Hello from Stephen Crittenden, welcome to Background Briefing on ABC Radio National.

This week, we're taking a look at the business culture behind the financial meltdown and the kind of business education which shapes that culture.

This is a story that goes a lot further back than Lehman Brothers, or Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, to the glory days when America's leading manufacturing companies were the envy of the world.

It's the story of how this great corporate heritage was squandered, and what this all has to do with the rise of a comparatively new social figure: the professional manager.

There's no doubt that American business has relied heavily on the Mas-ters of Business Administration as a credential. Some say too heavily: 100,000 new MBAs pour out of American business schools each year, and more than 40% of them go into the financial services sector.

But now they're being called the Mas-ters of Disaster. As you'll hear in this program, some of the leading critics of the MBA culture are actually business school professors who have been raising the alarm for some time.

The most prominent among them is Henry Mintzberg, Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal. He says there is no question that business schools like Harvard, Wharton, Stanford and MIT deserve a large part of the blame for creating and sustaining the business culture that caused the meltdown, because they have been promoting an utterly dysfunctional form of management practice for decades.

Henry Mintzberg: Look, my view is you cannot create a manager in a classroom, let alone a leader. You simply can't. Management is not a science, it's not a profession, it's a practice; you learn it by doing it. To claim that you're training people who are not managers to be managers, is a sham, pure and simple, it's a sham. You can't do it. You give completely the wrong impression and you send them out with an enormous amount of hubris which is, 'I can manage anything, even though I've never managed anything'.

Stephen Crittenden: In 1986, when Russell Ackoff, a pioneer of management education, retired as Professor at the Wharton Business School, he was asked what were the benefits of a business education. With savage irony he replied that there were three:

Ackoff Reading: The first was to equip students with a vocabulary that enabled them to talk with authority about subjects they did not understand. The second was to give students principles that would demonstrate their ability to withstand any amount of disconfirming evidence. The third was to give students a ticket of admission to a job where they could learn something about management.

Stephen Crittenden: Everyone we spoke to for this program was quick to point out that there are many very capable MBAs, and many good business schools offering sensible MBA courses.

But the number of failed CEOs with MBAs has not escaped notice. Stan O'Neill and John Thane at Merrill Lynch, Andy Hornby at HBOS, and the best-known of all, Enron's Jeff Skilling who's serving a 24-year jail sentence, and the former President of the United States, George W. Bush.

McGill University Professor Henry Mintzberg says what we call a financial crisis is really at its core a crisis of management, and not just a crisis of management, but a crisis of management culture.