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Today the overall success of a manager will be based on his or her ability to accomplish tasks and goals with and through people. Today it will be based on how well managers communicate, educate and delegate. Business schools, for the most part, are graduating students who are technically very competent. (They know what they know and they know it very well.) Unfortunately, I don't think schools are spending enough time teaching students how to teach; how to pass on what they know.
You can't manage the worker of the 21st century with a management style that was developed in the early 1900's. Professor Henry Mintzberg's latest book, Managers Not MBA's supports this point of view. "MBA programs not only fail to develop managers but give their students a false impression of managing that, when put into practice, is undermining our organizations and our societies." How can business schools graduate 21st century managers based on a program that was first introduced in 1908 and hasn't had a major revision since the late 1950's? Author, teacher, and leadership expert, Stephen R. Covey, puts it this way: "The mind-set of the Industrial Age that still dominates today's workplace will simply not work in the Knowledge Worker Age and new economy". (The workplace is any place where work takes place: the office, factory, classroom, sports field, etc.)
Mintzberg is no Monday-morning quarterback. He is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University and was named the Distinguished Scholar for the year 2000 by the Academy of Management. He is also the author of twelve books including The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning which management guru Tom Peters considers one of the most significant works of its time. Mintzberg goes to great lengths in this book to explain to the reader what is wrong with what is currently being taught in most business schools and what steps he feels administrators need to take to correct it. But he doesn't stop there. The professors who are hired to teach the course content aren't off Mintzberg's hook either. "You get to teach in a prestigious business school by proving yourself adept at research. Thereafter, publication in learned journals qualifies you to continue training the leaders of tomorrow." He goes on to say: "The claim that you have to do research to be an effective teacher is nonsense." Nonsense indeed. Managers and teachers are only as good as their ability to teach someone else what they know. If they can't do that, don't hire them.
I encourage all deans, school administrators and professors to read this book. The business community is looking for you to take a leadership role and graduate students who are equipped to manage in the 21st Century. Our free-enterprise system depends upon it.
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