The prolific and controversial Dean of the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, Santiago Iñiguez, made some noteworthy predictions for business schools on the last day of 2005 in an article titled “Management education in 2006: Anticipating some trends” which will no doubt raise some eyebrows from those already dubious about the value of business school educations, and in particular MBA programmes, in preparing tomorrow’s managers for the real world of commerce.
While Iñiguez observations that “business schools are a very dynamic segment of education and in 2006 they will continue to transform management practices through the creation and diffusion of knowledge and the preparation of executives and entrepreneurs” would not be refuted by many, the actual value of the supposed “preparation” is a widely controversial topic which has attracted some prominent dissention for years, and the current predictions he makes shed a revealing light on the issues in contention.
In short, the Dean’s predictions for b-school development are that there will be a continued drive towards internationalism (and in particular Asian internationalism), that there will be a more philanthropic focus on business school education this year, that “the development of information technologies will have a deeper impact in forms of delivery and learning methodologies than in the past”, and that in the process, there will be a shift in positions of b-school Deans as institutions search for Professors who act more like managers than academics in the charter of their roles as principles.
What is worrying about much of the predicted shifts forward in management education is not that they are too radical or out-of-touch – as has been the focus with much of the criticism of business schools – but that they seem so long overdue. The embracing of globalisation and information technologies are hardly the likely steps of change for 2006 in any thriving organisation today: companies have been reliant upon computers, software and technology to encompass a wider spectrum of international communication for decades now, and any that haven’t have long ago been elminated by those that have. The fact that Iñiguez feels the need to point them out at all should sound warning signals to even the most passionate traditionalist. Likewise his observation that “I also expect that 2006 will bring the opportunity to foster corporate social responsibility in management education”: if leading managers have not been educated with the fact that their future organisations should be aware of the impact of “social responsibility” in mind then it is little wonder they have suffered as such social misfits in a wider organisation context.
But the prospective remedial actions of shifting management education’s “centre of gravity” from the western world to Asia and searching for Deans who act like managers rather than academics signal the most startling sign of just how much a lack of any coherent strategy most modern business schools have in dealing with the issues at hand. Both actions suggest that academic institutions are content to be led by popular market forces rather than acknowledge their potential as catalysts of the direction of commerce: by their very nature as the starting-point for the career development of individuals who will shape tomorrow’s corporate landscape, business schools potentially wield an enormous amount of power, especially since there is no signal of a slowdown in the uptake of applicants for them.
Overall, Iñiguez paints a confusing picture – for while it appears that business schools have been overtly aware of the intricacies and development of the corporate flock and their own imperious potential to shepherd it, they appear to have being doing so little about it. It should come as no surprise then that the alumni of these establishments enter the workforce more confused about what they should be doing than their academically undecorated contemporaries, for it appears that the sum total of their Bachelors and Masters acolytions amount to the observation of the very activities the latter have meanwhile been engaged in, not, as commonly supposed, the other way round.
In discussing the development of b-schools, I think an interesting perspective would be to consider their abilities to 'eat their own medicine'. In that sense, Iñiguez's predictions belong in the past. Not that b-school deans necessarily function as managers already, but considering Mintzberg's 20year old call for leaders (not just managers), calling for deans to be more manager-like is perhaps not radical and controversial enough...
Fact is, b-school faculty has a tremendous power to influence the next generation of leaders, but only to the extent that they demonstrate visionary leadership capabilities themselves. Hence, my argument leads back to the age old distinction between epistemology and ontology that appears to be frequenting my comments on this issue. The conundrum is that of at the same time providing tacit understanding and measuring explicit performance. That is, for b-schools to be truly initiating change, their faculty at large needs to develop the capacity to facilitate the process of transformation involved in taking a class of fresh, fairly incompetent, though very ambitious students, and turn them into inspiring leaders for established and mature organizations. Now, that would be a feat!
Posted by: Heiko Schulz | January 04, 2006 at 08:56 AM