Many
believe that management education has contributed to the systemic failure of
today's leaders. After reading the Podolny (2009) article, in your reflection
blog share your thoughts on how business schools can best prepare future
leaders to adopt a holistic approach to business problems and ethical dilemmas.
Be sure to share benchmarks and examples of how some of the B-Schools are
accomplishing this.
Joel Podolny
discussed a variety of reasons why business schools today are considered to be
a contributor to the systemic failure of today’s leaders. While I have not heard much about the theory
that management education has contributed to this failure, Podolny does make
some interesting points worth considering.
He notes how the focus of leadership and ethics has shifted to vague
understandings of what a leader is, but struggles with answering questions like
“How do I want to change the world for the better?” I tend to agree with Podolny that it is
important for school to force their students to ask questions such as that one. While I was not in a business school for my
undergraduate education, I was forced to ask questions such as that one. I attended Savannah College of Art and Design
where I was studying to becoming a textile designer. During the duration of this program I had to
learn how to market and sell myself as a designer and as an individual that
someone would want to work with. When
thinking about characteristics and qualities that make a strong leader and
ethical individual, I think it is important to understand self-reflection and
be able to recognize what types of choices you are making, whether business
related or not. SCAD did a really great
job of integrating that aspect of business in a very visual way. Now that I am at ERAU, I am able to utilize
my visual understanding of what characteristics are needed to develop future
leaders and blend it with critical thinking strategies that I am learning
now.
With
that said, Podolny offers several tips and suggestions for business schools to
help better develop ethical leaders.
The first point that really stood out for me was his point about
fostering greater integration within what business schools are teaching. Similar to what I was learning at my
undergraduate school, integrating a variety of different techniques and
understandings for leadership is highly important to the overall understanding
of what makes a good leader. It is
important to understand not only the details, but the big picture as well and
utilizing a more integrative process for teaching leadership qualities can help
to express that more clearly. To go
along with integration, encouraging qualitative research is also crucial. Bringing in professors’, who are leaders in
their field of the soft skills such as leadership, values, and ethics can bring
variety and differing perspectives that may be lacking in many institutes.
While
I have no doubt that business school and the education being taught could be
tweaked and developed further, as most programs can, I do not necessarily
believe that the buck stops at the schools.
Ethical behavior, as discussed earlier in our module, I believe, cannot
fully be taught to an individual. As
Greg Burns and Jodi Cohen discuss in their article, Can you teach a person ethics?, they note a professor of ethics who
believe that you cannot necessarily teach a person ethics, but can simply show
them right from wrong. It is up to the
individual to take what knowledge they have in use that for the better
good. I think a lot of what Podolny
discusses is valid, yet I think there are more issues that are causing the
distrust than just the universities.
Cohen, J., & Burns, G. (2006, June 7). Can you teach a
person ethics? Retrieved March 28, 2015, from
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-06-07/news/0606070181_1_ethics-training-ethics-courses-core-values
Podolny, J. M. (2009). The
Buck Stops (and Starts) at Business School. Harvard Business
Review, 87(6), 62-67.
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