrors Marquis’s course at Cambridge at TheNomba, however, is not found within the syllabus itself, but in what unfolds around it: the dialogue among individuals who do not think alike. Faculty with vastly different perspectives, students of all ages and walks of life who debate what they have read and measure it against their own work.

“No one can effectively lead what they do not understand, beginning with oneself.”

That debate—the very one Marquis misses in business schools—constitutes, for us, half of the learning experience.

Marquis writes that many of his students arrive at business school eager to tackle the crises our system has wrought. What they lack is “an institution worthy of their best impulses.”

We have received this as a mandate. Companies, cities, and societies do not need fewer individuals trained in management. They need those individuals to be something more than mere executors. They need them to know how to pause. To read the context. To remember, to imagine, to serve others. That is why Marquis’s question, “What, exactly, is an M.B.A. for?”, leads us to an antecedent one—the question that opens our program: why do I do what I do? And, beneath it, the question that sustains the whole enterprise: who am I? And for whom am I?

Ultimately, the essence of Nomba fits entirely within Ordine’s manifesto: that which may seem useless... is often what we need most.