Permanent link The financial events of the last few weeks--which saw the dissolution of Lehman Brothers, the absorption of Merrill Lynch, the rescue of AIG, and related events--have been compared to the collapse of 1929. By any measure these events are cataclysmic and far reaching. What worries me is that they are far too unlikely to be discussed in business school curricula.
Major business schools develop relatively intense curricula that typically include core courses in finance, marketing, operations, decision analysis, accounting, economics, strategy, management, and perhaps ethics and management communications. The course work in these courses may or may not be coordinated, but even if they are, the course designers often assign readings and cases that create a tremendous volume of material on a daily basis. Students speak of learning to “drink from a fire hose.” The volume and rigor of these combined assignments ironically tend to drive students away from some activities that are essential to their long-term professional success, health and well being.
One of the casualties often is keeping up with the business media. When students are in class for five hours a day and preparing for the next day’s classes until well past midnight, there is little time for exercise, family, and leisure reading. Ironically, MBA candidates may go to school and because of their curriculum, find little time to keep up with current events in the business world.
Some argue that the pressures of the business school curriculum prepare students for the intense schedules of the working world—where they’ll have to carve time out their busy working days to read the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Business Week, Fortune, the Economist, the Far Eastern Economic Review, and so forth. Perhaps. I still find it ironic that in the places where we want to students to learn as much as they can about the business world, we do things that drive them away from staying current and relevant.
One way to fix this would be to include in the required core curriculum a course on business events. Such a class might meet once a week in groups of 30 to 60. The assignments might be to read something from an array of business media or to read one source more thoroughly. Or they might include some directions from time to time to find out all one can about a certain issue or company from all sources including the web. The class time then would be given to discussing the events of the week and what they mean. Students would come into class with a variety of information which they would share with each other thus enriching everyone’s understanding. Students would gain valuable experience calibrating the editorial slants of various publications and begin to settle on trusted sources. They would be pressed to sift through volumes of data and pick out the relevant, current and important. More importantly, they would augment their skills in identifying trends and patterns.
I’ve been in two institutions where such courses were proposed and in both cases they were dismissed as being non-rigorous, non-academic, and overly personal (as opposed to learning to run a business). The argument goes that in the same way that we would not teach a course on Personal Finance we should not teach a course on Current Business Events. Students should, detractors say, be doing this on their own.
The problem is, they aren’t, primarily because of the volume and structure of our required curricula.
A First Year student mentioned today that his peers in other schools were writing and texting asking each other about the conversations that were being had, or not, regarding the current financial crisis. I wonder what an overview of that poll would show. At one school, the students were lobbying the administration to set up a discussion panel. If a group of students have to lobby the faculty to set up a panel to discuss major business once-in-a-century events something must be wrong with our curricula. Maybe the student clubs will address the discussion issue. Maybe some faculty will on an ad-hoc basis drop the material for the day and discuss the major events. Again, though, if our regular curricula don’t make room for facilitated, reasoned, active, participative discussions on current business events, how can we claim to graduate people who know what they’re doing? Masters in Business Administration should, in my view, have developed the reading-to-keep-up habit by the time they graduate and not have to develop it on-the-job.
Permanent link Most incoming MBA students want to get immediately into their disciplinary classes. This is understandable. They’ve been planning this major transition in their lives. They’ve saved up or borrowed to make it happen. They’ve moved and they’re ready to go. Some of them may even be laboring under the old North American stereotype, fire, fire, fire, ready, aim. But students and administrators who design and deliver their programs without some context setting at the outset are bypassing a major opportunity, the opportunity to set a very important frame around their business education.
Every cohort of MBA who move through an MBA program will be facing a large number of society-wide issues and challenges. One wonders how many of them will address these challenges and how many of them will “just” focus on enhancing their own wealth and influence. You and I could come up with a list of these challenges pretty easily. We could also poll the students to find out what they, en masse, think is facing their world. Either way, the list will surely include the following:
1. How can we meet the world’s energy demands?
2. How can learn to do business in a sustainable way that doesn’t destroy the place where we live?
3. How can manage an increasingly diverse labor pool effectively?
4. How can we contribute to a stable environment in which we can do business in peace?
5. How can we help an increasingly aging population get fair and distributed basic health care?
6. How can we manage graft and corruption that sucks billions of dollars out of a productive global system?
7. How can we manage socio-economic disparities with aplomb and in ways that ensure the continuity of society?
Surely there are other issues on our collective tables, but this is a reasonable starting menu.
