The shifts in management education

Introduction

During the past decades, globalization brings opportunity as well as enormous pressure for the corporations to strive for its survival and growth. One of the key determinants to survive and strive is knowledge management and how to equip its management with updated concepts and skills. A firm’s competitive advantage depends more than anything on its knowledge: on what it knows, how it uses what it knows and how fast it can learn something new (HR Magazine, 2009, p. 1).Management education becomes one of the most important and prevailing way for company to gain knowledge since the first MBA School in 1900. However, through the evolution through one century, today’s management education changes a lot from the earlier as the needs of the students and company shift.

Shift from mastery of theories to mastery of skills

According Pfeffer & Fong (2002), research showed that the curriculum of the management education was too focused on analytics, with insufficient emphasis on problem finding as contrasted with problem solving and implementation. Also, there is not much evidence that the mastery of business concept could make the graduates advance their careers in today’s complex business environments. The driving forces to change are imperative, especially in the 21^st century, the market forces like globalization, technological advancement, cross cultural diversity and etc.

To cope with the challenging environment in the global village, a company should have “the competitive advantage, it depends more than anything on its knowledge” (HR Magazine, 2009, p. 1). Davenport pointed out “knowledge management system requires that information be useful, timely, and accurate” (Davenport, p. 24).  

We believe that the management education is essential and important for the sustainability of an organization and individual in the complex business environment.  Therefore, we have seen that in the early stage, the collaborative practice of the business schools are the students and professors but now also including the private or public organizations.

Networking

For studying the management education programs, like a MBA degree course, it is not only to impart management education to an individual but also impart a symbolic status to him or her to build a social network in the business environment. It is said that globalization has further strengthen the social network into a global network of the students of management education.  Classmates would interact with diverse groups, executives from various industries, functions & region, share experience and insights in various perspectives; so as alumni and the faculty – to build a new network for the possibility of future collaboration, it’s admitted that once admitted by a school, the alumni identity accompanies whole life.

Culture: an emergent topic

Also, with the increasing trend of doing business across the globe, the diversify culture among countries is a challenge to the organizations and individuals. The management education program should also implant the culture issues into various core courses, like marketing management, communication skills and business ethics.

Ethics education becomes prevailing  

After financial crisis in 2008, public awareness of corporate integrity was highly increased. Stakeholders now see boards as more accountable for the effectiveness of their overall governance process (Delotte, 2013). “Company fosters a trusting culture will have an advantage in the war of talent” (Hurley, 2006). The change of business practice put a pressure on the management school redesign the curriculum in ethical development of their students.

The management schools are required to persuade the employer that their students are educated with business ethics and behave ethically. There are six fundamental principles of persuasion (Cialdini, 2001) and management schools are using Liking, Consistency, Authority and Scarcity for persuasion. Management schools are also required to work closely with industries and corporation to maintain the quality of education (Gupta, 2011). They need to regularly review their curriculum and bring necessary change according to the needs of the corporation and environment.

It is showed there are many strategic partnerships between corporations and management school to increase the value add to the distribution role in the industry (Paul et al, 2003). For example, Management schools invited guest speakers, business managers or religious leader to deliver seminars and class. However, strategic partnership between corporations and management school on ethics education is limited. To cater complex world and demand for ethics education, collaboration between the consulting firm and management schools on the business ethics researches and development of education program me is expected.

Conclusion

Collaboration is about bringing ideas together, about sharing perspectives and insight and effort, for the purpose of getting useful thing done. Company and schools are the main character in management education. Schools have to adapt its curriculum to changing business environment and in return, companies supply ideas and practice for schools to deliver knowledge more effectively to the students. It’s also time for the corporation to partner with university to achieve synergy to deliver the essence of good management education and train people for managerial positions.

Reference

1.        Watson, W. E., (2009) Leveraging HR and Knowledge management in a challenging economy, HR magazine

2.        Tapscott, D, Erickson, T, Gratton, L, Cross, R and Cap, F (2009) Building the Collaborative Enterprise. Ten questions to ask about business opportunities though collaboration. nGenera Corporation.

3.        Delotte (2013) Developing effective governance operating model: A guide for financial services boards and management teams

4.        Hurley, R. F. (2006) Managing yourself: The decision to trust. Harvard Business Review, September, 55-62

5.        Cialdini, Robert B. (2001) Harnessing the science of persuasion, Harvard Business Review, 79(9)

6.        Paul N. F., Betts R. A. and Sullivan R. S. (2003) Changes in graduate management education and new business school strategies for the 21th century. Academy of Management Learning & Education 2(3), 233-24

7.        Gupta, R (2011) Paradigm shift in management education: The need of the hour. International Journal of Enterprise Computing and Business System Vol. 1 Issue 2 July

8.        Jeffrey Pfeffer & Christina T. Fong (2002, September).  The End of Business Schools? Less Success Than Meets the Eye.  Academy of Management Learning & Education Vol. 1, Number 1. Retrieved 17 April 2014 https://www.aomonline.org/Publications/Articles/BSchools.asp

9.        Rex Davenport (2005, February).  Why Does Knowledge Management Still Matter?  T+D American Society for Training & Development.