Recently, the writer of a guest editorial in The Guardian Weekly proposed a solution to what ails the world’s business schools: Shut them down. The author, Martin Parker, claims there are 13,000 business schools on the planet and he says that’s 13,000 too many. He says the reason he knows a total shutdown is the only remedy that will actually work is that he’s taught in business schools for the last 20 years.
His detailed critique covers a lot of territory, but I found one part of it particularly interesting in light of what I’ve been reading lately. Parker wrote: “If we want those in power to become more responsible, then we must stop teaching students that heroic transformational leaders are the answer to every problem[.]”
At first blush it seems as if we need more such leaders. But I think the point here is the same point which management consultant and author John Hagel is making in his book, The Power of Pull: This kind of thinking leads to passivity rather than the creative engagement which our society so desperately needs.
Hagel explains that what he calls “scalable” collaboration and learning are now the essential ingredients to have broad impact on society.
Legacy organizations (which means nearly all of our organizations) have largely been organized around economies of scale. Organizations can become more efficient in the delivery of goods and services, whether a corporation, a nonprofit or a government, if they scale up their size, break down and routinize all the needed tasks, and ruthlessly drive toward increased efficiency in operations. But, that works only up to a point because each increment of efficiency becomes harder and harder to achieve.
The result is what we see today. Employees working longer hours with increasingly stressful performance targets and less help to achieve them. Their routines and targets come from on high with little or no creative input from the employees.
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