Filling the Educational Gaps

The management of OM—where students are taught how best to learn from their future employer’s experiences and a workplace where the knowledge of prior usage, whether successful or unsuccessful, helps transient managers make fewer poor decisions—would fill the educational gaps cited by Bailey, Ford, Leavitt, and Brookfield. It would also improve the reflective approaches used in Revans’s action learning and Mintzberg’s IMPM, and confirm managers’ oft-repeated admission after the fact that hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Quintessentially, decision making is important for all our living standards. The record shows that in business, this skill is wanting in some considerable measure. For it to get better, management instruction needs to be more receptive to the untapped benefits of hindsight, which is another way of “working smarter,” Peter Drucker’s catchphrase first coined by the American industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor 125 years ago (Drucker, 1991). If experiential learning is not about working smarter, then mediocrity, nay decline, is surely a destiny that awaits. It is time for business academics to give employers—and for employers to demand—more polished diamonds.