OR Insight Vol. 2 No. 1 JanuaryMarch 1989

EDITORIAL

Educating managersThe past few years have seen an ever-increasing concern about the need to educate managers in the UK. Comparedwith Germany, Japan and the USA, UK companies appear to provide considerably less training for their employees.I ncreased education and training of managers is an important way of increasing organizational performance, yet varioussurveys have found a disturbing level of complacency and ignorance about management training. There are, of course,some notable exceptions, but most firms are in need of considerable improvement.

This is the worrying conclusion of David Hussey in his recent book, Management Training and Corporate Strategy,subtitled "How to improve competitive performance. Hussey's book describes research undertaken by HarbridgeHouse Consulting Group to investigate the state of management education and training in the UK. lt also draws on anumber of Government-sponsored surveys of management education and training. Hussey's theme is thatmanagement training and education can be a powerful tool to achieving competitive success. He argues that not onlyis British business failing to use training for this purpose, but that much of the resources devoted to management trainingare wasted, while the activity as a whole is under-resourced.

The MBATwo chapters of Hussey's book are directly concerned with the role played by educational institutions in educating

managers. Not surprisingly, discussion is focused on the impact and perceived roles of the MBA. There is someinteresting information here on the experience and motivations of MBA students, the business schools and companyperceptions of the MBA. For example, many firms, particularly in the manufacturing sector, show little interest inemploying MBA graduates. This lack of interest may be interpreted as merely another symptom of a complacent attitudeto management education. However, alternative explanations have more to do with the nature of MBA programmesand the nature of MBA graduates themselves. Ascher puts it like this:

"Some have argued thatpeople with MBAs are over-ambitious and overtly agressive, often relying on theoreticalrather than practical approaches to problems, and thus provide a source of friction within the managerial ranksoflarge corporations. Others maintain that theproblem is one oftaioring business education to meetthe needsofBritish industry, and suggest that the business schools are notproviding the appropriate training for effectiveperformance in the UK commercial environment.'

Undoubtedly, many MBAs are motivated primarily by prospects of financial gain. Salary expectations are high, and,because the supply of MBAs is limited, heavy demand from consulting and financial service firms means that suchexpectations are often justified. Other business sectors may find it difficult to compete in terms of salaries offered.However, Hussey argues that salary expectations of MBA graduates are often out of line with their own abilities, andthat too few are sufficiently interested in working in the manufacturing sector. Excess expectations might also accountfor observed high wastage amongst highly-qualified graduates. Having found a job, many find it is not stimulatingenough, or that promotion prospects are lower than expected, and they leave after a relatively short time.

lt is interesting to compare this recent perspective with observations made by Livingston writing in the HaivardBusiness Review in 1971. According to Livingston, high wastage caused by "job hopping" is not necessarily a "badgeof competence", or an easy road to high income. Rather, it is often a sign of arrested career progress arising frommediocre or poor performance on the job.

Livingston goes on to argue that a major reason why highly-educated and ambitious individuals do not always makesuccessful managers is that they lack the "will to manage". They expect to gain great satisfaction from the income andprestige associated with executive positions in important enterprises, but they do not expect to gain much satisfactionfrom the achievements of their subordinates. lt follows that management schools and business organizations that selectmanagement students on the basis of their records as individual performers may be picking the wrong people to developas managers. This might explain why so many MBAs and other business graduates are attracted to jobs that permitthem to act in the detached role of consultant or specialized expert. Staff jobs emphasizing analytical abilities arepreferred to line positions requiring supervisory abilities. The implications for MBA recruitment criteria are clear. Whatis not so obvious is whether, or to what extent, individuals can be trained to manage the work of other people.

What of the nature of MBA programmes themselves, and the charge that business schools are not providing theproduct that the market requires?

Providers of MBAs have argued that reluctance to employ MBA5 is attributable to the traditional and conservativenature of firms whose management is resistant to change. They say that business schools are concerned withstimulating change and with the preparation of managers forfuture needs of industry faced with an increasingly turbulentand competitive environment. Short-term profit orientated organizations may not be best placed to recognise theseneeds.

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Copyright © Operational Research Society 1989

OR Insight Vol. 2No. lJanuaiyMarch 1989

A common perception is that MBA programmes (and other management courses) are too 'academic' in contentand are taught by people divorced from the realities of business life. An alternative perception is that there is a need toprovide at an early stage the "broadening" experience and training required to prepare functional managers for generalor strategic management. This may be appropriate for the middle manager about to make this transition, but what ofstudents with little or no management experience? For such individuals, objectives may be more modestly expressedas increasing self-confidence and general business awareness.

Underlying much of the scepticism about the value of MBAs may be an ingrained belief that good managementcannot be taught, it can only be learned by experience. Learning by experience or "on the job" is clearly an importantdimension of management development, but it needs to take place in a managed way. Assuming it will just happen isnot enough. As Hussey notes, passing on the same lessons of experience ('This is the way we do things here") can bea direct cause of distorted perceptions of strategic issues and the persistence of corporate myths. Moreover, relyingon parochial experience alone often means that management remains in ignorance about new techniques.

Education or training?

At this point it seems appropriate to consider the distinction between "training" and 'education", on the grounds thatwhat industry wants is management training and what educational institutions are apt to provide is managementeducation.

