For quite some time, I had been meaning to write about the seemingly new “admitting failure” phenomenon in development policy. That idea, however, had been pushed back by other, more pressing ideas.
Thankfully, Ed Carr, my favorite online sparring partner, wrote the following last week:
(…) I wonder about the utility of these admitting failure efforts that I see coming from groups like Engineers without Borders. I had the good fortune to catch up with Tom Murphy (or, as the twitterati know him, @viewfromthecave) the other day while he was here in DC, and we started talking about learning from failure. In the course of our conversation, we came around to two key problems. First, really admitting failure requires reframing the public image of development as an inherently do-no-harm effort, where just doing something is better than nothing. Second, given this first problem, when we really start talking about what failure means, even in the most constructive of settings, we will call the entire development enterprise into question.
I don’t have much to say about the two points Ed and Tom brought up — that is really their area, and Ed summarizes their discussion nicely. But I can offer my economist’s take on admitting failure.
The Education of an MBA: That Was Then, This Is Now
Earlier this week, I discussed signalling, both in the context of the recent trend toward “admitting failure” in development policy and in the context of corporate social responsibility in the business world. Wikipedia describes signalling as
The idea that one party (termed the agent) credibly conveys some information about itself to another party (the principal). For example, in Michael Spence’s job-market signalling model, (potential) employees send a signal about their ability level to the employer by acquiring certain education credentials. The informational value of the credential comes from the fact that the employer assumes it is positively correlated with having greater ability.
Not only that — the agent also has to incur a real cost in order to send the signal, otherwise the signal is simply not credible. Moreover, sending the signal need not involve any productive aim other than signalling. The classic example of signalling among economists is getting an MBA, which is costly both in terms of tuition and forgone wages.
So much for the costliness of getting an MBA. How productive is getting an MBA? Michael Ryall, who teaches at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and who guest-blogs over at orgtheory.net, has written a few excellent posts on how the content of an MBA education has changed in 30 years. Here is a good excerpt from his latest post: