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No, Management Is
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by Richard Barker
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Harvard Business Review
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Idea in Brief—the core idea
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Article Summary
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No, Management Is
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a Profession
Some business skills can’t be
taught in a classroom. They
have to be learned through
experience.
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Idea in Brief
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The big idea:
Although managers can be formally trained and qualified, and their social status is similar to that of doctors and lawyers, management is not a profession.
The argument: We rely on professional bodies to define what their members should know and to certify them as fit for practice. But the abilities and learning required to be a good manager don’t lend themselves to such oversight—and business education is more about acquiring the skill of integration than about mastering a set body of knowledge.
A better approach: The key is to recognize that integration is learned rather than taught: It takes place in the minds of MBA students, who link the various elements of the program. Business education is not one-size-fits-all, and, most important, it should be collaborative rather than competitive.
For the exclusive use of S. Sadeghi, 2020.
This document is authorized for use only by Sohail Sadeghi in FE202 (A) Organizational Leadership taught by Koppman, S., University of California - Irvine from Sep 2020 to Mar 2021.
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No, Management Is
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a Profession
by Richard Barker
harvard business review • july–august 2010 page 2
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Some business skills can’t be taught in a classroom. They have to be
learned through experience.
It is natural to view management as a profession. Managers’ status is similar to that of doctors or lawyers, as is their obligation to contribute to the well-being of society. Managers can also be for- mally trained and qualified, notably by earning an MBA. If management is a profession, the business school is a professional school.
That perception has fueled criticism of busi- ness schools during the recent economic crisis. They have come under fire for allegedly failing in their obligation to educate socially responsi- ble business leaders. The same perception has informed the schools’ response, which has been to work toward greater professionalism. Writing in the June 2009 issue of Harvard Busi- ness Review, Joel Podolny, a former dean of the Yale School of Management, argued, “An occu- pation earns the right to be a profession only when some ideals, such as being an impartial counsel, doing no harm, or serving the greater good, are infused into the conduct of people in that occupation. In like vein, a school becomes a professional school only when it infuses those ideals into its graduates.”
Podolny is in sympathy with Harvard Busi- ness School professors Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria, who argued in the October 2008 issue of HBR that it was time to make manage- ment a true profession. In their view, “True professions have codes of conduct, and the meaning and consequences of those codes are taught as part of the formal education of their members.” Yet, they wrote, “unlike doctors and lawyers,” managers don’t “adhere to a universal and enforceable code of conduct.”
These calls to professionalism are hardly new. Writing in the very first issue of HBR, in 1922, HBS professor John Gurney Callan claimed, “Business...may be thought of as a profession [and] we may profitably spend a good deal of time in considering what is the best professional training for [those] who are to take important executive positions in the coming generation.”
A. Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard University, was even more assertive in his 1923 HBR essay “The Profession of Busi- ness” (adapted from his address to the incom-
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No, Management Is Not a Profession
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ing class at HBS the previous September). He attributed the very creation of HBS to the emergence of business management as a dis- tinct profession.
In contrast with these views, 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 pro- fessional status is, hanging the mantle “profes- sional” on business education fosters inappro- priate analysis and misguided prescriptions.
Let’s begin by examining what actually con- stitutes a profession.
What Is a Profession?
Professions are made up of particular catego- ries of people from whom we seek advice and services because they have knowledge and skills that we do not. A doctor, for example, can recommend a course of treatment for an illness; a lawyer can advise us on a course of legal action. We cannot make these judgments ourselves—and often we cannot judge the quality of the advice we receive. The Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow wrote about the med- ical profession, “The value of information is frequently not known in any meaningful sense to the buyer; if, indeed, he knew enough to measure the value of information, he would know the information itself. But information, in the form of skilled care, is precisely what is being bought from most physicians, and, in- deed, from most professionals.”
