The more we manage, the worse we make things. Does this ring true? To me this article* was insightful about some of the not-so-good things about business education today.
Acquiring business skills is ever more popular. In response suppliers are more innovative, generate lots of new products, new ideas, and new concepts, but do not necessarily add equivalent value to the practice of management, in fact much of it obscures the wood from the trees.
As well as producing a dense forest, many of these products are a regurgitation of obsolete ideas or poor concepts which perpetuate the wrong sort of management behaviour. Prescriptions about central planning, command and control systems that have long been discarded in the macro economic world, persist within the frameworks 'sold' to business even when current reality is a turbulent, chaotic and uncertain environment – far away from the stability needed for planning to be a successful strategic process. There is a lot in the forest that is not good wood!
I have worked within management education for more than 15 years. I have studied, designed learning–for, and taught strategy and change to executives from all sizes and descriptions of organisations, and at leading business schools. Based on this experience, and mindful of the needs of today's reality, future success will not reside with those leaders who know more and more – of the wrong stuff! Instead, quality intelligence will enable leaders to identify which old wood to change or fell, to focus on doing more of the right things and allow followers to create innovative new growth in the clearings.
* Simon Caulkin writing in The Observer, 1st October 2006