Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/63913
Knowledge What are the three most impor- tant lessons that today's business schools should be teaching tomor- row's executives? The first is that they have to learn to take responsibility for themselves. Far too many people still expect the per- sonnel department to look after them. They don't know their strengths, they don't know where they belong, they take no responsibility for themselves. The second is that the most impor- tant thing is to look up, rather than down. The focus is still on managing subordinates, when it should be on being an executive. Managing your boss is more important than managing subordinates. And so is asking, "What should I contribute to the organization?" The final lesson is the need to acquire basic literacy. Yes, you want that accountant to be an accountant, but you also want her to understand what the other organizational functions are about. That's what I call the basic literacy of the organization. Such lit- eracy is not a matter of taking the right courses, but a matter of practical experience. We help our students achieve basic literacy by placing them in small teams and sending them out to work in actual organiza- tions. There, they take on projects that make a significant differ- ence to the organization. I recently sat down with one team that had been working in makes itself obsolete every give students functional skills that enable them to earn their keep very quickly, if very narrowly. Certainly one of the purposes of undergraduate and typical MBA programs is to help the student get a good first job. I think there is no doubt that MBA pro- grams are effective in that respect. MBA students get very good jobs, better jobs that they would have landed without an MBA. That's all that can be expected, really. What happens after they land the job is up to each individual person. a fairly large organization two days a week for the last six months on the difficult question of pricing. These were very able people between the ages of 27 and 40 who had at least five years of prac- tical experience. But they had never really seen an organization as a whole. Through their work they were exposed to the entire organization and began to understand that pricing is not just a financial decision or a marketing decision, but requires an under- standing of the entire organization, as well as of the market. That's a lesson you can't learn in a classroom. How well do business schools prepare their students? Only the students themselves can answer that question, and they rarely know until ten years or more have passed. Also, I think that what you mean by management, one cannot learn until one first has several years of practice. Finally, the reality is that manage- ment positions will be far fewer in the future, so we should be preparing students for other types of careers as well. The question, therefore, should perhaps focus on the extent to which we enable students to "get going." In this respect, I believe that business schools prepare students very well. They 14 BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 You've stated that traditional management careers will disappear. What will take their place? We'll have to call them executive careers, or careers in organiza- tions. The traditional career path, which takes you from being a professional specialist to being a supervisor of specialists and then a manager—that's going to be history pretty soon. General Motors, for example, has already reduced its management struc- ture from 28 layers to 15 and will drop to three or four in the not too distant future. Then there is the growth of careers out- side the organization, where people are contractors to the organ- ization instead of its employees. One of the great challenges to the organization will be rewarding and motivating people when the possibility of promo- tion doesn't exist. I've been working with large companies on initiatives that enable their best people to develop their own busi- nesses within the organization. They become CEOs of their own shows and are rewarded and recognized as such. I don't think our business schools are prepared for this reali- ty. Our business schools do not prepare people to take responsi- bility for their careers. How will the Internet and related technologies change management education? First let me say that shying away from Internet-based education because it is too impersonal to be effective is nonsense. Nothing is easier than building feedback and direct contact into the