Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/57464
From the Editors An Urgent Call to Action What's your crisis? Are you worried about falling student enrollments, faculty shortages, or a lack of diversity on campus? Are you focused on reformatting your MBA or achieving accredita- tion for your program? Do you need to raise money, upgrade your facilities, reconnect with alumni? How critical is the situation? How well are you and your staff responding? The way you answer those questions may give a hint about how well you—and your business school—will survive the next decade of management education. I just read John Kotter's new book, A Sense of Urgency, in which he discusses how badly most of us, both individuals and institutions, deal with the imperatives for change. According to his calculations, in 70 percent of the situations when changes were neces- sary, "either they were not fully launched, or the change efforts failed, or changes were achieved, but over budget, late, and with great frustration." Complacency is one root cause of failure, Kotter says. People don't think anything is wrong, or they think prob- lems can be fixed by using old methods that were successful in the past. A false sense of urgency also leads people astray. They bustle about, set up committees, conduct studies, produce data—but they never address the core issues. Business schools are not immune from this syndrome of failing to implement, or even recognize the need for, massive change. Yet if busi- ness schools hope to remain relevant in the 21st century, they must radically reinvent themselves, argues author and professor Gary Hamel. Among other things, he says, management programs must focus on innova- tion, which will drive all business strategy in the future. Hamel also believes that administrators and faculty will have to practice innovation themselves, reconsidering not only what they teach, but how they deliver content. He pre- dicts this and other changes for business schools in "The Innovation Generation" on page 18. If change was easy, there wouldn't be libraries of business books devoted to the topic of managing it. Kotter, in particular, offers specific tactics leaders can use to rally workers around a common cause—beginning with making a heartfelt case for change. As Kotter says, rational, intellectual appeals rarely move people into decisive action. Pas- sionate, emotional stories turn them into advocates and believers. Kotter believes that, whenever your school identifies a need for action, it's not enough to form committees and write proposals and hold meetings to debate the next steps. You have to make your staff care about solving the problem, he writes; you have to inspire them with "a gut-level determination to move, and win, now." Motivating whole teams of people will become even more crucial if, as Hamel expects, the whole landscape of management education undergoes transfor- mation. But whether the changes on the horizon are as simple as creating a new administrative post or as drastic as reinventing the MBA, the schools that understand how to implement change will be the ones that thrive well into the future. ■ z 6 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 BILL BASCOM