The Education of Practicing Managers

“Management” education takes place in MBA programs, which are remarkably standardized in content —across schools and around the world. Yet the MBA is more B than A, more about the functions of business than the practice of managing. In the name of developing general managers, therefore, it tends to train staff specialists. No wonder so many MBAs have for many years gone into consulting and investment banking — often more than 60% from the most prestigious American schools.

Education at every level divides subject matter into sharp categories — defined by how the knowledge has been created, not how it is used —as specialists in each field promote their own views of the world. In MBA programs, for instance, students get the word on shareholder value in finance, on empowerment in organizational behavior, on customer service in marketing. Somehow they are supposed to put this all together. They never do.

That is because management is neither a science nor a profession, neither a function nor a combination of functions. Management is a practice — it has to be appreciated through experience, in context. Management may use science, but it is an art that is combined with science through craft. In other words, managers have to face issues in the full complexity of living, not as compartmentalized packages. Knowledge may be important, but wisdom — the capacity to combine knowledge from different sources and use it judiciously — is key.

This is not to deny the role of formal education in management development. Business schools have important things to teach about managing. But by teaching it in the ways they generally do, they miss great opportunities for creative learning suited to practicing managers. It is therefore time to reconsider the very idea of management education, specifically the design of degree programs for practicing managers. Business schools may pride themselves on teaching new product development and strategy, but their MBA programs have not been seriously re-evaluated since the 1950s.

In an attempt to develop a new perspective on management education combined with management development, we have in recent years worked with colleagues from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, INSEAD in France, Lancaster University in England, and McGill University in Canada; with faculty in Japan from Hitotsubashi University, Kobe University and the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; and with colleagues at the Korean Development Institute. Drawing on the most interesting innovations in management education and development and devising a number of our own, we created the International Masters Program in Practicing Management. This program sets aside many of management education’s most cherished beliefs and in their place establishes seven basic tenets upon which we believe true management education should be built:

Tenet #1: Management education should be restricted to practicing managers, selected on the basis of performance.

Managers cannot simply be created in a classroom. The practice can be enhanced there, but not established. Efforts to teach management disassociated from context and experience undermine the education, most commonly by reducing it to analysis. Providing education in the context of deep-rooted practical experience, however, turns the classroom into a rich arena for learning.

Managerial experience also provides the appropriate basis for selecting participants. Certainly managers must be intelligent, and test scores and essay questions do provide one basis for measuring that intelligence. But demonstrated job performance provides a far more effective one — far more appropriate, too, for a society concerned with its leadership.

MBA programs rely initially on self-selection: The candidates choose to apply, and the schools select from that pool. This puts those selected on a fast track toward positions of leadership. Might it not make more sense to do this the other way around — to let experience speak about leadership and then develop those whose performance speaks most clearly? In other words, let people prove themselves by performing in the field, then have others who can best assess that performance —namely, senior people in their own organizations — make the selection.

Tenet #2: Management education and practice should be concurrent and integrated.

It makes little sense to select people steeped in practice and then remove them from that practice to educate them. Managers should stay on the job, so their work experience and educational experience can be interwoven. Learning and doing at the same time creates tensions, of course. Too much time away from the job can be stressful, but too little time away from it can weaken the education. Short courses, like strobe lights, may leave nothing behind, while months off the job may mean there will be no job to return to. But such tensions are intrinsic to management practice itself and facing rather than avoiding them is also educational.

Tenet #3: Management education should leverage work and life experience.

Theory is important and cases are useful. The former are like maps of the world, the latter like travelers’ tales. Both are best appreciated — as are their limitations — by people who already know the territory. Thus learning becomes most powerful when managers can assess the theory in their own contexts and can apply the messages of cases to their own experiences. Ideally those experiences would provide living case material for the classroom. When that happens, education becomes practical, and practice becomes educational.

There is too much teaching and not enough learning in much of today’s management education, too much control of the classroom agenda by instructors. Teachers certainly have to introduce formalized knowledge —ideas, concepts, research findings and so forth — to the process, but that knowledge must meet the needs that managers bring to the classroom and resonate with their extensive knowledge, much of it tacit. The best management education occurs when the educational push of the faculty meets the learning pull of the managers.

Push meets pull naturally in a process of infusion, not intrusion. A course in ethics that is slipped in between others in finance and marketing epitomizes intrusion. Everything in its place, apart. The alternative approach is to infuse the discussion of ethics through other issues, such as the expansion of existing businesses into developing countries. That makes for more integrated learning, which will develop more integrated managing. And it calls for a rather different approach in the classroom.

Tenet #4: The key to the learning is thoughtful reflection.

Many schools promise that their management development programs will be the equivalent of boot camp. Managers certainly don’t need boot camp. Pressure no more enhances real learning than does passivity. Besides, too many of them live boot camp every day! Industries function according to recipes —accepted procedures and beliefs about how things work. Into this is stirred a good portion of hype promulgated by much of today’s management literature, the latest fad and the managerial correctness present in so much of the business press. Considering this, you can appreciate how much baggage every manager is encouraged to carry around. Managers need to step back from all this and reflect on their experiences. The best thing the university setting can offer is that kind of engagement, in an atmosphere that allows people the luxury of suspending their disbeliefs so they can learn.

