Archive for the ‘Management Education’ Category

Through Imagining the Future of Leadership, a symposium at the Harvard Business School and accompanying blog series organized by Profs. Snook, Nohria and Khurana, an eclectic group of  thinkers gathered to investigate what is necessary today to develop the leaders we need for tomorrow.

This video (a The Crucial Skill for Tomorrow’s Leaders – Video – Harvard Business Review) provides a nice sample of the discussions that took place, featuring (in order of appearance):

Myself, Bill George (Harvard Business School and former CEO of Medtronic), Daisy Wademan Dowling (Leadership Development at Morgan Stanley), Andy Zelleke (Harvard Kennedy School), Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld (NYU), Evan Wittenberg (Global Leadership Development, Google, Inc.), Ellen Langer (Harvard), Scott Snook (HBS and retired Colonel, US Army Corps of Engineers).

My own contribution dealt with “The Soul of Leadership“, the notion that leadership builds on trust, and trust builds on values.

Research by my colleagues Mary Sully de Luque and Nathan Washburn shows that CEOs who frame decisions in pure economic terms tend to be perceived as more autocratic and less visionary than leaders who express concern for a broader set of stakeholders through, for example, a commitment to public good. And the more visionary a leader is perceived to be, the more willing employees are to go the extra mile and consequently deliver higher performance. [...]

Corporations may have “no body to kick and no soul to damn” as the old adage goes. But their leaders do. In fact, it is followers’ perceptions of a leader’s “soul” that can make or break the deal. One of the greatest challenges of any corporate leader is to convince everyone else that they will not compromise the interest of the corporation, if not society, for their own benefit.

My colleague Mansour Javidan, also in attendance, discussed how crucial Global Mindset will be in the future of leadership.

Leaders with a strong stock of Global Mindset know about cultures and political and economic systems in other countries and understand how their global industry works. They are passionate about diversity and are willing to push themselves. They are comfortable with being uncomfortable in uncomfortable environments. They are also better able to build trusting relationships with people who are different from them by showing respect and empathy and by being good listeners.

Richard Barker argues in HBR that management is not a profession.

I will argue that management is not a profession at all and can never be one. Therefore, business schools are not professional schools. Moreover, laudable and beguiling though professional standards and ethics may be, and however appealing professional status is, hanging the mantle “professional” on business education fosters inappropriate analysis and misguided prescriptions. (The Big Idea: No, Management Is Not a Profession – Harvard Business Review.)

While the arguments provide for a healthy debate, they are, as Rakesh Khurana aptly puts it, wrong:

We have to recognize that many business school graduates attain positions of social power and influence. Wherever the issue of power arises, we need to ask questions around responsibility and accountability. Business education has the potential to be a powerful influence in making business managers more accountable to the society they shape. Whether they went to business school or not, most managers in large organizations are impacted by individuals trained by business schools, the ideas that are diffused through business school publications, the cases taught in executive education programs, and the general tone set business schools set about the purpose of management and the relationship between corporations and society. For all these reasons, business schools themselves have the responsibility to make management a profession. (Why Management must be a profession – Harvard Business Review)

Business schools are finally asking themselves the key questions about their purpose and obligations towards society.  The notion of professionalism provides a very useful framework to address the question.  Professions exist to serve the greater good by applying specialized knowledge to solving complex problems.  They are built on a combination of training and institutionalized responsible conduct.  I’m yet to hear a better alternative to describe the purpose of management and drive decisions about management education. (Barker proposal does not do it in my view).

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Great conversation between The Economist Matthew Bishop (author of Philanthrocapitalism) and Nancy Lublin (CEO of Do Something and author of Zilch: The Power of Zero in Business).

It is true that leaders in the non profit sector have a lot to learn from the for-profit sector when it comes to management practice.  But as Nancy so eloquently argues, non-profits can provide extraordinary lessons when it comes to managing and motivating people Businesses would be well served by encouraging key staff to actively engage in non-profits.

Online video and audio: programmes and multimedia | The Economist.

