See AACSB website for latest issue of their BizEd magazine.
...Gary Hamel argues that business educators must become inventors, innovators, and experimenters to help business meet the challenges that lie ahead...
...In his latest book, The Future of Management, co-authored with Bill Breen, Hamel urges business leaders to abandon “commandand- control” management hierarchies to build more democratic workplaces that give everyone a chance to lead, innovate, and effect positive change...
Just two questions out of several from the downloadable PDF BizED.
- To what extent must business schools reinvent themselves?
Any field—whether it’s medicine, engineering, or business— can become stuck in a paradigm trap over time. Everybody’s been trained the same way. They think the same way, and they take the same things for granted. I think that’s where management is today. Business faculty need to be very conscious of the inherited dogmas that may underlie their views.
Many of the most progressive 21st-century pioneers— the companies that are really challenging management dogma—are led and were built by people who didn’t go to business school. They didn’t know what they didn’t know. So, those of us who have the responsibility to train the next generation of leaders and managers have to be vigilant that we don’t unthinkingly trap our students in the same orthodoxies that have trapped managers for the last 75 or 100 years. We have to treat everything we’ve learned about how we manage and organize human beings as hypotheses that are forever open to disconfirmation.
- What do you think the b-school landscape will look like ten years from now?
I think there will be more online and diploma programs that are focused on particular needs, that aren’t full-fledged, two-year MBA programs. There will be more flexibility in the curriculum in terms of the pace at which students earn their degrees. I think there will be more emphasis on clinical learning, on getting out and integrating the theoretical lessons of the classroom in practice. I do think there will be many opportunities for business schools to reinvent themselves. To what extent those opportunities are going to be
exploited, I don’t know.
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