Managers don’t need more prescription. Prescription in general is the problem, not the solution, because situations vary so widely. Managers need description, illustration of alternate ways to understand their world: how customers buy, how organizations function, how cultures have impact. Better description in the hands of an intelligent practitioner is the most powerful prescriptive tool we have because that is what allows managers to act on problems.

Reflecting does not mean musing; it means wondering, probing, analyzing, synthesizing — and struggling. People have to be engaged, curious and alert on a personal level and in a social process. In other words, managers have to share their reflections, to learn from one another’s ideas and experiences. This kind of interaction happens outside the classroom of every management development program. If only it could happen so pervasively inside those classrooms as well! Undoubtedly, managers have at least as much to learn from each other as they do from the faculty.

Tenet #5: Management development should result in organization development.

The ongoing effects of an educational program should have impact beyond the recipient. As currently constituted, the MBA program encourages strictly personal learning. Participants self-select with the intention of offering better talent at a higher price. (Perhaps that explains why so much management has itself become self-serving, especially as reflected in executive compensation.) Similarly, managers may return from such programs as more fully developed individuals, but if the learning process stops there it can be a rather limited exercise. The kind of organizational impact we are suggesting is based upon the individual’s obligation to diffuse his or her learning into the organization.

The impact of this can range from the simple and straightforward to the rather elaborate. Participants can share interesting readings with their colleagues, brief them on classroom sessions, even run miniature replications of what they have experienced. More broadly, participants can set out to change their organizations on the basis of what they learned in the program.

Education that creates such impact requires a radical departure on the part of business schools and companies. Schools must open up and become more responsive, truly customizing their programs. Companies have to raise their expectations about management education and development. Insofar as it is possible, management development programs need to use the work that managers do naturally — leverage the work that is there already, as unobtrusively as possible, to render change naturally.

Tenet #6: Management education must be an interactive process.

If all of the above works as it should, the educational process becomes subversive. And not a moment too soon! We wish to undermine the very basis of conventional management education, to call into question the notions of courses, curricula, teaching and students. Programs of the kind discussed here cannot be chopped into neat courses, each with its own box of disassociated knowledge, and packaged together in a curriculum. The problems and challenges of real management do not present themselves that way, so why should management education do so?

Imagine a program woven together by values and attitudes, and by truly engaging methods of learning. There would be no students, only participants. Managers would participate alongside the faculty in the designing and the learning process. They would move seamlessly back and forth between concept-based and experience-based learning, reflecting collectively across sessions and modules, the learning blended into one continuous flow, sometimes smooth, sometimes gusty. This is integration not designed and imposed by blueprint. It is the kind of integration that is infused, lived and evolved — in truth, the only real kind of integration.

Tenet #7: Every aspect of the education must facilitate learning.

Over the past half-century, concepts about management have evolved. A function that was seen as essentially directive is now widely viewed as facilitative. Compare Henri Fayol’s 1916 definition of managerial work as planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling with the current emphasis on organizations as adaptive networks of knowledge workers. Without question, management education should mirror this evolution, yet so much about it is still designed to control the teaching rather than facilitate the learning.

Take, for example, the physical layout of the average classroom. Students are lined up in nice neat rows so that they can see the professor who delivers a lecture, then asks for questions from the audience. That may be fine for conveying information, but it is hardly optimal for sharing insights. Arching these rows in the shape of a U so that people can see each other during case discussions may be an improvement, but that still puts attention on the individual. Imagine instead the benefits of having the participants sitting around circular tables in a flat classroom so that they can slip in and out of small group discussions quickly and easily, without having to “break out” into smaller sessions to do so. That’s the kind of dynamic interaction that the architecture of the classroom should encourage and reflect.

Likewise, so must the role of faculty and the mode of teaching. Although there clearly remains a role for lecturing and for leading case discussions, professors should spend less time professing and instead encourage discussion to flow freely along insightful lines developed by the participants themselves. What is commonly referred to as action learning can be a useful tool in this regard, but its effect is limited when the action is artificially simulated in the classroom as is often the case.

The most effective mode of learning is what we call “experienced reflection,” wherein participants are encouraged to consider classroom inputs in terms of their own experiences, to confront new ideas with old beliefs, individually, in small groups and across a whole class. All the conventional learning methods become more useful in this context.

Developing Management and Organizations

There is a certain quality of conversation that takes place in a well-managed classroom that is almost unique, where the fruits of experience, theory and reflection are brought together into new understanding and commitment. This may sound utopian, but it is not. Experiments with this kind of approach are taking place in a number of management-education programs around the world.

This points toward a new partnership between companies and business schools that would enhance the level and depth of conversations about the field of management and organizational development on both the academic and corporate sides of the equation. The place to begin is with the reform of management education, and the organization’s responsibility for the development of its managers is central to this reform. When companies and their managers make a commitment to the continual acquisition and diffusion of learning throughout their organizations, much of what we have described above can be worked into company practice, not only through formal development but informally as well. We believe that companies can incorporate this philosophy into their daily functioning, not just by raising the level of activity but by raising the level of reflection. The potential for the concurrent development of managers and organizations is enormous.