It is true, of course, that most nonprofes- sional providers of goods and services also have knowledge that we don’t. We cannot, for instance, manufacture a computer or operate a train service. Nevertheless, we can judge whether or not our demand has been met: We know what to expect from our computer, and we know if our train is delayed. The difference is that we might act on a lawyer’s advice and not know its quality, even after the case has been completed. Perhaps she gave us good ad- vice but the case was lost, or vice versa. The outcome might have been more or less favor- able had her advice been different. We are in no position to know, because the professional is the expert and we are not. There is an asym- metry of knowledge.
In some cases the knowledge asymmetry is relatively transient. A taxi driver in a foreign
town provides us with a service, using his knowledge of the local geography. Once we ar- rive at our destination, however, we can ask a local whether the driver’s route was the most direct, and thus reduce the asymmetry. But who evaluates legal advice for us? Although we could ask another lawyer, he couldn’t offer a second opinion without being informed of the details of our case—which would amount to hiring two lawyers to do the work of one. Fur- thermore, the two lawyers might advise us dif- ferently, and we’d be unable to distinguish the better advice.
In practice, our lawyer herself implicitly as- sures us that we can rely on the legal advice she is giving. This relatively permanent knowl- edge asymmetry is the mark of the true profes- sion; as consumers, we have no option but to trust the professionals with whom we transact. Nevertheless, we might be unwilling to trans- act at all without some guarantee that the ser- vices we receive meet a minimum quality threshold. That requires the existence of pro- fessional bodies, whose regulatory role enables consumers to trust their advisers, thereby mak- ing a market for professional services feasible.
For a professional body in any given field to function, a discrete body of knowledge for that field must be defined, and the field’s bound- aries must be established: When, for example, is something a medical or legal issue, and when is it not? There must also be a reasonable consensus within the field as to what the knowledge should consist of: If physicians can- not agree on how the human body functions, or lawyers on the nature of a contract, no dis- crete body of knowledge can be said to exist. The boundaries and consensus for any profes- sion will evolve over time, but at any given mo- ment they can be defined—which is what en- ables formal training and certification. Certification signals competence to consumers who would benefit from it.
Professional bodies hold a trusted position. They have, in effect, a contract with society at large: They control membership in the profes- sions through examination and certification, maintain the quality of certified members through ongoing training and the enforcement of ethical standards, and may exclude anyone who fails to meet those standards. Society is re- warded for its trust with a professional quality that it would otherwise be unable to ensure. This is the model for the legal and medical pro-
Richard Barker
(r.barker@jbs.cam .ac.uk) is a professor at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School in England, where he served as director of the MBA program from 2003 to 2008.
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No, Management Is Not a Profession
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harvard business review • july–august 2010 page 4
fessions and others, including accounting, ar- chitecture, and engineering.
As I will argue, neither the boundaries of the discipline of management nor a consensus on the requisite body of knowledge exists. No pro- fessional body is granted control, no formal entry or certification is required, no ethical standards are enforced, and no mechanism can exclude someone from practice. In short, man- agement is not a profession. Moreover, man- agement can never be a profession, and poli-
cies predicated on the assumption that it can are inherently flawed.
Why Not Management?
One might ask, If medicine can reach agree- ment on the requisite body of knowledge for becoming a physician, why can’t business do the same for management? After all, isn’t the MBA a general-management qualification, and isn’t there a reasonable consensus on MBA curriculum content? It is generally agreed that nobody should be allowed to prac- tice medicine without schooling and certifica- tion; is society not also at risk from a business leader with no license to operate? Moreover, don’t several organizations, including the Graduate Management Admission Council and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, play roles similar to those of established professional bodies? And why shouldn’t we introduce and enforce ethical standards?
Asking whether a consensus can be reached on the body of knowledge that qualifies some- one to be a manager—on the basis of which society would delegate control of the training for, certification in, and practice of manage- ment to a professional body—is not the same as asking whether consensus is possible on the MBA curriculum. That is a narrower question of whether business schools can agree on what they should teach. The real issue is whether what the schools do teach qualifies students to manage, in the way that an MD qualifies some- one to practice medicine. I will argue that the answer is no, and that therefore management cannot become a profession.
