August 18, 1998
The Wall Street Journal

Managing Your Career
by Hal Lancaster

Rex Adams Talks About Middle-Management Changes

By most measures, Rex Adams is a dinosaur. He spent more than 30 years with a single company, Mobil, and most of that in a single function, human resources, eventually rising to executive vice president, administration. He did so without benefit of an MBA, although being a Rhodes scholar is nothing to sniff at.

He stuck around Mobil long enough to complete a "significant" restructuring and personnel cutback before taking over as dean of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in 1996. His long corporate career, his firsthand involvement in the corporate turmoil of the '90s and his current role in training the next generation of managers have given him some insights. I spoke with him about career issues. Here, adapted from our interview, are his responses:

Are people like us, who spend their entire careers with one company, out of fashion?

Commitment still matters a great deal in terms of who gets positions of real responsibility at major corporations. It isn't just talent. That having been said, people have seen a significant amount of corporate downsizing. It has had profound consequences. People come into corporations with a kind of contingent commitment. As long as you're treating me right and I can do better here than anywhere else, I'll stay.

How has the changing corporate environment affected business schools?

In restoring ourselves to full competitiveness, there is a changing concept of how you make decisions, and companies are selling off assets that don't fit for the long haul. That's creating tremendous demand for consulting and investment-banking services, which is fueling the demand for the MBA degree.

While we have been going through this long period of adjustment, large organizations haven't been hiring and that opened a significant gap in the internal development pipeline.

Now, as the investment community says, "We've seen how you've gotten costs in line, how about the top line: growth," that also fuels demand for an infusion of talent.

Within these re-engineered corporations, there is also a tremendous need for middle-management education and "reskilling," which is driving demand for executive-education programs. Previously, a great deal of middle-management activity was to consolidate information, mediate between the levels of the corporate hierarchy and implement business plans.

Much of that has been thrown out the window. Now, information flows quite freely, businesses are managed much less hierarchically and middle managers have responsibility for bottom-line results. That requires a new set of skills.

A lot of my readers are trying to decide whether it's better to get an MBA or to stay on the job and learn through experience. How would you advise them?

My own experience in the corporate world says stay where you are if you like the place and people and feel it has a future, because credentials don't matter, performance matters. But a very, very high percentage (of MBA seekers) are dissatisfied with their career path and future prospects. That's one of the consequences of all this downsizing and the volatility at all these companies.

These are bright people. They have seen what has happened at Mobil and AT&T to Uncle Charlie and Aunt Alice. They're less likely to trust companies to "take care of them." Most of our students are having difficulty determining whether they can learn what they need in their career paths to advance in management.

The MBA offers a very expensive but very efficient way to give you a broad-based education and skill set. That's the most valid reason to interrupt their lives and cough up this large amount of money. Another significant consideration is the extensive array of opportunities for graduating MBA's. We have 360 companies recruiting here for 330 students.

There has been considerable curriculum reform in business schools in recent years.  Are more strides needed to catch up to the needs of this generation of managers?

The top business schools have done a great job of retooling curricula. In terms of executive education, the picture is more mixed.

It's probably more the case in business than in law or medical schools that research tends to follow changes in actual practice, rather than initiate or lead. Traditionally, doctors look to medical schools for changes in technology that affect their practice. I don't know many managers who sit around and wait for business-school research to change the way they manage.

We have established relationships with a number of corporations where our faculty works with the companies over several years to develop customized executive-education programs that deal with the issues those companies are dealing with to modernize and improve their operations.

With the speed at which business changes these days, do business schools need to develop more programs to update their graduates' skills throughout their careers?

Our graduates increasingly demand that. The way to do that is through distance learning. We have a global-management program; half of the program is offered on the Internet. I think we have a lot of insight into how we can build in certificate courses and update courses for our alumni body to serve their needs over the full trajectory of their careers.

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