Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/63444
Tom Peters: a well-known fanatic against the status quo, offers a fairly con- troversial commentary on the state of management education. Peters' unconventional perspectives have led Busi nessWeek to call him business' "best friend and worst nightmare," and the same label might apply to his views on management educa- tion. While he is one of its biggest fans and advocates, he can also be a harsh critic. Drawing on decades of experience and research, he offers a unique take on what's right and what's wrong with business schools and offers ideas on how they might want to reinvent themselves. How well do you think business schools prepare students for management careers? I find that to be an incredibly difficult question, especially since I grew up around the Stanford/Harvard/Kellogg mentality. It's like asking, "How well does the retail sector serve American consumers?" On the one hand you can shop from the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog and spend $275,000 on the motorcycle that Hitler rode or some other damn thing. On the other hand, you can go to Wal-Mart and get some pretty good stuff for $9.95. How does that relate to management education? Maybe I'm talking more to myself than to you and to your readers, but I think when you say "management education," the tendency is to think Harvard/Stanford/Chicago. But Tom Peters, a self-described professional loudmouth, has some things to say about business education—which should come as a surprise to no one. For almost 20 years Peters has dedicated himself to inspiring individuals and the organiza- tions that employ them to transform the way they think, work, and live. "Embrace change!" "Work with passion and enthusi- asm!" "Wow everyone!" Anyone so devoted to reinventing and reinvigorating the world's workforce is obviously going to be interested in how that workforce is educated. It probably won't be much of a surprise, either, that Peters, by Christy Chapman that's about as intelligent as thinking Tiffany's or Neiman Marcus instead of Wal-Mart when you say retail. Because man- agement education consists of everything from a 38-year-old going to night school for five years to get an associate's or a bachelor's or maybe a master's degree; to entrepreneurial peo- ple at the University of Phoenix providing all sorts of courses to people of all shapes and ages and sizes; to thousands of tech- nical and administrative courses that are available on the Web for free or for $30,000 a year; as well as to Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. Also, at the front of the line is the corporate emphasis on management education. Corporations are doing stuff that is so much more interesting than anything Harvard or Stanford is doing, and they've been doing so for the last ten or 15 years. I mean, the rapidity with which IBM has moved most of its training online is just breathtaking. As a result, I would come out pretty much on the positive end of the scale, because I think there is an enormous amount of experimentation going on in terms of delivery channels and so forth. Do you consider that to be one of the strengths of management education? The wild and wooly experimentation and the breadth of the programs that are being offered? Absolutely. When I consid- er what's really great about management education, the model that comes to my mind is a 34-year-old with an under- graduate degree from wherever, and I care not where, who gets her first supervisory job. She knows that she would like to be a lot better educated; and so she either goes online, or to Golden Gate college, or to one of a hundred or a thousand other educational centers, depending on where she lives. At seven o'clock, after a long day's work, she enters a classroom where the teacher—I say teacher and not profes- sor because the instructor is not usually a tenured profes- sor—is a partner at the local Ernst & Young office and is BizEd MAY/JUNE 2002 15 UNCENSORED photographs by Larry Maglott