Consider the nature of a business contract, which in its narrowest form is a detailed, pre- cisely worded document, drafted by a profes- sional lawyer and specifying the terms of an agreement, including prescribed remedies in the event of certain outcomes. The contract is the re- sult of a professional service delivered to manag- ers. Managers also seek the services of account- ing firms for internal audits, of engineering consultancies for capital expenditure projects, and so on. Each transaction requires the special- ized skills of a professional. Each is also an out- put from the professional’s perspective and an input from the manager’s perspective.
The manager, however, is responsible for bringing together many inputs. The lawyer is always concerned with matters of law, whereas
The MBA Debate: It’s Not Over Yet
Business schools are under attack as a result of the economic crisis. MBAs, per- haps especially those from our parent, Harvard Business School, have come under fire for supposedly putting their own interests ahead of those of employ- ees, customers, and even shareholders. Management education is broken, the indictment reads, and we need to make fundamental changes to it.
Many people believe there’s some truth to these charges. The debate, there- fore, is really about how business schools should respond. A number of experts, in- cluding Nitin Nohria, the new dean of HBS, argue that management should have a rigorous professional code. In a landmark HBR article, Nohria and HBS professor Rakesh Khurana eloquently called for a return to the intent of HBS’s founders, which was to create a cadre of managers as skilled and disciplined in their field as Harvard-trained lawyers and doctors were in theirs.
Some experts view the issue differ- ently. McGill University’s Henry Mintz- berg, for example, believes that MBA pro- grams already straitjacket managers—by encouraging the development of narrow functional expertise rather than the inte- grative skills that define effective man- agement. (See his HBR article “The Five Minds of a Manager,” written with Jonathan Gosling.) This month’s Big Idea feature is very much in this vein. Richard Barker, a former director of the MBA pro- gram at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School, argues that manage-
ment by its very nature cannot be de- fined as narrowly and precisely as a pro- fession, and that the essence of an MBA resides not in professional training but in the broader experience of the business school as a learning environment.
Other commentators weigh in some- where in the middle. A former dean of the Yale School of Management, Joel Podolny, asserted in his HBR article “The Buck Stops (and Starts) at Business School” that although MBA programs need to inculcate professional standards akin to those for lawyers and doctors, the curriculum should be designed along lines that Barker and Mintzberg would probably agree with.
Harvard Business Review
has been a leading forum for discussion of the MBA’s future. In addition to publishing the arti- cles mentioned here, the magazine has hosted a fascinating online debate (see http://blogs.hbr.org/how-to-fix-business-
schools/) joined by B-school deans and educators from around the world. The ex- changes have been spirited and some- times even testy. We urge readers to en- gage with them. Management education will never become more responsive to the needs of business in particular and society in general without the involve- ment of the practitioners who graduate and recruit from business schools.
We have invited Nohria and Khurana to comment on Barker’s article at hbr.org. Please join the debate.
—The Editors
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the manager’s focus may change significantly and unpredictably from one day to the next. In general, the professional is an expert, whereas the manager is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none—the antithesis of the professional.
The argument can be taken further. The lawyer writes a contract and charges for her time; her work is finite. Even when she has an ongoing relationship with a corporate client, her contribution is always a specialized input, measurable in terms of the amount billed. But the manager is responsible for the combined value generated by all inputs to the firm. In- puts are managed at varying stages in a prod- uct’s life cycle, and at any given time products are at different stages in that life cycle—mean- ing the manager’s job is never done. The man- ager’s contribution is inherently difficult to measure and has an indeterminable impact on a variety of outcomes. The difference between
the lawyer’s world and the manager’s is rather like that between the value of a single revenue transaction and the value of a company as a whole. As a completed output with a monetary value, the revenue transaction is relatively ob- jective. A company’s share price is subjective— dependent on imprecise assumptions concern- ing a range of inputs, and ultimately a best guess about the future.
