When Did Drucker Say That Management Is a Liberal Art
(The beginning in an ongoing series about how the Drucker School is addressing the challenges facing direction teams and business schools today.)
For a fourth straight year, MBA enrollments have been dropping everywhere—even at the Ivies. This fall a spate of articles published by business organisation media outlets lamented the pass up and asked why this is happening.
Does it mean that nosotros just don't need MBA programs anymore?
Our answer is no. What it does mean, though, is that MBA programs must change.
That is why we spent the by twelvemonth retooling our flagship MBA program to movement even closer to Peter Drucker'south principles and, in particular, to a point he made repeatedly: that management is a liberal fine art.
Continue your focus on people, the father of mod management theory said.
Peter was a firm proponent of the idea of "functioning societies"—that is, societies that provide individuals with social condition and a meaningful purpose for their lives. He became interested in direction because he realized people spend so much of their lives at work. He as well realized that managers accept a responsibleness to create and maintain good for you organizations in which people find meaning and purpose.
That means that a performance club requires sustainable organizations, in all sectors of society, that are run past ethical and responsible managers who pay attention to what they exercise to guild and for society. When nosotros train our MBA students, we must keep that in mind.
Management Exercise'south: Peter's List
In particular, at our school we have focused very closely on an essential listing of "Do's" that Peter's life and piece of work addressed. Because he was a humanist, he argued that managers should:
- Get things washed through people.
- Business organization themselves with people.
- Empathize human nature.
- Exist concerned with questions of efficiency and profitability and larger, more philosophical questions of morality, spirituality, emotional well-being and dignity.
- Emphasize personal, subjective, individual experiences.
- Provide people with status, function and a sense of customs and purpose.
- Let people to initiate and participate in decision-making.
- Have faith in human potential and human chapters for self-management and advisable behavior.
- Sympathise cultural or communal values and morals.
The problem today, however, is that non all management strategies accost or follow these. That attitude has also filtered into many business schools, which is why I believe that MBA programs are suffering in the instruction marketplace.
Numbers, not People
Headlines similar this one from the Washington Post paint a bleak picture of the MBA's future.
What's the hereafter? We have an answer.
One of the biggest challenges facing managers (and business schools) today is the intense focus on maximizing shareholder wealth that becomes the sole measure out of organizational success. When organizations, especially large ones, employ only numbers to make their decisions, the humanist focus that Peter emphasized gets lost.
When that delicate balance tips abroad from people to numbers, managers are treated more than as hired hands. That is, managers are hired into unfamiliar companies that run them through the strict application of financial controls, portfolio concepts, and marketplace-driven strategies. We believe that i upshot of this is that professional managers go responsible just to themselves, defective a greater moral, social, or ethical obligation to guild or their system.
When that delicate balance tips abroad from people to numbers, managers are treated more as hired hands.
Equally yous would expect, this perspective has filtered into business schools and is reflected in curricula that teach students to maximize shareholder wealth and to measure an organization's success past those shareholders alone.
The other problem facing business schools today is that they are under increasing pressure to provide specific employment-related grooming to enable students to better leverage the job market place upon graduation. We don't disagree with this at the Drucker Schoolhouse. Students should be concerned about the return on investment from their didactics—in the U.S., an MBA can cost every bit much as $130,000 while the average debt from an undergraduate teaching is around $37,000.
But as well much emphasis on shareholder wealth turns our business schools into institutions that train functionaries—that is, people who are highly specialized in the use of analytical techniques with no sense of their broader responsibility to a functioning society. In plough, specially for the millennial audiences out there, we believe that is why the management profession is viewed as having no social relevance.
How do we gear up this?
In my next post, I will offer some of our solutions at the Drucker School. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, I welcome your comments!
Drucker Day 2019: Don' Miss it! Learn More Here.
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/management-liberal-art-peter-drucker-thought-so-do-we-jenny-darroch
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