Managing: a Study in Neglect : Authors Say Schools, Businesses Fail to Train for Future : LYMAN PORTER

It took Lyman W. Porter and Lawrence E. McKibbin three years of work and more than 500 interviews with university faculty and corporate executives, but six weeks ago their critical study of business education was published.

“Management Education and Development: Drift or Thrust Into the 21st Century” was unveiled on April 11 and immediately went into a second printing, having caught the attention of business and university leaders and the general media.

“They (publisher McGraw-Hill) are already considering a hard-bound edition for libraries because of the response,” said Sharon Barber, assistant director of communications for the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. “It’s really hopping.”

Their work has two very simple messages: 1. Business education at the university level needs revamping because colleges are becoming dangerously complacent and do almost no strategic planning for the future. 2. Management education should be a lifelong endeavor. Many managers know this, but few companies act on this crucial need with any serious intent.

Porter is a professor of management and former dean of the Graduate School of Management at UC Irvine. McKibbin is the director of the office of international programs and a professor of management at Oklahoma University. The two men were commissioned by the business schools assembly to study management education’s present form and future needs.

According to the assembly, the report is the first systematic study of its type in nearly 30 years. Its predecessors--reports sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corp.--were published in 1959; 25 years later, Porter and McKibbin began their work.

Porter, 58, discussed his study with Times staff writer Maria L. La Ganga, days before leaving for England, where scholars have just completed a look at management education in Japan, Germany, the United States and England. “I want to find out more about what they’re planning to do and how they compare what’s happening here and so forth,” Porter said. “I think they’re going to make more of a national policy from their study.” Q. What was the most surprising finding that came out of your three-year study?

A. On the business school side, we were surprised that there wasn’t more strategic thinking within the schools--about where they were heading, how the world was changing, in terms of what that meant for them. And I think that we expected more criticism from the corporate world of what business schools were doing than we found in some areas. We felt, in some ways, that the companies should have been more critical than they were sometimes.

Q. Do you think that because companies are not critical of the business school “product,” that they think the education that students are getting is superfluous?

A. No. They praised the schools for what they were doing well. We talked about the analytical areas and the content knowledge that students had in particular functions of business.

Q. Such as number crunching?

A. Well, not just number crunching, but accounting and marketing or whatever these students’ area was. But we found some real concerns about whether the people skills were as strong as they could be. I think on the corporate side the biggest surprise was the amount of attention that companies felt they should be giving to management and development, and how much more they felt they should be doing than they were doing.

Q. Why?

A. I think we’re feeling the impact of the last six or eight years, with the sort of rise of the Japanese success stories and so forth. You see the popularity of the “In Search of Excellence” type books, of both companies in general and higher-level managers starting to be more introspective. They’re feeling that we’ve got to find better ways of doing things. And this is just one aspect of that.

Q. Why were these companies so concerned?

A. Because the business world is changing so fast. The rate of change was really affecting many of the companies that we talked with. And, therefore, they felt the need to get their managers up to date. Business changes, and many companies are changing the way they’re doing business.

Q. You talked to 52 companies for this study, and one issue you discussed was management development--the continuing education of managers to help them cope with changes in the business and the work force. How many of those companies were involved in management development activities?

A. I would say that 40 or so were doing something, but at some points it was very rudimentary. I think the big difference was how strongly it was encouraged by the company and expected by the company on the one hand, versus simply left up to the employee.

Q. Were many insensitive? What sort of a spectrum of activities and attitudes did you find?

A. We saw the whole range. I suppose it would be shaped in a normal curve. Out of the 50-plus that we talked with, 10 of those 50 would be really on a leading edge and maybe 10 would still be pretty much back in the 1950s. And the rest would be somewhere along the line. On an average, companies are doing more. But there’s still the dispersion of how well they’re doing it, how much they’re doing it and how it’s integrated with their other corporate activities. Some I just think lack leadership from top management to build the resources necessary to make this an important activity and have it seen as an important activity in the company. It’s more indifference than antagonism.

Q. Why is such a low priority given to management development? The survey found that only 10% of the companies required managers to spend any time on it.

A. It was seen as something of a luxury. It has tended to be seen as something nice to do and not really necessary. I mean, you go into a deep recession, and companies let it go. But I think it’s going to be less subject to ups and downs of the economy than it has been in the past.

Q. What differences did you find among the companies you interviewed?

A. A lot has to do with leadership and people skills today. I think what has really been added in recent years is that companies are trying to give more attention to a strategic focus as managers move up the hierarchy. They are trying to make managers get out of their sort of narrow operational viewpoints and take a broader strategic focus. That includes both being able to understand the financial aspects, the marketing aspects, and personnel aspects of a company and so forth, and how these all fit together.

Q. What sort of things do you see then on a concrete level? Can you give an example?

A. Some companies require all their employees to get a certain amount of development activities per year; a certain number of work days per year spent in development activities. Other companies wouldn’t think of that and leave it totally up to the individual. So it’s how much encouragement the company gives and even requires in some cases. IBM is one that requires it.

Q. Why do the managers want this?

A. They’re feeling the need for training whether they stay with that organization or not. From the manager’s point of view, it’s portable. If you learn something new, whether you stay with your current company or not, you can carry that with you. And these days people don’t stay as long with one company. They don’t see their whole careers necessarily being with the same company they start with. Underlying everything is the fact that business is more complex than it used to be. The business world is changing faster, and it just takes more to keep up.