By Thunderbird Knowledge Network Editor

LIMA — About 300 Peruvian women with big dreams for their microenterprises crowded into a makeshift auditorium June 21, 2010, for the launch of Proyecto Salta, a three-hour business course developed at Thunderbird School of Global Management in partnership with local training company Aprenda.

“The audience was absolutely captivated,” said Thunderbird Professor Christine Pearson, Ph.D., a curriculum contributor who attended the launch. “The material seems to be just the right level.”

Aprenda instructors repeated the free course twice in different locations on June 22. Overall, the program will reach 100,000 micro-entrepreneurs all over Peru within four years.

Many program participants have microloans from Mibanco and other Peruvian banks, and the goal of Proyecto Salta is to link access to capital with access to education.

Funding partners for the program include the Australian Agency for International Development and the Multilateral Investment Fund of Inter-American Development Bank.

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From today’s Financial Times:

Two concerns about the oath are that there is no sanction for those who break the pledge and that some of the commitments – to the environment for example – have left-leaning tendencies. Peter Escher, one of the founders of the oath at Harvard, defends the wording. “This was not intended to be a political oath. The environment has a legitimate claim on any organisation,” he says.

To try to kickstart discussions around ethics and sustainability, Angel Cabrera, president of Thunderbird in Arizona, instigated the concept of an oath at the school in 2005. Prof Cabrera describes himself as an “activist” in the MBA oath field and with Harvard’s Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria – Prof Nohria will be Harvard’s next dean – was instrumental in developing the oath project.

“We need to treat management as a profession. This is one way, but only one way, to do this. It’s not a panacea or complete solution.” He sees it as having real value within the business school community. “It changes the conversation. It puts pressure on us to rethink the curriculum.” Otherwise, he says, “You can go through an entire MBA programme without being told that corruption or bribing is not acceptable.”

Prof Cabrera argues that managers who sign the oath will still be fallible. “It does not mean these people are going out to get a 100 per cent score.” Mr Cooper agrees. “I think a lot of people see the oath as something in black and white. For me it is a set of principles to work towards.”

via FT.com / Business education – A pledge of good behaviour.

The Washington Post blog on leadership addresses higher education this week.  I argue that:

“Leaders of traditional institutions need to confront the new realities of the market place and ask themselves and their constituencies what unique value proposition their institutions can and should provide. In the era of MIT’s Open Courseware and Apple’s iTunes University, content differentiation cannot be the answer. Institutions will compete through their specific approaches to education, their values, their brands, their networks, their capacity to accommodate the preferences and needs of specific populations.”

via On Leadership Panelists: Future of higher ed: New tech means traditional universities must innovate or die. – Angel Cabrera.

By 2020, thousands of MBA graduates will hopefully have taken a professional oath and will start reaching the top steps of the corporate ladder.

From Bloomberg:

When Larry Estrada graduates from Harvard Business School next week, he’ll begin work at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. He’ll do so only after taking an oath.

Estrada, 30, joined about 150 fellow business school students and faculty worldwide to campaign for the acceptance of an MBA ethics pledge modeled on the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors. The aim is to get as many as 6,000 graduates at 50 MBA programs to swear they won’t put personal ambitions before the interests of their employers or society.

[...]

Other business schools have oaths or pledges as part of their graduation rituals. At the Rotterdam School of Management, part of Erasmus University in the Netherlands, students take a pledge promising to “act honourably, ethically and with integrity in respect to the values and interests of all stakeholders.”

Graduates of the Thunderbird School of Global Management have taken an “Oath of Honor” upon graduation since 2006. Thunderbird, a 64-year-old independent business school in Glendale, Arizona, is ranked No. 1 by U.S. News & World Report for international business programs. Harvard is fifth.

[...]

Nohria began thinking about an oath for business students in 1996, inspired partly by the example of his sister, a physician who took the Hippocratic Oath, named after Hippocrates, an ancient Greek considered the father of western medicine, he said.

