Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62201
Trials rends & disappointing to some observers, a thoughtful evaluation points to steady progress and advancement. While recent report cards for business schools may be by Ángel Cabrera 38 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2003 D Henry Mintzberg, the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill Uni ver sity in Montreal, Canada, for example, we're educating executives with a product from 1908 and a strategy from the 1950s. The first date refers to the year when the first Harvard MBA graduated; and the second marks the publication date of Higher Education for Business, an assessment of American business schools writ- ten by Robert Aaron Gordon and James Edwin Howell. Other indictments have been raised by professors, espite radical upheavals in the world's corporate environment, many would charge that execu- tive training and development models have changed very little in recent decades. To quote administrators, and others on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere. In my opinion, however, those of us in manage- ment education don't always give ourselves enough credit for the strides we've made or for the things we're doing well. Admittedly, we face challenges; but our progress and sense of purpose have never seemed steadier or stronger. Limitations in Our Models At the time when the Gordon and Howell report was pub- lished, U.S. business schools were producing 3,200 MBA graduates per year. The study drew attention to the lack of rigor and academic legitimacy of the schools of that time, and it eventually generated a transformation that spanned several decades. During that period, economists, sociolo- gists, and psychologists helped build the scientific basis of current management education. For better or worse, today's business schools produce hundreds of thousands of graduates across the world, evi- dencing the enormous impact that current business training models have on our societies. Notwithstanding the size and status of these models, limitations and flaws in our practices unquestionably exist. We regularly hear criticisms about the broad tenets of management education, as well as rebukes that stem from current research. Mintzberg, for example, asserts that today's MBA pro- grams produce functional specialists—experts in finance, marketing or accounting, for example—instead of true, professional managers. Yet we all know that real manage- ment consists of much more than solving well-defined tech- nical problems. Real managers usually have to identify the problems themselves; and, more often than not, these problems are ill-defined and transdisciplinary in nature. Real managers must be able to look for collaborative solutions and then implement them in socially complex environments.