Q. What did managers think they need most?

A. Well, I think probably first and foremost is education about the changes occurring in their particular area of business, whether that’s banking in the case of people associated with banks, or in communications or development of international competition and that sort of thing. It depends on what level they are in the organization. But it’s really a mixture across areas. I think a lot of people that, say, start out in marketing find out they need to know a lot more in the financial areas. In the old days, they would have stayed in marketing the whole time and concentrated only in getting more information about their own specialty. So I think a lot of it is broadening out. People are seeing the need to broaden out as they move up.

Q. We’ve talked of making people better managers. Are they made or born? Can managers be taught?

A. Well, I’d certainly hope so, or we’re in the wrong business. In the business schools and management schools and university, no program can guarantee that somebody will be a good executive, but I think you can certainly help people become better at what they’re doing in that area. I would be optimistic on that, yes.

Q. What do managers find to be more difficult--dealing with the technical aspects of their jobs or the people?

A. There’s a lot of continuing need and people feeling the need for developing their people skills. They need to understand more how to work not only with subordinates these days, but how to coordinate with people from different areas and so forth. Companies are not nearly as structured as they used to be on average. There’s some tendency towards flatter organizations. The emphasis on the vertical-lateral structure in companies has changed proportionally more towards the lateral. In lateral companies, you don’t have formal authority over someone.

Q. So you have to learn to negotiate rather than demand?

A. Right. So things like negotiating skills and communication skills become critical. You can’t rely on formal authority.

Q. Say someone starts at IBM, gets into management and 10 years pass. What do they need to know 10 years later, how does that change and how does the company address that?

A. Well, I think a lot of companies in the early years of a person’s employment are particularly concerned with getting across the way that their company does certain things, in other words the IBM way, or the General Electric way of doing things and the philosophy of the company. This is so that managers understand the nature of the organization they’re in and how it operates and what its goals are and objectives. Then it’s being able to understand broader areas and their own particular functional area.

Q. And then?

A. Then you have people who are just superb on operations, but it’s hard for them to move to the next level where they have to understand changes in the environment and get a more strategic orientation. And that’s where we’re having trouble. We’ve got more than enough people that are very good at operations and not enough people that can take a broader overview and look ahead, and see how things are going to change in a couple of years, and why what you’re doing now may not be what you need to do two years from now or five years from now.

Q. Are business schools addressing the issue of ongoing management education?

A. Some business schools have been doing this for as long as 35 years or so, and certainly there’s been an increase of activity on the part of business schools over the years. Some schools are very heavily involved in it, such as Northwestern and Duke. However, not every school needs to address ongoing management education--or necessarily should. Schools have to consider where this fits into their strategic planning. We felt that at least some of the schools we visited hadn’t really thought through where they wanted this activity to be in their total set of activities.

Q. In addition to this lack of strategic planning in the universities, your study found a considerable complacency in the universities--about their position and how they’re doing.

A. Business schools have come a long way in the last 25 years in terms of improving their academic credibility, having stronger, more qualified faculty. They’ve also grown a lot in the last 10 years in enrollment. They now have 25% of all undergraduates across the country. I personally do not think that is healthy.

Q. Why not?

A. Previous studies, as well as ours, have emphasized the need for breadth at the undergraduate level. There are many routes to getting into managerial careers, and it’s not necessary that someone has to major in business. If they do, they certainly ought to make sure they get as much breadth as possible.

Q. You mentioned in your study the need in the business school curriculum for an increase in some of the softer things, like leadership. Why?

A. Well, this is a longstanding issue. I think in business schools, the job they’re doing in the soft skills area has not kept up with the job they’re doing in the analytical areas. I think we certainly found--in terms of reaction of the corporate community--that business schools are doing a very good job on developing the analytical, quantitative skills of students. But we probably haven’t made that many advances in the area that I’m interested in, the behavioral side.

Q. How do you teach leadership?

A. Well I think we have to take some different ways of looking at it. Traditionally, we haven’t tried to develop leadership skills; we’ve taught more about what the concept is. And that’s certainly part of it. But I think we’re going to see more emphasis on skill development in the next 10 years than we’ve had, say in the last 20 years.

Q. How would one do that?

A. There are various kinds of simulated activities, that is simulations in class. We must also, I think, make better use of students’ outside-of-class activities, encouraging them to get involved in activities that would give them an opportunity to build on leadership skills. People need opportunities to get to do some of these things, get feedback and that sort of thing. You can’t just tell them; you can’t just give a lecture on leadership, although that’s done a lot of times.

Q. People often rise into management who have never had any management training, people who go into, say, reporting and then are promoted to editor because they succeed as a reporter. Are they worse off than their counterparts with management training?

A. That’s an age-old problem in organizations, typically in technical organizations. You know people who are very good technically, like engineers, who move up and find themselves in management positions. That’s where there needs to be a lot of attention to the management skills development. Business schools, even if they were doing a much better job in the people skills area than they are, still can only do so much in two years. With some companies, as soon as somebody gets to that level that they supervise, they are immediately sent to some kind of training program. Others might not do much of anything and just assume that the person will do it.

Q. So job experience is not enough?

A. One big change is that organizations are realizing, again because of this increasing complexity of the business world, that you can’t depend just on job experience anymore. Job experience is valuable, but what it does by itself isn’t fast enough and doesn’t provide enough breadth. After all they’re somewhat confined by what they’ve done in their job.

Q. So you’re basically saying that because of this, almost every company should have some provision for continuing education of its managers.

A. Right. I think again what the company needs to do is think, “How are we going to deal with this, and what do we want to do, what’s our plan on this? And how does this fit into all the other activities?” I mean, companies only have so many resources. Management education is not a free service.