and sometimes downright fishy
thoughts on Technology and Leadership
by Herb Bowie
Preparing Managers to Manage
The time has come to recognize that higher education in management rests on a fatal fallacy. The idea behind the contemporary business school is that preparing future business managers means training them in a discipline called Business Management. After 100 years of fruitless attempts to produce such a discipline, it should be clear that it does not exist. Preparing managers to manage, in fact, is not different from preparing people to live in a civilized world. Managers do not need to be trained; they need to be educated. And for that purpose, although a certain amount of study of business-related subjects may prove useful, the business schools as they are presently constituted are at best superfluous.
From the Book The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong, New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009, page 291, ISBN 0393065537
Copyright © 2009 by Matthew Stewart
No. 212