All this accords, of course, with the reality that no true professional bodies have emerged in the field of management. Consider again an analogy with medicine: Although we cannot expect an unqualified person to successfully conduct brain surgery, successful businesses are frequently run by people without MBAs. It is unthinkable that society would allow an un- qualified person to even attempt brain surgery, but nobody would seriously suggest that an MBA be required for entry to management. We can, of course, offer business education, in- cluding certification in the form of MBAs and other degrees, and such education can reason- ably be assumed to generate better managers. Yet the difference between a business educa- tion and a professional education is stark and fundamental: The former may help individuals improve their performance, but it cannot cer- tify their expertise. The role of the manager is inherently general, variable, and indefinable.
Business Education
The inherent differences between the profes- sions and management have direct implica- tions for the design of education in each. Pro- fessional education enables an individual to master the body of knowledge deemed requi- site for practice. It comprises three stages: ad- mission, during which potential entrants are screened for intellectual ability and aptitude; a taught program, during which educators im- part knowledge of the subject; and formal as- sessment, which leads to certification. Busi- ness education also involves admission, a taught program, and assessment, but the simi- larity is superficial only. If business educators, imbued with notions of professionalism, fail to recognize the fundamental differences, flaws in the business education model will inevita- bly result.
Admission. Professional education is about taking a given individual on the journey from having little or no knowledge or experience to becoming qualified. But business education is
A Code of Business Ethics?
A professional body determines and en- forces a code of ethics. This process is fundamental to the very existence of any profession, because it enables society to trust that members of the body are serv- ing the public interest.
Management is not a profession. It has no code of ethics, much less a mecha- nism to enforce one. Does that make business ethics a lost cause?
A code of business ethics is in principle achievable, albeit challenging because of management’s broad and undefined scope. HBS professors Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria offer a prototype in their 2008 HBR article “It’s Time to Make Management a True Profession,” which could no doubt provide the basis for a generally accepted code. The greater problem is enforcement. The professions have monopoly control over member- ship; they can restrict entry and force exit. No such model is available in man- agement, which doesn’t require a license.
Business schools can make a difference by building on core strengths rather than emulating the professions. The subject of ethics provides excellent raw material in an environment where students are
learning as much about themselves as about technical or functional subjects, and where the learning comes as much from interaction with their peers, inside and outside class, as from classroom in- teraction with the professor. In that envi- ronment, discussion of an ethical issue such as conflict of interest has great value: Students must consider what they would do if faced with the issue and think through the consequences. Equally im- portant, they experience firsthand how their peers would react to their choosing one road rather than another. If a certain behavior is unacceptable to your peers, and if they are important to you person- ally and to your career, unethical business practice becomes less likely.
Business ethics belongs in the curricu- lum but can be learned effectively only in the right environment. Business schools should ensure that students understand the situations in which ethical decisions are made, and in particular that they grasp the personal implications of such decisions. The focus, in short, should be on the core strength of the business school as a learning environment.
—R.B.
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typically post-experience, meaning that partic- ipants are not novices. An MBA program offers them an opportunity to share, conceptualize, and better understand workplace experiences; to build on the skill of working with others; and to open up new career opportunities. To admit only students with little or no work experience, as the professions normally do, would be to misunderstand the nature and purpose of the learning experience.
A second difference is that although profes- sional education is concerned exclusively with the individual, a quality business education depends in a distinctive way on the peer group. Thus no given candidate can be effec- tively evaluated independent of all the other candidates.
Suppose you wanted to provide a course in international business. Most people would probably agree that learning international business is not about the textbook acquisition of technical knowledge but, rather, about a concentrated exposure to the breadth of expe- rience and understanding that helps make someone a better global manager. A prerequi- site for learning is therefore diversity in the classroom—which requires that the nature of admissions be rethought.
This is particularly a problem for manage- ment education in the United States. A typical class in a top-tier U.S. school might be made up of 70% American students, 20% interna- tional students with close ties to the U.S., and 10% genuine “outsiders.” International business is taught by means of case studies, which allow students to discuss subjects ranging from trade
relationships with China to cross-cultural man- agement in Eastern Europe to outsourcing in India. This process, unfortunately but inevita- bly, is superficial. It is unrealistic to think that American students who have had American ex- periences—even when they have the benefits of a good textbook and a great professor—can conjure up a meaningful understanding of in- ternational business through class discussion, however academically gifted they may be.
