Bennis Warren G, O'Toole James
Leadership Institute, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Harv Bus Rev. 2005 May;83(5):96-104, 154.
Business schools are facing intense criticism for failing to impart useful skills, failing to prepare leaders, failing to instill norms of ethical behavior--and even failing to lead graduates to good corporate jobs. These criticisms come not just from students, employers, and the media but also from deans of some of America's most prestigious B schools. The root cause oftoday'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. Business school deans may claim that their schools remain focused on practice, but they nevertheless hire and promote research-oriented professors who haven't spent time working in companies and are more comfortable teaching methodology than messy, multidisciplinary issues--the very stuff of management. The authors don't advocate a return to the days when business schools were glorified trade schools. But to regain relevancy, they say, business schools must rediscover the practice of business and find a way to balance the dual mission of educating practitioners and creating knowledge through research.
商学院因未能传授实用技能、未能培养领导者、未能灌输道德行为规范，甚至未能为毕业生找到好的企业工作而面临强烈批评。这些批评不仅来自学生、雇主和媒体，也来自美国一些最负盛名的商学院院长。沃伦·G·本尼斯和詹姆斯·奥图尔断言，当今管理教育危机的根源在于商学院采用了一种不恰当且最终适得其反的学术卓越模式。他们不是根据毕业生的能力，也不是根据教师对商业绩效重要驱动因素的理解程度来衡量自己，而是几乎完全根据科研的严谨性来评估自己。这种科学模式基于一个错误的假设，即商业是一门像化学或地质学那样的学科，而实际上商业是一种职业，商学院是职业学院——或者应该是。商学院院长可能声称他们的学校仍然专注于实践，但他们仍然聘用和提拔以研究为导向的教授，这些教授没有在公司工作过，更擅长教授方法论，而不是处理混乱的多学科问题——而这正是管理的本质。作者并不主张回到商学院被美化成职业学校的时代。但他们表示，为了重新获得相关性，商学院必须重新发现商业实践，并找到一种方法来平衡教育从业者和通过研究创造知识这一双重使命。