I believe that incoming MBAs should wrestle with these questions before they get mired in the differences between debits and credits, the calculation of weighted average cost of capital, the ways to encourage people to buy things they may or may not need, and the intricacies of derivatives. They should be asked questions like:
1. What do you plan to do with the new-found information and skills you will develop in your program?
2. How can you use your talents to better society?
3. How can you use your skills to become a net contributor rather than a net taker?
4. How can you, with your skill, talent, and education, address the issues that face your generation?
Every generation of course will face different issues. Each cohort that graduates from business school annually will face their own challenges and issues—and over time that agenda will evolve and migrate.
So why is it that we invite people to business school and have them jump right into the basics of disciplinary detail in finance, accounting, marketing, operations, economics, decision analysis, strategy, and management without pausing to consider why they are being endowed with this education in the first place?
I’m not saying that we should overlook or ignore the internal inside-out desire to better one’s station in life. Fair enough. Let’s add to that though a perspective on an MBA education that tees up a set of issues confronting our society in which these people will function and flourish and extract their livings. Let’s invite them to be conscious in the backs of their minds that the MBA education they’re receiving brings with it some social responsibility. I would even argue that it seems clear after sixty years of living that the religious leaders and the political leaders are not producing a safer world and that our future lies in the hands of international business people who, for the sake of doing a stable deal, will overlook characteristics that seem to drive the other two groups nuts.
I think incoming MBA students should be asked to read the Atlantic article on the “Shipbreakers” in India, view the related CBS Sixty Minute segment, and then talk about where all the junk in the world is going. They should know that according to one of my students from Nigeria that central Africa is becoming the automobile junkyard of Japan. Japan has a law that you cannot own a car older than ten years. This helps pollution and the car industry no doubt. So they load these ten year old cars on boats and ship them to central Africa where the people are delighted to have well made cars at a discount. The problem is when the cars breakdown, they can’t afford to fix them, so old Japanese cars are piling up in central Africa.
They should read the Scientific American article describing how the United States could derive all of its energy pollution free from the sun within the century if it chose to do so and ask why isn’t this happening?
They should read the article “Why Doctors Make Mistakes,” add the insight that more people die in the US from medical mistakes than from car accidents, and discuss how to reform the healthcare systems used in the world so that fair and evenly distributed health care is available to all who need it.
They should read about how graft and corruption are draining the productive efforts of countries, not companies, and discuss the need to fix that. They should listen to Gordon Gecko in the film Wall Street declare that “greed is good” and discuss the pros and cons of that assertion, especially in the maelstrom of today’s economic melt downs.
They should understand that racism, sexism, bigotry, prejudice and bias are alive and well in the world and the private sector appears to be the only place where humans seem modestly able to overcome them.
We tried creating such a contextual frame for our MBA program for three years at my school. It was a challenge. First, the invited interdisciplinary faculty instructors were reluctant to lead discussions on topics on which they were not experts. My reply was, “You don’t need to know the answers; you just need to facilitate a lively discussion about the issues. This is the beginning, not the end.” Most were distinctly uncomfortable with that set up. The students were also impatient. They wanted to dive straightway into the “real” classes and begin learning the disciplinary details. Spending five 90 minute classes over the course of week creating a backdrop and a foundation for their studies seemed, in today’s sound byte world, too long.
Maybe we assume that since we often ask on admissions forms for an essay about what you plan to do with your MBA that we’ve covered the context issue. Maybe we grow faint at the prospect of inviting young ambitious people to pause and get in tune with their, and our, social context. Maybe we think it’s not our place to ask people to consider these questions. Maybe we think someone else will deal with the challenges and issues. Maybe we fear to appear to be too idealistic or value based. (At the same time, though, we purport to teach, even to inspire, them to be leaders.)