Because a student at business school has a direct impact on the learning of others, the strongest class is likely to be the strongest com- bination of individuals. Many graduates recog- nize the truth of this. Jacklyn Sing, an alumna of the MIT Sloan School of Management, de- scribes a view among alumni: “Some of the classes proved useful to their current work [but] the specifics fade in the memory. It is the people in the program that shape the experi- ence and make all the difference.”
This view will be familiar to anyone who has studied or worked at a business school. For technical training to fade in the memory would be alarming in a medical doctor, but it is understandable in business school alumni. Again, that is because business education is not about mastering a body of knowledge.
The program. Consider the following find- ing from a formal review of the MBA program at London Business School: “The corporate leaders we interviewed indeed produced an extensive list of qualities they desired in future recruits, but almost none involved functional or technical knowledge. Rather, virtually all their requirements could be summed up as fol-
The Value of the MBA Program
In a survey about their experience in Cambridge University’s MBA program, alumni were asked to rate the usefulness in their current careers of the aspects below, on a scale of 1 to 5. They valued most highly what they had learned outside the classroom. As for classroom subjects, they val- ued the general skills of strategy and leadership above more-focused disciplines such as marketing, operations, and finance.
SOURCE JUDGE BUSINESS SCHOOL
EXPERIENCES WITHIN CAMBRIDGE
OTHER CORE CLASSES
STRATEGY AND LEADERSHIP CLASSES
CONSULTING PROJECTS
OUT-OF-CLASS EXPERIENCES WITHIN BUSINESS SCHOOL
OUT-OF-CLASS
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No, Management Is Not a Profession
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lows: the need for more thoughtful, more aware, more sensitive, more flexible, more adaptive managers, capable of being moulded and developed into global executives.” LBS summarizes these requirements as attributes rather than skills. They are intrinsically soft and indefinable. They can probably be learned, especially in a business school envi- ronment, but it is not obvious that they can be taught, which is what would be expected from a professional school.
The exhibit “The Value of the MBA Pro- gram” shows some findings from a survey of approximately 600 MBA alumni of Cam- bridge University. In terms of its usefulness in their careers, the alumni valued the learning environment above the curriculum itself. They ranked learning that took place outside the business school classroom, and more broadly in the university, as the most useful. Next came company-based consulting projects, which are not part of the taught curriculum but are a component of small-group learning. Within the curriculum itself the softer skills of strategy and leadership were most prized. Clearly, the environment within which people learn can be more powerful than the specific material taught.
None of this is to say that functional areas are unimportant. Rather, we need to broaden our perspective on business education. Any business needs effective execution in func- tional areas, but that is not the role of the gen- eral manager, of the business leader. The gen- eral manager should have an understanding of these areas, and the combination of textbook learning and classroom discussion is an effec- tive way to achieve it. But it would be a mis- take to think that business education stops there. The manager must also acquire the core skill of integration and decision making across various functional areas, groups of people, and circumstances.
The skill of integration distinguishes manag- ers and is at the heart of why business educa- tion should differ from professional education. Yet business schools have always wrestled with how best to help students acquire this skill. The difficulty is partly structural. Faculty mem- bers almost universally specialize in one func- tional area and typically lack the expertise to teach (or sometimes even to cross-reference) material from others. Case studies, which are typically written from a functional perspective,
reinforce this limitation. The Yale School of Management has pioneered a curriculum based on the co-teaching of integrated classes, but this is a challenging model that others are unlikely to follow.
The key here is to recognize that integration is not taught but learned. It takes place in the minds of the students rather than in the con- tent of program modules. The students them- selves link the various elements of the pro- gram. Thus it is vital that business schools understand themselves primarily as learning environments, where individuals develop at- tributes, rather than as teaching environments, where students are presented with a body of functional and technical content.
