{"id":29,"date":"2005-05-03T00:29:29","date_gmt":"2005-05-03T06:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=29"},"modified":"2005-05-03T00:29:29","modified_gmt":"2005-05-03T06:29:29","slug":"how_ivory_is_yo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=29","title":{"rendered":"How ivory is your tower?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Warren Bennis and James O\u2019Toole are the latest big-name business professors to stride into the public square and flagellate themselves. Following, among others, Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer<\/a>, McGill’s Henry Mintzberg<\/a> and the late Sumantra Ghoshal<\/a> of the London Business School, they’ve written an indictment of management education, arguing that “business schools are on the wrong track.”<\/p>\n

In “How Business Schools Lost Their Way<\/a>,” a long article in the current Harvard Business Review, Bennis and O’Toole charge b-schools with having “succumbed to physics envy and the scientism it spawns.” Yearning to be taken seriously as “an academic discipline like chemistry or geology,” management education has “adopted a model of science that uses abstract financial and economic analysis, statistical multiple regressions, and laboratory psychology.” Little of the research “is grounded in actual business practices.” In striving for academic respectability, in other words, b-schools have succeeded only in diminishing their relevance.<\/p>\n

It’s a valid criticism. Even by the standards of the social sciences, “management” is an awfully squishy field, and attempts to prove otherwise are at best quixotic and at worst self-destructive. (It’s no coincidence that the great academic treatises on business management have tended to come from economists and psychologists rather than management scholars.) Bennis and O’Toole are certainly correct in saying that the research coming out of business schools tends to be far removed from the challenges faced by real managers. Back when I was an editor at HBR, I spent a lot of time plowing through turgid academic papers trying to turn up nuggets of practical wisdom. They were dispiritingly rare.<\/p>\n

But having made an important and tough point, the authors go soft. Rather than being an academic discipline, they write, “business is a profession, akin to medicine and the law, and business schools are professional schools\u2014or should be.” This amounts to little more than replacing one elitist delusion with another. Business is not at all a \u201cprofession\u201d the way law or medicine is. Managers are not distinguished by their deep understanding of a shared, specialized and rigorously defined body of knowledge, as lawyers and doctors are. Think of it this way: You wouldn\u2019t want an untrained amateur to operate on your heart or defend you in a trial, but you\u2019d happily hire a bright, effective, energetic man or woman to be a manager in your company, even if that person didn\u2019t have an M.B.A. or other formal business training.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s face it: Good management is, roughly, 30% common sense, 30% analytical acumen, 30% personal charm, 8% ruthlessness and 2% specialized knowledge. You’re not going to get management education on the right track unless you’re willing to be honest about what management is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Business professors are beating themselves up again<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}