Management education, MBA, competencies, hard and soft tracks

1. TRENDS IN
MANAGEMENT EDUCATION
Prof. Dr. Luiz A. Stevanato
2011

2. Main goals
1. Key factors that impact managerial practices
2. Critical competences required
3. Trends in management education

3. KEY FACTORS THAT IMPACT
MANAGERIAL PRACTICES

4. COMPLEXITY

5. “To every complex problem do exist a
simple, elegant, and frequently wrong
solution”.
Anonymous

6. Global Competition
• More than a cliché
• Opportunities and challenges…
– Too many challenges
• Advantages derived from asymmetries
• Systemic consequences at Long term

7. Technology & Innovations
• Cultural artifacts – embodies visions and values
• Not simple technical device
• Innovation driver
• New practices, products, markets etc.

8. Social and environmental demands
• Emphasis on stakeholders relationship
• Legitimate demands…
• Sometime, mixed with hidden political agenda
• Actual stage – managerial pragmatism
• But remember – language is a virus

9. SOCIAL DIVERSITY

10. Clash of cultures
• Fundamental differences
• Taken for granted assumptions
• Not visible but powerful in its impacts
• Conflict´s source more than synergies

11. Relationships
• Cultural fragmentation;
• Non translatable speeches
• Expectancy divergence
• Generational, gender, cultures etc.

12. POLITICS IN ORGANIZATIONS

13. Politics make decisions more complex
• Power networks – coalitions, feuds, interests
• Interdependence
• Irrational decision making
• Linear logic tend to not work

14. For managerial performance
CRITICAL COMPETENCIES

15. Systemic thinking
• Structured, integrated and critic
• Interdependencies
• Causality and correlation
• Near and distant causes
• Successive approximations

16. Conflict management
• Team integration
• Shared vision
• Spread a sense of purpose and urgency
• Build communication bridges

17. Art of Communication
• Listen more than talk
• Understand the other´s point of view – Empathy
• Talk less – know to prioritize
• Key to give and receive feedback

18. Negotiation and Persuasion
• Negotiation strategies
• Be convincing – talk to emotions
• Establish sense of purpose and urgency
“The character is maybe the most effective means of persuasion”.
Aristotle

19. Trends in
MANAGEMENT EDUCATION

20. MANAGEMENT EDUCATION IS AT A CROSS ROADS

21. “Hard Science” Track
• Decision making based on hard information
• Intensive use of mathematical modeling
• Multivariate statistics
• Alphabet Soup
– CRM, ERP CSM, Web analytics, BI etc.;
,
• Emphasis on metrics
• The return of “the managing by number”

22. “If something can not be measured, then it
can not be managed”. (*)
(*) We can´t find the author of this sentence.

23. “Hard Science” - representatives
•Thomas Davenport
•Robert Kaplan
•David Norton
•Gert Laursen
•Jesper Thorlund
•Praveen Gupta
•IBM
•Etc.

24. “Soft Science” Track
• Decisions are ultimately value judgments;
• Managers gets results through others
– Negotiate, delegate, follow-up, evaluate
• Managers day-by-day communications - fragmented
• Build a sense of purpose and urgency

25. “The most important things cannot be
measured”.
Edward Deming

26. “Soft Science” - representatives
•Henry Mintzberg
•Warren Bennis
•Chris Argyris
•David Garvin
•David Kolb
•John Kotter
•Nassim N. Taleb (?)
•Etc.

27. “The virtue should
be found somewhere in the middle”.
Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics

28. Thank you.
http://pesquisaconsumo.blogspot.com/
@ http://twitter.com/Luiz_Stevanato
www.sacore.com
s2a@sacore.com
Prof. Luiz A. Stevanato
Psychologist, PhD,
MBA Professor, Marketing
Researcher and Organizational
Culture Consultant.

29. References
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Business School Publishing, 2007
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http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6363.html], May 2010.
• WARREN, Bennis and O'TOOLE, James. How business school lost their way. Harvard Business Review, may, 2005, Vol.
83, n. 5.
• MINTZBERG, Henry. Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development.
San Francisco, Berreti & Koehler, 2004.
• KOLB, David, RUBIN, Irwin and McINTYRE, James. Organizational Psychology: An Experiential Approach to
Organizational Behavior. Englwood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1974.
• RAMLALL, Sunil J. Measuring Human Resource Management’s Effectiveness in Improving Performance. Human Resource
Planning, Vol. 26, 2003.
• TALEB, Nassim N. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York, Random House, 2010.