First and foremost, business education should be collaborative. Consider Oxford Uni- versity’s MBA program, in which a class has about 240 students, each with about six years of work experience, who represent nearly 50 countries and almost all sectors of the econ- omy. That amounts to some 1,500 years of ex- perience. The pedagogical opportunities in sharing it are obvious—and they require an en- vironment in which students actively work to- gether and learn from one another. This goes much deeper than networking, the much-cited benefit of business schools. Networking is im- portant in the professions, too, and doctors and lawyers are equally likely to look back on school relationships with a warm glow. But in a collaborative learning environment the peo- ple around you are more than just colleagues and friends; they are an explicit and valuable part of your educational experience. It follows from this that effective business education can- not be delivered exclusively online, because online delivery is a teaching mechanism, not a learning environment. Dick Schmalensee, a former dean of MIT Sloan, has acknowledged, “We’re trying to maximize the quality of what we deliver and don’t feel going online will help us achieve that.” Implicit is the recognition that business education is about more than the acquisition of textbook knowledge.
Moreover, business education is explicitly not one-size-fits-all. Most MBA students have prior work experience; each of them is build- ing in a unique way on a unique foundation and will experience the program differently, learn different things, and emerge to pursue a different career. An important implication is that learning needs differ according to the
The typical U.S. MBA
class is made up of
70% Americans, 20%
internationals with
close ties to the U.S., and
10% “outsiders.”
For the exclusive use of S. Sadeghi, 2020.
This document is authorized for use only by Sohail Sadeghi in FE202 (A) Organizational Leadership taught by Koppman, S., University of California - Irvine from Sep 2020 to Mar 2021.
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stage of a student’s career. For example, a younger student might gain little from study- ing the responsibilities and functions of boards of directors but might need precisely that knowledge 15 or 20 years later. In other words, business education is best delivered in doses throughout a career, rather than in a single shot at the beginning.
In this regard, the Insead model is exem- plary. The one-year MBA program, which was pioneered by Insead, is successful in part be- cause some of the fundamental benefits of im- mersion in a business school environment can be captured within one year; the second year conveys primarily technical or functional knowledge. Exposure to the learning environ- ment over time, however, continues to bring benefits, so Insead also runs one of the largest executive education programs in the world. It is a lifelong learning partner, not a one-stop certification shop. That is precisely what busi- ness education should be.
Assessment. Evaluation is actually neither problematic nor contentious in technical and functional areas. It is perfectly possible—and appropriate—for ability to be measured in fi- nance or accounting, and for students to com- pete for the highest grades. But we have seen that business education is about more than clearly defined subsets of knowledge like these; its essence is in softer, indefinable at- tributes and experiences that have relevance in interpersonal contexts. Thus we should not be surprised that an academic grading system cannot reliably predict managerial ability.
Assessment in these softer areas is problem- atic in two respects: It is difficult and thus per- haps arbitrary, and it risks being counterpro- ductive because it can damage a learning environment. If a business school is a competi- tive environment, in which the myth is main- tained that the best future business leaders will score the highest grades, dysfunctional behav-
ior inevitably results. Why learn collaboratively if doing so helps your competitors score higher grades? Why develop attributes of leadership, of interpersonal impact, if you are graded on individual performance in functional sub- jects? Why immerse yourself in the learning environment if you can get better grades by immersing yourself in a textbook? How can business schools embrace the diversity of can- didates’ prior experiences and learning oppor- tunities if everything comes down to perfor- mance under a homogenized grading system?
Grading is important in technical and func- tional areas, but the distinctiveness and vitality of business education require that a grading culture be downplayed. Students are there to contribute to and benefit from a rich learning environment; they are there to be empowered rather than ranked.
Management educators need to resist the siren song of professionalism. Functional and technical knowledge is an important compo- nent of business school curricula, but it is not the essence of management or the substance of business leadership. Nor is it what makes a business school like Harvard or Stanford great. Business schools do not uniquely certify man- agers, enabling them to practice. Nor do they regulate the conduct of those managers ac- cording to a professional code of practice. What they do is provide learning environ- ments that consolidate, share, and build busi- ness experience, that accelerate personal de- velopment and growth, and that help equip managers to deal with their diverse working environments. Business schools are not profes- sional schools. They are incubators for busi- ness leadership.
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The skill of integration is
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