On the other hand, we all live in this increasingly Friedman-ian flat world and the behavior of these hordes of graduating MBAs will affect us all. Is it too much to ask them take a time out in their Pamplonian charge to riches, fame and glory and consider what’s happening around them? Is it too much to invite them to think about how they might become net contributors instead of net takers in society? Is it too much to invite them to use their collective prodigious power to address and perhaps resolve some of the major issues facing all of us in the global community? Why shouldn’t the business education institutions of the world prime the experience they deliver to their students with a few moments of context setting introduction? Let's orient them to their upcoming studies in a challenging world. They will get precious little of that once the “real” program begins, working as they do ‘til past midnight every night trying to find the right number.
Permanent linkI've been teaching a career management course for 30 years, first at HBS and then here at the Darden School, UVA. I'm surprised at how important career decisions are to people and at how little rigor they bring to those decisions. The result is a modified trial-and-error methodology that unfortunately leads to current statistics of something like 5-8 career changes for most graduating MBAs. People use a variety of techniques for making career decisions: serendipity, opportunistic, creation, and peer pressure. Given the high proportion of habitual behavior among most people, a matching approach seems to be the obvious best approach. By matching approach, I mean making decisions based on goodness of fit between personal habits or enduring life themes and the demands of any particular job, career or organizational culture.
The problem is that most people don't know themselves well enough and in enough detail to make a good decision based on goodness of fit between themselves and the demands of a job. Well, you might say, I know myself well. Really? What are your habitual ways of thinking? How do you prefer to process information? What's your preferred social structure and style? Have you analyzed your preferred lifestyle? What about your analytic skills? Energy level? Biochemical brain balances leading to or away from ADD, OCD, BPD, etc.? The danger with any degree of self awareness is what we might call "benign self deception." If you make career decisions based on your momentary reflections of who you are and what you want, be careful! You may overlook some key factors (habits or themes) in your life that will surface after you've taken the job--and then you'll be looking again.
Those who make career decisions on a rigorous self assessment are likely to make better decisions than those who don't. So then the question is, "how can I get a good self assessment to use in my career search and decision making?" There are thousands of self assessment tools out there, some of them trash and some of them quite helpful. But consider this premise: no single instrument is accurate enough or comprehensive enough to give you confidence in making career decisions.
There are just too many variables to consider in one instrument and too many variables in the answering of the questionnaire items to trust your career future or even a part of it to one instrument. The answer is to take several self assessment tools and look for the repeating patterns or themes or the tips of iceberg habits that appear across instruments. This requires some time and effort and some skill at inductive logic (looking at the data and generating the principles). Too much time and effort your say? Compare that with the cost of time and effort in working in a job that doesn't fit you and then doing it all over again in 1-3 years. Why not invest up front and narrow your career search to the band of jobs that would likely fit you better?
My colleagues and I have ported the text I used (and was the lead author on-- Self Assessment and Career Development) to the web to offer this kind of service. You can preview it at www.CareerNextStep.com. There are more than a dozen instruments there for you to use in your search for a rigorous listing of your career defining personal characteristics. But whether you use Career Next Step or not, whenever you approach your next major personal or professional decision, please, consider carefully (preferably data-based) your dominant Life Themes (cognitive, interpersonal, social, professional, etc.) before you decide. If you choose ignoring them, the odds are you'll be unhappy and be making the same decision again shortly. Save yourself a boat load of time and effort by investing in a good self assessment up front. Permanent linkFirst, may I distinguish between strategic and tactical leadership. Tactical Leadership is based on the courage and determination that individuals throughout the organization can display when things that need to get done aren't getting done. Strategic Leadership has to do with setting the future path of an organization. There are lots of theories out there about strategy ranging in intentionality from "logical incrementalism" to "creating the future."
My concern here is with those who want to expand their leadership influence in an organization or those who are already in executive roles and are concerned that their organization is not developing leaders faster and better. In that regard, I see two main reasons why there's a lack of leadership.
The first is a lack of strategic story. Most people, in my experience, if you ask them, "what do you think the strategy of your organization ought to be?" haven't much if anything to say. They may complain about what they see, but they have nothing to offer in its place. They haven't developed their own strategic story for the path the organization should pursue. In my view, a good strategic story has at least six pieces: a clear and memorable and inspiring mission statement, a clear and detailed vision statement of where we want to go, a clear and short values statement of the core principles upon which we will be making our decisions, a strategy statement (the longest of these pieces) that describes how we're going get from where we are to where we want to be (vision), and a statement of short-term operating goals (STOGs). In my experience, far too many executives misconstrue STOGs as strategy. All of these elements taken together can be called an "organizational charter." One could, and I believe, should develop detailed charters for their organization, their current work group (that they lead), and for themselves. In other words, we can think of strategic issues occuring at the organizational, work group and personal levels, and using the structure of a charter will help individuals round out their strategic thinking. My book on Level Three Leadership has a chapter on Personal and Organizational Charters if you're interested in more details.