“All my life I’ve believed that the work I do is no less responsible to society than the work that she does, and the contribution I make is no less than the contribution she makes,” Nohria said in an interview May 3. “When business leaders came under attack, one of the things I wondered was, how can we remind business leaders of the responsibility they have to society? How can we remind them that if they conduct themselves with honor and hold themselves to a high standard there’s no reason for them not to enjoy the respect that other professions do?”

via Bloomberg.com: News.

My colleague Bob Hisrich presented today on campus his latest book “International Entrepreneurship: Starting, Developing, and Managing a Global Venture“.  Bob likes to define entrepreneurship as “creating value, assuming risks and reaping rewards”.  When moving from a domestic market to a global scale, entrepreneurs take advantage of economic discontinuities and inefficiencies across borders and find ways to create value by bridging markets and tapping resources.

Global entrepreneurship is one of the core components of Thunderbird’s model of global leadership.  We use the term to refer not only to the creation of new enterprises, but to the establishment of new commercial relationships, business partnerships, investments or business expansions.   Global entrepreneurs envision new ways to create value where others only see obstacles.

No matter how we define it, the name of Merle Hinrichs ‘65 (in the picture in a recent visit with the President of Panama) keeps coming to mind as the perfect example of a global entrepreneur.

A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of presenting him with Thunderbird’s highest distinction (the honorary doctorate), in recognition for his many contributions to global trade (not to mention his service as a Thunderbird trustee, his philanthropic work using trade to combat poverty, or his multi-million dollar contributions to the School for the benefit of future global entrepreneurs).

Born and raised in Nebraska, Merle moved to Asia after graduating from Thunderbird.  In 1970 he founded what later became Global Sources (Nasdaq: GSOL), with the hope to facilitate trade between East and West and that way contribute to global prosperity and peace.  With time his company would become Asia’s leading business-to-business media company (which makes him, I suppose, a meta-global-entrepreneur: a global entrepreneur dedicated to empowering global entrepreneurs).

Today it is hard to imagine a world economy without China, but when Merle envisioned Global Sources, Nixon was yet to set foot in China.  Global markets are not inevitable, the are the result of entrepreneurial talent and hard work.  Congratulations Merle for being such great example of what we are about!

Interesting piece on the Boston Globe about the business oath movement.  It includes references to early conversations between HBS’ Dean-elect Nitin Nohria and the late Sumantra Ghoshal:

Ghoshal was a vocal critic of the “maximizing shareholder value” mantra, the idea, ascendant since the early 1980s, that share price should be the dominant yardstick for measuring the performance of managers. Ghoshal and others had come to believe that that worldview allowed managers to ignore their other, equally legitimate responsibilities: everything from the welfare of their own workers to the environmental impact of their products. And with compensation linked to share price, executives were inevitably tempted to do everything they could, legal and otherwise, to goose stock prices quarter by quarter, even if that damaged the company over the long run.

And an account of the process of professionalization of management:

The oath’s champions do not claim that it can transform business alone. They see it as a first step in the larger project of “professionalizing” the practice of management — turning it into a field, like law or architecture, whose practitioners are united not only by specialized knowledge but a shared set of values beyond personal enrichment.

“What professions do is come up with codes of conduct that benefit society or clients or patients. That’s missing in management,” says Gregory Unruh, an ethics scholar at Thunderbird School of Management who helped its students create the school’s oath.

In this sense, the term “profession” doesn’t just refer to a job, but a special sort of work that also represents a higher calling: Doctors make money, but their first directive is to heal people; lawyers can be rich, but their responsibility is to pursue justice for their clients.

“Many people who want to be in business today want to have the status of a profession without any of the constraints,” says Khurana.

via Executive honor – The Boston Globe.

GMAC runs this month a nice account of the emergence of the business oath movement in their latest Deans Digest newsletter (I appreciate the credit but this is a truly collective endeavor!).

It includes a reference to a neat initiative of The University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business: “since the spring of 2004, every graduate of an Ivey degree program takes the Pledge and receives an individually numbered Ivey Ring”. What makes this initiative particularly powerful is that it is led and sustained by alumni, which builds a sense of tradition around the principles of honorable professional practice.