Implications for the Future of Management Education


What are the implications of this discourse for the future of management education? What should the Sloan School do to lead the way in realizing this vision? The key lesson we take away from the convocation is that management education should endeavor to develop principled leaders who earn trust, who are able to address a broader set of problems and stakeholders, and who are able to identify and exploit opportunities to innovate, many of which will be provided by advances in science and technology.

In practical terms, what does this imply? First, it clearly requires us to pay more attention to the ethical dimensions of being a professional manager, to the sort of leadership that is required to earn stakeholders' trust. Management schools cannot change their students' characters by preaching at them, but students can learn what sort of behavior is expected of them as professionals, and they can learn to be more effective leaders and more sensitive to ethical issues. We believe that this is most effectively done in context, not in isolated lectures or courses focused on ethics. Ethics cannot be taught to aspiring managers as abstract philosophy. It must be grounded in the real work managers do, the issues they encounter, and the decisions they are called upon to make independently and in concert with other groups and institutions. As we at Sloan are redesigning our curricula, we are placing great emphasis on the effective teaching of ethical principles—on developing leaders who are principled as well as effective and are able to enhance long-run viability and performance.

Second, as managers are expected to address broader responsibilities and deal with new, complex issues, so too must the management schools that educate them. To ensure that we are addressing the most important problems of the day, the management school of the future will need to be an open forum where a diverse set of people and stakeholders come together to learn and explore how to address these problems and meet these challenges. This means doing more than periodically bringing business leaders to campus to share their vision and problems with faculty and students. It means engaging leaders from all parts of society—business, government, and civil society.

Since the ideas, tools, and evidence that will be used to build this new management education system will only be as good as the research that generates them, management research will likewise need to broaden its focus to provide the theories and tools needed to meet these broader expectations and to examine how well organizations are performing on these broader dimensions. Breakthroughs such as those listed at the beginning of this introduction came from research that was then translated into our educational programs. Accordingly, we believe that it is essential in this era of rapid, complex change that MIT Sloan and other management schools continue to be research-driven. Greater complexity in the executive suite has increased, not reduced, the need for sound and rigorous analysis, and it has broadened the set of problems that need to be analyzed. Business schools must develop leaders who can deploy new management methods in response to new management challenges.

Third, future managers will need an understanding of the potential benefits, risks, and ethical challenges posed by emerging technologies, including nanotechnologies, personal robotics, bioengineering, and others not yet in view. Businesses must innovate, and innovation depends increasingly on exploiting the potentials of new technologies. Moreover, ethical and technical analysis will need to be closely coupled in management decision-making if we are to guide science and technology in appropriate directions.

This does not mean all managers need to have Ph.D. degrees in specific technical disciplines that underlie their products or services. While this would not necessarily be a bad thing, it would not guarantee that managers understand the details of technologies that emerge decades after their graduation. Managers, whether they have technical degrees or not, need to learn to speak the language of science and technology and to be able to challenge and engage experts in an informed discussion of the scientific data needed to make sound and prudent decisions. In short, managers need to know how to learn about new technologies and to think creatively about their implications and likely evolution.

In order to equip our students to lead successful innovation, we at MIT Sloan believe it is vital that we engage our colleagues in science and engineering even more directly and creatively in the future than we have in the past. If Provost Brown is correct that most of the fundamental breakthroughs in science and engineering at MIT have come out of its multi-disciplinary laboratories and centers, the management school of the future must be an open and inviting setting where scholars from multiple disciplines interact and bring the best of their disciplinary knowledge to bear in teams working on the most critical problems of the day. The results of this work and these interactions must be translated into innovative curricula that prepare management students to drive successful innovation in new products and processes. The era in which business schools can wall themselves off from the rest of their universities and still be successful is very likely over!

Ultimately, realizing the vision and meeting challenges outlined here will require transforming our traditional curricula and mode of operations. Like our sister universities, we have structured the lives of our students and faculty around a set of independently taught, sequential courses fitted into full or half-semester time blocks, punctuated by times set aside for students and faculty to visit and study companies around the world. The fixed semester, sequential-course model was designed for faculty to teach their discipline-based knowledge in a relatively pure fashion, unencumbered by the multi-faceted complexities of many important problems.

To be sure, there is both efficiency and merit to the conceptual clarity which this structure allows in teaching basic disciplinary principles. Some of this knowledge will undoubtedly need to continue to be delivered in this fashion. But increasingly, we need to find ways to apply the same insight to our teaching as we do in our multi-disciplinary research laboratories and centers. We need to link research to teaching by engaging students in the application of knowledge from multiple disciplines to real-world problems. This means more cross-disciplinary, cross-functional, problem-oriented teaching. It means building more direct links between classrooms and real organizations, their problems, and the people involved in them. Some of this can be done remotely by taking advantage of the wonders of modern communication technology. But much of it requires personal interaction and engagement in order to see the problems and challenges first hand in their actual cultural and organizational settings. Doing this will reek havoc on traditional semester and course designs. But it will create new opportunities for better linking research, ensure more rapid testing and application of new theoretical breakthroughs and research findings, and in doing so will help harness the advances of science, technology, and human capacity called for by participants in the convocation.

The two-year MBA degree program was a natural byproduct of a model that saw education and training as a one-time ticket needed to enter a profession. Management education in the future will need to break out of this one-time, sequential model of education and practice by translating the rhetoric of "lifelong learning" into reality. Alumni and managers of corporate partners will need to be viewed as extended family members who come together on a regular basis and as new developments arise. New, shorter degree-granting programs may emerge, and new technologies and new teaching methods are likely to transform executive education as we know it. So stay tuned—these are interesting times in management education, as well as in the broader management profession.

We believe the analysis and dialogue that occurred at the Sloan Convocation and is recorded on the pages to follow can serve as a starting point for rethinking and reforming the profession of management. We invite you to explore the ideas presented here and then add your own voice to the debates and dialogue about the future of management that we hope our convocation and this volume will launch.




Management[c] Inventing and Delivering Its Future
Management[c] Inventing and Delivering Its Future
ISBN: 7504550191
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 55

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