Productivity’s Top-Down Responsibility

My own supplementary explanation is that modern business and business education thinks management is mostly about leadership, the instruction for which is typically to develop assertiveness, communication, employee motivation, and networking skills (Kransdorff, 2006). It is a subject that features highly in most curricula but not the key competence of decision making, which rarely appears as a dedicated subject. Alongside this, productivity is generally considered to be an operational issue for workface employees, whose skills need to be updated constantly to accommodate changing circumstances. In fact the onus for productivity is really management’s, for without better top-down decision making, any improvement in operational skills can easily get lost. Before skapegoating or upgrading subordinates, managers need to look to themselves to improve their own decision-making skills, which if Capgemini is right, are not giving full value to their employers (Capgemini, 2004). My conclusion is that business education is missing a huge opportunity by not better teaching the wider discipline of experiential learning, within which is buried the whole subject of OM.

The criticisms of business teaching, including the MBA degree, go even further. For years business schools have been sidestepping industry’s preference for less theoretical instruction. In the United Kingdom the 1971 Owen Report into business schools voiced the tension between abstract and practical approaches to management (Advisory Panel on Management Education, 1971). A succession of other government and independent reports over the following two decades highlighted the continuing tug-of-war between practical and academic approaches, variously followed by initiatives such as the introduction of part-time or modular MBA programs and MBA courses for specific industries or organizations; the arrival of business instruction in hybrid institutions, such as polytechnics and colleges; and the imposed increase in levels of work experience prior to the commencement of the MBA (Constable & McCormick, 1992; Handy, 1987). In my view what appears to have happened is that industry pressure for more practice in the curriculum (exactly what experiential learning could bring to the table) was misinterpreted as a plea to raise entry qualifications and make existing business education more widely available. Few business schools saw it as direct criticism of the way in which they taught the business of business.