The "science" of management
I just read two very interesting cases about Honda from Harvard Business Review: Honda (A) and Honda (B).
This is the story of management books. Honda (B) is the real life and Honda (A) is the management book written after. Often authors fall in the trap of “Post hoc ergo propter hoc”.
Even in social sciences or in psychology one can make experiments to test his theories. The only “science” without experiments is the management science. I am not aware of any test conducted by any university to test a management theory. Yet every day, a new management theory pops-up.
The B-schools stubbornly consider management to be a science and teach it like math.
Warren Bennis and James O'Toole published an article on this topic in the Harvard Business Review (“How Business Schools Lost Their Way”).
The root cause of today's crisis in management education, assert Warren G. Bennis and James O'Toole, is that business schools have adopted an inappropriate--and ultimately self-defeating--model of academic excellence. Instead of measuring themselves in terms of the competence of their graduates, or by how well their faculty members understand important drivers of business performance, they assess themselves almost solely by the rigor of their scientific research. This scientific model is predicated on the faulty assumption that business is an academic discipline like chemistry or geology when, in fact, business is a profession and business schools are professional schools--or should be.
This is the story of management books. Honda (B) is the real life and Honda (A) is the management book written after. Often authors fall in the trap of “Post hoc ergo propter hoc”.
Even in social sciences or in psychology one can make experiments to test his theories. The only “science” without experiments is the management science. I am not aware of any test conducted by any university to test a management theory. Yet every day, a new management theory pops-up.
The B-schools stubbornly consider management to be a science and teach it like math.
Warren Bennis and James O'Toole published an article on this topic in the Harvard Business Review (“How Business Schools Lost Their Way”).
The root cause of today's crisis in management education, assert Warren G. Bennis and James O'Toole, is that business schools have adopted an inappropriate--and ultimately self-defeating--model of academic excellence. Instead of measuring themselves in terms of the competence of their graduates, or by how well their faculty members understand important drivers of business performance, they assess themselves almost solely by the rigor of their scientific research. This scientific model is predicated on the faulty assumption that business is an academic discipline like chemistry or geology when, in fact, business is a profession and business schools are professional schools--or should be.
Labels: Management
posted by Felix Enescu at 10:12
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