周末约人，晚上到家里吃饭，做这些菜也能不丢人~

PART 1

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These days I see the continuing tensions between business schools and universities regarding legitimacy, identity and relevance of research and curricula. I would like to point out the consequent need to reframe and re-examine business and management education through the lenses of new paradigms and models.

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In this article, I take up the challenge of rethinking management education and its potential alternative approaches and models. I take a critical view of management education and ask, alongside other critics, whether we really know what management education is, or should be, about. Our position is that we need to rethink the meaning and concept of the ‘business school’ and our current philosophies of management education. Consequently, we pose the following questions:

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(1)??????? What is management about? Is it an Art or a Science?

(2)??????? Do we have a theory of managing?

(3)??????? What is the proper content of management education?

(4)??????? What are the core management skills?

(5)??????? Is there a new, more radical management education model that can focus our thinking and hence provide insights into the logic of the range of alternative models that are currently being proposed?

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Let us start with a discussion about the nature of management and the content of management education. How should educators react to the many criticisms of existing models, which are seen as too narrow, too technical, too analytical and not managerial? Let us also examine the key forces driving change in management education arising from both internal and external forces. Then, I would advocate the creation of new management education models which I read last month? - using the new radical model underlying the Lorange Institute of Business in Zurich, Switzerland, as a vehicle for dialogue and debate about design options for new models and paradigms.

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Conclusions are drawn from this discussion to provide insights and guidelines for the critical examination of other new, innovative models of management education, which would be presented in my later continuation of my articles on the topic.

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What is management and what should be the content of management education?

For many years the most strident, and important, critic of management education has been Professor Henry Mintzberg. In his book Managers, Not MBAs, which summarizes and synthesizes much of his thinking, he states in his preface: ‘I was simply finding too much of a disconnect between the practice of management that was becoming clearer to me and what went on in classrooms, my own included, intended to develop managers.’ More importantly, he argues that management is not a science: ‘Management certainly applies science: managers have to use all the knowledge they can get, from the sciences and elsewhere. But management is more art, based on “insight,” “vision,” “intuition”’.

In essence, agreeing with Drucker, he summarises the practical role of the manager as follows: ‘Put together a good deal of craft with a certain amount of art and some science, and you end up with a job that is above all a practice’.

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Focusing more on the content of management education, Livingston in his article on the ‘Myth of the Well-Educated Manager’, wrote the following comments, also quoted in Mintzberg : ‘Formal management education programmes typically emphasize the development of problem-solving and decision-making skills ... but give little attention to the development of skills required to find the problems that need to be solved, to plan for the attainment of desired results, or to carry out operating plans once they are made.’

?????? Above all else, the proposition is that the field of management ??education should be broad, including careful examination of managerial skills of problem search and framing, strategizing and implementing change. It should not be beset by narrow functional specialization. It is clearly characterized by paradox and ambiguity and, hence, requires holistic thinking and important skills of synthesis as well as insights into analysis and analytic thinking.

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What is the content of management education?

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Watson – an experienced dean who has held the position at three schools in the UK (Cambridge, Henley and Lancaster) – focuses very clearly on the proper content, and positioning, of management education. Many of the themes he stresses draw on Mintzberg’s descriptions of managerial work and management practice though he also advances Cardinal Newman’s ideas on liberal education and Hirsch’s work on cultural literacy as important influences on well-designed curricula of management education.

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He uses Mintzberg’s seminal analysis of managerial work – in essence Mintzberg’s doctoral thesis research – to throw light on the skills and key roles of the manager. As noted by Watson, Mintzberg identifies ten roles that managers fulfil. Three are seen as interpersonal, involving personal and organisational skills; three are seen as informational, requiring monitoring and dissemination of appropriate information; and four are viewed as decisional, including resource allocation, negotiation and entrepreneurial skills.

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Watson then translates the necessary managerial skills and qualities that should be possessed by good managers:

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?? Peer skills: the ability to enter into and maintain peer relationships;

?? Leadership skills: the ability to motivate and train subordinates, to provide help and to deal with problems of authority and dependence;

?? Conflict resolution skills: the skills of mediating between conflicting individuals and handling disturbances;

?? Information-processing skills: the abilities to discover relevant information and to present it to others both orally and in writing;

?? Skills in decision making under ambiguity: how to realise that a decision has to be made and then how to make that decision;

?? Resource-allocation skills: the skill of choosing between competing resource demands;

?? Entrepreneurial skills: the ability to search for problems and opportunities and to implement change in organisations;

?? Skills of introspection: managers need to understand themselves and to learn how to learn.

Mintzberg’s view is that at least one-third of all management education programmes should be devoted to addressing this managerial skill base.

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However, it is doubtful whether few, or indeed any, programmes other perhaps than Mintzberg’s own IMPM programme, or even come close to this criterion, despite the many wide-ranging criticisms of management education programmes.

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If one-third of an ideal programme should encompass training in Mintzberg-type managerial skills, what should constitute the other two-thirds?

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Watson? argues that the remaining elements of management should include both the traditions of liberal education as exemplified by Newman and also detailed exposition of the underlying knowledge base of the competitive, economic, social and technological environment faced by the manager.

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Adopting Newman’s principles of liberal education into the management curriculum would involve the development of the extremely important intellectual skills of analysis, criticism and synthesis. For Newman these skills were fundamental and their objective was clear.

They allowed the individual to become introspective, open-minded, insightful and possess the ability to absorb knowledge critically in framing problems and making decisions. Such liberal education courses are currently not common in existing business school curricula.

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In addition, the domain of management knowledge and knowledge about the structure and functioning of organizations is usually the dominant core component of most existing management programmes. Most curricula typically focus on the following elements: the social and organizational environment (the domain of social scientists); the economic and financial environment (the domain of economists, business cycles, lawyers and accountants); and the strategic and quantitative elements of marketing, operations, logistics and public/corporate policy (the domain of managing growth and organizational direction).

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Overall, this domain knowledge encompasses the roles and activities of the manager and the organization. Careful articulation of this domain knowledge, therefore, produces a sound competence level for the managerial knowledge base.

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However, most current programmes over-emphasize domain knowledge and under emphasize the multi-disciplinary nature of the management task. Without proper grounding in Newman’s intellectual and synthetic skills, Mintzberg’s panoply of interpersonal skills and – given the global environment – Hirsch’s skills of cultural literacy and sensitivity, thorough grounding in domain knowledge is clearly insufficient. And the urgent challenges of change in management processes and the global business environment will force a redesign of many existing curricula.

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We now examine the influence of the many challenges and forces driving change in the management environment as a prelude to synthesizing the key elements of the current debates about new models and paradigms in management education.

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TO BE CONTINUED IN NEXT POST? ON THE SERIES …….