Comment: Right signals to applicants, wrong incentives for deans: business school rankings and the challenges to management education
Based on the findings by Dewinney, Dowling and Perm-Ajchariyawong, we point out that, while MBA rankings provide useful signals to students about their salary prospects, they also create misleading incentives for business school administrators. The inbuilt bias in favor of the traditional model of business education discourages innovation and therefore stifles responses to major challenges – such as the globalization of the business education market, the advent of life-long education and the need for more relevance to management practice.
EMBRACING THE SACRED IN OUR SECULAR SCHOLARLY WORLD.
I am honored to speak to you as our sixty-fifth president. Sitting down to prepare my remarks, I realized that I could talk with you about absolutely anything. I decided to talk about us. I hate to say it, but I fear that we are not all that we can be. Please don’t worry—this will not be another presidential address that will call on us to be relevant. We are plenty relevant. The fact is this should be our Golden Age. But something is very amiss. Something is keeping us from being all that we can be. As you can tell from my title, I think that “something” is our reaction to what I am calling our secular world. My goal here is to at least provoke us—and who knows, maybe even to inspire a few of us—to live our lives differently. My address comprises three parts. I will briefly talk about why I think this should be our Golden Age. I will then take a look at our secular world and share what gives me pause. In so doing, I will talk about the audit culture that has emerged around us, our problematic reaction to it, and the consequences of that reaction. And I will close by reminding us of the sacred nature of our work. But I will not just leave it at that. I want to share an idea or two about how to move forward. Some of us will need to summon some courage if we are to live in a world where we can thrive.
Organizational Design and the Gehry Experience
T here is no shortage of architectural images in organizational theory. We talk about the architecture of complexity (Simon, 1962), architecture of simplicity (Miller, 1993), architectural innovation (Henderson & Clark, 1990, p. 10), connectionist and symbolic architectures (Fiol, 2002), social architecture (see General Electric’ 1999 annual report), and architecture of design (Weick, 1993). The question is, are these images anything more than colorful language? When Bennis and Cameron rub up against the real thing and write about it, as they do in their interactions with the influential architect Frank Gehry—referred to by some as a “starchitect”—this is a great chance to compare real architectural work with our borrowed imagery. To do so is to spot some key issues in organizational design. Scholars of organizational design are moving in an odd direction. As political scientist Paul Schulman (private communication, November 19, 2001) put it, the history of organizational theory is one of “moving from a belief that organizational behavior could be fully determined by a set of complete and consistent design principles, to a hard won recognition that more and more variables come into play.” The problem here is that as the variables multiply, scholars say less and less about more and more. The net result is that we have become a discipline of critics who lower confidence rather than a discipline of designers who raise confidence. When our predictions fail, we typically add more variables to our frameworks but we don’t drop any. Nor do we take seriously the possibility that greater reliance on something other than the language of variables is called for. If you look closely at definitions of organizational design, you begin to see the problem. Consider a definition crafted in 1965 that remains accurate: