Everybody's Business: Reclaiming True Management Skills in Business Higher Education

Reclaiming True Management Skills in Business Higher Education

I. Mitroff, C. Alpaslan, E. S. O'Connor

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137412058
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Hochschulausbildung

Everybody's Business is a succinct analysis of the factors that led to the founding of American business schools and why they are the way they are. Mitroff, Alpaslan, and O'Connor consider why current business schools do not give students the knowledge and the tools they need to deal with today's complex, messy problems and systems.

1

The Argument

Abstract: Every important problem in business—and in life—is essentially a management problem. Our prime intent is to improve business schools so that all of us can better deal with the complexities of today’s world. This chapter presents the central argument of the book. It consists of three main parts: (1) the intellectual content of business schools, (2) the mindset that business schools inculcate in their students and faculty, and the kinds of psychology that are taught in them, and finally, (3) the philosophical underpinnings of business schools. In brief, we are concerned with the intellectual, emotional, and philosophical foundations of business schools.

Mitroff, Ian I., Can M. Alpaslan, and Ellen S. O’Connor. Everybody’s Business: Reclaiming True Management Skills in Business Higher Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137412058.0005.

Introduction

Business schools are one of America’s most important inventions.¹ (We will discuss about the founding of business schools later.) Business schools are vital to the education and training of future managers and leaders. For this and many other reasons, we have no desire to do away with them. Indeed, it is foolhardy to think that the world would be better off without them. But this doesn’t mean that they can remain the way they are. Far from it. Our prime intent is to improve business schools so that all of us can better deal with the complexities of today’s world.

This chapter presents the central argument of the book. It consists of three main parts: (1) the intellectual content of business schools, (2) the mindset that business schools inculcate in their students and faculty, and the kinds of psychology that are taught in them, and finally, (3) the philosophical underpinnings of business schools. In brief, we are concerned with the intellectual, emotional, and philosophical foundations of business schools.

Intellectual content

There is no question that students need to learn, among other things, the fundamentals of accounting (how to keep the “books” or “accounts,” i.e., how much is spent versus earned and the ways in which money is earned and spent), business economics (what makes the economy and businesses “tick”), finance (how to raise money to fund new businesses, products, and services), leadership and organizational behavior (what makes good managers and organizations “good,” “effective,” etc.), marketing (how to market one’s products and services), and business strategy (how to plan for one’s future and ensure that one has a future). In most business schools, these constitute the core of the curriculum.

Still, in recent years, new specialties and topics such as crisis and risk management, sustainability, stakeholder management, and ethics have clamored for equal, if not serious, attention. While it is not entirely accurate to say that these and more traditional topics have been taught in a vacuum, it is not an exaggeration to say that they have mostly been taught independently of one another, not interdependently. This is in spite of the fact that anyone one who has ever worked in an organization knows, or should know, that one cannot make major changes, for instance, in the accounting practices of an organization without seriously affecting all of its other aspects, e.g., what people are hired, how and for what people are fired, promoted, etc.

While we are not fundamentally opposed to the basic academic and professional disciplines per se—after all, who can be against a “disciplined mind?”—we are firmly opposed to the notion that management can somehow be “reduced to” or is “nothing but” accounting, business economics, etc. We are also firmly opposed to the splitting of management into separate components and privileging one component over the other such as distinguishing leadership from management and favoring the former over the latter. We agree with Henry Mintzberg when he said that leadership was management practiced well.² In our framework, leadership is the effective “management” of followers.

The reduction and splitting of management into separate and autonomous disciplines is largely due to the origins of business schools.³ Unlike medical schools that evolved over centuries and for which highly specialized training was seen as fundamentally necessary, in the beginning, business schools were weak coalitions, if that, of a loose smattering of subjects such as accounting and bookkeeping, elementary arithmetic, etc. that were not integrated into any coherent whole, i.e., management. (We will expand on this in the last chapter.)

As they developed, business schools hired, among others, specialists in economics, psychology, and sociology to man and beef up subjects such as finance, marketing, etc. For the most part, economists, psychologists, and sociologists developed loyalty to their separate disciplines and subject matter, not to the school as a whole. Thus, each of the disciplines essentially set their own hiring and promotion standards, developed their own curricula, etc. As a consequence, management was never recognized as the “integrating glue” that held it all together. It still isn’t. Little wonder why business schools are less than the product—not the sum—of their separate parts.

As we show later, a system is the product NOT the sum of its interactions. This has a very important consequence. The overall performance of a system is a function of the product of the performances of its parts. Thus, if any part has a poor performance, say zero, then zero times all of the other performances, no matter how high they are, lowers the total system performance to zero. In short, one does not make up for the low performance on one part with outstanding performance on all the others.

To illustrate this further, let us take that part of business schools in which we have spent our entire careers and thus know best, departments of management and organization. Recently, many of the top business schools have made a deliberate policy decision to hire only those junior faculty who either have their PhDs in social psychology and economics, or want to publish in top social psychology and economics journals. Partly this is to shore up their academic standing within business schools. As other departments such as business economics and finance have sought mainly to hire candidates only from leading departments of economics, departments of management and organization have finally found their own “grounding disciplines” so-to-speak. The result is that in many cases they are no longer willing to hire their own and the graduates of other similar programs to teach in departments of management and organization.

In part, the decision to hire faculty from social psychology makes sense since organizations are made up of people and therefore one wants faculty who have a background in social psychology. But one can also argue that one needs people with backgrounds in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis since they too have rich traditions in dealing with the “human condition.”

Unlike the faculties of schools of law, medicine, and engineering, most business school faculties do not “practice” their professions.⁴ Medical school faculties often have practices where they treat actual patients. Law school faculties often teach the very laws that attorneys use in courts to deal with actual cases. Engineering faculties often teach the theories and practices that engineers use when they design, build, and manufacture things. That is, in general, law, medical, and engineering school faculties are generally, but not always, immersed in their professions’ practices. Today’s business school faculties, however, often hire economists, sociologists, and social psychologists who do not practice the very things that they teach in the classroom: managing a business. In fact, some of the business school faculty that we know joined academia because they had a disdain for business and management. Hiring scientists from the so called grounding disciplines moves business schools further away from reality.

All of this would be rather beside the point if it hasn’t been shown repeatedly that the disciplines are poorly managed, e.g., what gets accepted for publication in the so called top journals. Time and again, the names, gender, and institutional affiliations of the authors of rejected papers have been resubmitted using “higher rank” affiliations and the papers have then been accepted even though the content has been totally unchanged.

The wrong units of reality

Business schools are currently organized around the wrong units of reality. The late pioneer of systems thinking Russell Ackoff said it best of all: “Managers don’t solve problems. They manage messes.”

Although managers certainly divide their worlds into the wrong entities as well—e.g. narrow silos such as manufacturing, operations, security, etc.—the problems they face are much broader and messier than the narrow problems of the disciplines. That is, managers often act as if the world were nothing but an extension of the ways in which business schools are organized. In short, business schools and business itself almost mirror one another exactly. But why should one expect anything else when managers have largely been trained on a steady diet of preformulated, narrow, canned exercises?

Ackoff appropriated the word “mess” to stand for a whole SYSTEM of problems that were so interconnected such that no single problem could be taken out of the mess of which it was a part without distorting irreparably the fundamental nature of the particular problem and the entire mess as well. In short, problems don’t exist apart from all the other problems to which they are connected. As opposed to exercises, there is no such thing as self-standing, completely self-contained problems.

Mitroff’s philosophical mentor, C. West Churchman, once put it as follows; “Something is a problem if and only if it is a member of the set of all other problems.” The crime problem is not separate from the education, housing, immigration, job availability, etc. In addition, the crime problem, etc. are messes in their own right!

What this means for business schools is that functions and disciplines such as accounting, finance, business economics are all parts of a larger Management Mess. They are fundamentally distorted if they are researched, studied, and taught as if they were independent of one another. They are not! As Marilynne Robinson would have put it, business schools “live on a tiny island of the articulable” which they “tend to mistake for reality itself.”⁵

In an earlier book, Mitroff, Hill, and Alpaslan have shown how to study messes.⁶ In a later chapter, we apply these ideas to business schools. The upshot is that on every front of our existence we are confronted with larger and increasingly complex messes. And yet, to an alarming degree, we still organize business schools and business itself as if they were well defined, well structured, and well contained problems. They certainly are no longer, if they ever really were.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the traditional academic disciplines and professions shed light on important issues and problems, but they are not sufficient to illuminate the whole mess. By separating what is less separated than ever, we make messes worse. Like all the schools within universities, business schools have to be reorganized around the research, study, and teaching of messes as they pertain to management. There is no activity in any field of human endeavor that does not involve a mess of some kind. The painful conclusion is that we either learn to manage messes or they will mismanage us.

Emotions

To an overwhelming extent, the kinds of psychology that are taught in business schools, if they are even taught at all, are superficial and simplistic. There is virtually no mention of the fact that people are guided by unconscious fears and anxieties of which they have little if any knowledge, and even less control over. The prevailing assumption is that people are largely rational calculating machines devoid of passions and sentiments. True, the burgeoning field of behavioral economics takes into account the fact that people do not behave like the axioms and postulates of traditional economics. Nonetheless, it still does not incorporate deeper unconscious fears and anxieties.

For over 30 years, Mitroff and Alpaslan have worked in the field of crisis management. Rationally, it is in the direct interests of all organizations—big and small, profit and non-profit, private and public—to plan for a wide array of crises. Those organizations that do plan for crises not only experience fewer of them, but they recover faster with fewer injuries and loss of income than those who do not plan. As a result, they are significantly more profitable.

In spite of this, Mitroff and Alpaslan have found that far too many organizations do not plan for crises because even thinking about them raises enormous fears and anxieties. If these fears and anxieties are not acknowledged and overcome, then an organization cannot think about crises, let alone plan for them.

The sad fact of the matter is that, for the most part, business schools do not talk about such things. For this reason, we purposely...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Argument
• 2  Digging DeeperJungian Psychology
• 3  What Is a System? What Is a Mess?
• 4  The Nature of Human NatureThe Psychodynamics of Everyday Life
• 5  The Management of KnowledgeSystems Age Inquiry
• 6  Heuristics for Managing Messes
• 7  How We Got into the Mess and Prospects for Getting Out
• Bibliography
• Index