The second major reason there's a lack of leadership is the fear of rejection. IF a person has a strategic story to tell, that is, they've done their strategic homework and have a set of beliefs about what they think the organization should do, then the question is "what proportion of your life are you living inside-out versus outside-in?" Unless the average in your life is above fifty percent inside-out, I believe the odds of you becoming a leader are minimal. Clearly neither extreme, zero or 100 percent inside-out-ness are good: spineless or self centered boor. But if you worry more about what others will think than about the goodness or truthfulness or importance of your strategic story, you won't have the courage to say what you believe and with conviction.
If you want to be a more effective leader, consider these two questions:
1. Have I developed an organizational charter for my organization? If not, I won't have anything to say.
2. Am I leading my life on-balance more inside-out than outside-in? If not, I'll be too worried about what others think of me to be honest and direct about what I see.
We'll come back later in another post to the question about how executives can develop more leaders in their organizations. Permanent linkEd Schein in his wonderful book, Leadership and Organizational Culture, and in his previous works as an anthropologist cum business school professor, outlined three levels of cultural observation: artifacts, rituals and underlying assumptions. For the past ten years, I've used a parallel structure to frame leadership and managing change seminars all over the world. These three levels of analysis are:
Level 1. Visible Behavior (what one can capture on film)
Level 2. Conscious Thought (the consciously cognitive realm)
Level 3. Values, Assumptions, Beliefs, and Expectations about the way the world is or should be.
This model has been very useful for its simultaneous simplicity and complexity, for its ease in understanding for practicing lay managers, and for its power in uncovering the roots of human behavior, singly, in groups, or en masse.
Further, when one asks executive groups all over the world, as I have, what proportions of the behavior at all three levels of the people you've met in life are habitual, the conversations get very poignant very quickly. They typically say, 75%, 85% and 95 to 100% respectively. If indeed that much of our behavior is habitual (unthinkingly repetitive), then every educational experience faces a huge challenge--and indeed, every individual faces a huge challenge--can I rise above my habits to be an intentional being? This is THE fundamental question in life, first posed for me by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in his book, The Evolving Self: will you ever be anything more than a vessel transmitting the genes and the memes (in my parlance VABEs) of previous generations on to the next? Sadly, he opines, the answer for most people is "no." I agree with him. Only the few will transcend or rise above their genetic and memetic legacies and become a self leader, an intentional adult. How could one presume to lead others if one is unable to lead one's self?
The challenge for every would-be leader then is first to become aware of one's own VABE's or memes and sort through which to KEEP, which to LOSE, and which to ADD in order to become a better leader. Recipes about leadership steps that are momentarily remembered at Level Two and promptly forgotten don't cut it. Only those principles that settle down to Level Three are likely to become lasting shapers of behavior. Further, only connections at Level Three are likely to shape others--hence the need for more Level Three Leaders--those who are comfortable working at Level Three and at influencing others at Level Three. Those who lead at Level One ("Do what I tell you without asking questions!") and those who lead at Level Two ("Here's why you should do what I tell you!") ultimately will be touching only the surface of human behavior whether at the individual, interpersonal, group, or organizational size-circles.
Finally, here's the most destructive VABE around: "I'm right and you're wrong." More damage has been done and is being done in the world based on that single assumption than any other. I don't see the political leaders or the religious leaders in the world making it a peaceful, safer place. Only the international business leaders who are willing to compromise that assumption for the sake of a deal, to create commerce, will have the flexibility to create a peaceful world culture.
What about you? What are your core Level Three VABEs? Do they include "I'm right and you're wrong?" If so, perhaps you should adjust...or else you'll be nothing but a rider on the tips of spears thrown by previous generations. |
Hi! This is an opportunity to share ideas on a number of Business Leadership and Management related topics. I hope you'll enjoy the discussions to the left. If you have other topics you'd like to engage, let me know. Cheers, Jim
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