One definition of the difference between management education and management training is that long courses areeducation, while short courses are training. Another is that education is about improving knowledge, while training isabout improving skills. Neither of these definitions is particularly helpful. Hussey suggests that if there is a differenceit is that management education signifies breadth and management training signifies depth. Even here there is adifficulty. Is an MBA training for middle management or is it education for ambitious indMduals with limited workexperience? One is inclined to agree with Hussey that separation of the two ideas is difficult, and in any case is notreally worth the effort. However, the distinction may be worth considering in more detail if it helps firms to think aboutwhat they need, and educational institutions to think about what they ought to provide. The parameters of breadth anddepth can usefully be extended to three dimensions, as shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1: Dimensions of training and developmentrianyfunctions

EDUCATION

Differentfirms

Other things being equal, training is concerned more with one particular job or function, focusing on one particularfirm's approaches, and concerned more with short-term (but hopefully long-lasting) improvements in performance.Education is more concerned with interrelationships between jobs or functions, possibly with the whole firm and thebusiness environment. Education is also more about presenting ideas and techniques in a conceptual way to showtheir applicability to all firms in an industry or to organizations in general. Finally, education is more likely, other thingsbeing equal, to address long-term objectives calling for perhaps fundamental changes In the way in which work is carriedout. Often this implies changes in the organizational culture. in developing courses for managers or potential managers,it may be helpful to consider course design in terms of these dimensions.

In designing courses, the range of alternative forms in these dimensions is dependent on the intended courseparticipants. The more homogeneous the participants, the more viable are courses of a training nature which can betailor-made to suit the participants. To the extent that courses recruit a heterogeneous mixture of students, they mustperforce be of an educational nature in the sense of Figure 1. The challenge for teachers is to ensure that courseparticipants develop an ability to apply general concepts to specific real-life situations. This is, after all, the least thatemployers expect of "educated" graduates.

Experiential methods

Such concerns have led many management education programmes, including first degree programmes, to put moreemphasis on case studies. These allow students to apply problem-solving and decision-making techniques in "real-life" contexts. Typically, students are required to discuss a problem situation and to "advise management". Livingstonhas argued that this is not teaching students what they most need to know to become successful managers. He argues

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Onefunction

Short termimplementation

long term(cultural) changes

OR Insight Vol. 2 No. I Januaiy March 1989

that management education programmes often over-emphasise anaIytica, problem-solving ability and pay too littleattention to the important management skills of identifying problems and opportunities, planning for the attainment ofdesired results, and carrying out operating plans. As many operational researchers are only too aware, problemidentification is frequently more important that problem-solving, and can be a much more complex task. Opportunity-finding may be even more important than problem-finding ability because, as Drucker argues, results in business areobtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems:

"All one can hope to get by solving a problem is to restore normality. All one can hope, at best, is to eliminatea restriction on the capacity of the business to obtain results. The results themselves must come from theexploitation of opportunities . . . Maximization of opportunities is a meaningful, indeed a precise, definition of theentrepreneurial job. lt implies that effectiveness rather than efficiency is essential in business. The pertinentquestion is not how to do things right, but how to find the right things to do and to concentrate resources andefforts on them.

Such observations, although made some time ago, still seem to be worth repeating today. They suggest thatexclusive use of cases which ask for advice on how to deal with a particular problem, however broadly stated, are notenough. Courses ought to include material emphasizing the development of a problem and opportunity identificationskills, and planning exercises. One way to achieve this might be to use very detailed case studies containing a surfeitof data, rather than carefully selected data. Students would then be required to identify problems and opportunitieshidden in the case. In addition to suggesting courses of action to handle problems or exploit opportunities, studentswould be required to detail plans for implementation of their recommendations. Project work is obviously valuablebecause of the training it gives in these skills. Unfortunately, project work can be very time-consuming, and there is alimit to the amount of variety of experience that can be injected into management education programmes in this way.Case studies are not an easy option and require careful selection: nevertheless, a balanced programme of case-studymaterial can go some way to providing a directed course in learning by experience.

The argument that analytical approaches are over-emphasized in management education programmes has alsobeen taken up by Mintzberg. He argues that successful management, particularly at senior policy-making levels,requires a blend of analytical thinking and intuitive thought processes. Each of these is a product of activity in differentspecialized parts of the brain. Thus, analytical thinking has been associated with the "left hemisphere" of the brain,where information is processed sequentially in an ordered manner which can be articulated. In contrast, intuitive thoughtprocesses have been associated with the "right hemisphere" of the brain, which is specialized for simultaneousprocessing in a more holistic fashion. These thought processes are "mysterious" because they cannot be explained interms of the analytical thought processes of the left hemisphere or articulated by the left side. Effective managers,argues Mintzberg, seem to revel in ambiguity, and make use of "soft", speculative information to gain a "feel" for problems.The use of judgement and hunch is thus suspect only insofar as it cannot be explained in left-side analytical terms.

If these ideas are correct they explain in part why analytical management science techniques are so difficult to getaccepted in dealing with strategic issues, and why it is so difficult to elicit a rule base from "experts" when constructingan expert system. Policymakers and experts may be relying heavily on right-hemisphere thought processes. Also,these ideas legitimize the case for more intuitive, judgemental work in management education programmes. There is,then, a case for more experiential and creative exercises involving, for example, role-playing, videotaping and the useof behaviour laboratories.

Doubtless there are management educators who are familiar with the ideas outlined here. However, many educatorsand managers would do well to bear these ideas in mind when designing management education or trainingprogrammes. In particular, it is clear that all of these issues are pertinent to the design of operational research courses.Attention to these issues would do much to increase course effectiveness and the value to industry of OR graduates.

STEPHEN WARD

For the interested reader

K. ASCHER (1986): 'Mastering the business graduate', Personnel Management, January.

D.E. HUSSEY (1988): Management Training and Corporate Strategy - How to Improve Competitive Performance, Pergamon Press.

J. STERLING LIVINGSTON (1971): Myth of the well-educated manager", Harvard Business Review, JanuaryFebruary.

H. MINTZBERG (1976): Planning on the left and managing on the right", Harvard Business Review, JulyAugust.

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