Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/111663
Practicing Wisdom I am the bene���ciary of a 2005 Harvard Business Review article titled ���How Business Schools Lost Their Way.��� In it, Warren Bennis and James O���Toole argue that medicine is a profession taught by doctors, law is a profession taught by lawyers, and business is a profession taught by PhDs. These PhDs, they add, are less interested in teaching than in conducting research, little of which ���is grounded in actual business practices. The focus of graduate business education has become increasingly circumscribed and less and less relevant to practitioners.��� Soon after the article appeared, an enlightened dean and trusting faculty hired me as an executive-in-residence. Now in my eighth year, I still keep one foot in academia and the other in what I call the real world. The need for and value of practitioners is now seemingly more accepted than it was eight years ago. In fact, AACSB International offers a Bridge Program designed to help people like me enter academia without earning PhDs. (See www.aacsb.edu/bridge/default. asp.) Of course, an entire roster of professionally quali���ed faculty is not a good idea for any school. In fact, if schools want to maintain AACSB accreditation, half of their faculties must be academically quali���ed, and even more should be AQ if the school puts a high emphasis on graduate-level education. Some of these ratios may change if the association���s proposed new standards are adopted, but schools will still need a high percentage of faculty with doctoral degrees. But if a few practitioners���let���s be frank, if many of us���were teaching courses in our areas of expertise, schools would assemble more diverse faculties that would help students develop the kind of understanding and wisdom only obtainable from real-world experiences. Unfortunately, business education is still dominated by PhDs who rely on theory-based textbooks that I abandoned after my ���rst year of teaching. I recently had an e-mail exchange with a professor who criticized me for bringing too many guest speakers into my classes. This professor told me that ���relying so heavily on guest speakers means there���s a good gee-whiz factor, but one might wonder how these contribute substantively to students��� skill sets.��� I couldn���t disagree more. My guest speakers have offered my students insights they never could have gotten from a textbook. For instance, one outside expert told my technology entrepreneurship class about the challenges he faced as he was trying to raise venture capital���how it took him twice as long to secure half the money he needed���and what strategies he used to deal with that situation. Another speaker, talking to my technology management students, offered excellent advice for how MBAs without technical degrees should manage the technical staff reporting to them. A third guest spoke to my global business students and detailed the personal cultural growth he experienced when his company began expanding to more countries. While I might have been able to raise all these issues in my classes, I���m certain the students learned more by listening to the true experts. The case study method was supposed to help business students learn about real-world issues instead of academic theories that may or may not still be valid. For just that reason, I am a big believer in using cases in the classroom. But now I want to go further. I want to stop teaching knowledge and start focusing on understanding with the wisdom I���ve acquired in the real world. What is better: for students to memorize some complicated equation that is readily available online, or to learn how and when to apply that equation? The former is knowledge; the latter is wisdom. And it���s wisdom, not knowledge, that matters in the information age. Allen H. Kupetz is Executive in Residence at Rollins College���s Crummer Graduate School of Business in Winter Park, Florida. BizEd March/April 2013 67