Managers Over the Past Several Term Paper

In order to be more competitive, it had recently hired two business managers. Yes, they did have more experience than the MBAs right out of school. Yet, no, despite their $350,000.00 income, they know little about how hospitals are run. The running joke is, apparently, that they are trying to institute programs that may be great for global corporations, but hot medical centers.

What does Mintzberg suggest is a way to resolve this situation? He believes that management education should only be for those individuals who have some experience overseeing personnel. In addition, business schools should not produce heroic managers but "engaging managers," or leaders who support those under them, encourage input and best practices from everyone when developing strategy, and rewarding all personnel when the organization succeeds.

He also looks at the other developed countries to see if they may have another approach. Although MBA programs are rare in Japan, Japanese businesses have taken on the job of developing practicing managers themselves. In Germany, MBAs are also rare, but business leaders experience discipline-based training in their undergrad programs and many get doctorates. Like Japan, the emphasis of management is in the firm, not the profession.

Mintzberg states that there are a number of opportunities where people can get management training once they are with a company. He sees several options to consider when designing more effective management development strategies: sink or swim, or when it is up to the manager to get his/her own help either through further education or reading; moving, mentoring and monitoring, when people gain on-the-job training and feedback from others; management development buffet table, or classes offered by outside vendors, rather than onsite; learning in action, the traditional way for managers to work together; corporate academies, or in-house corporate universities that further develop managers.

The bottom line, he concludes is that organizations should start "with what leaders and managers need to know." Based on this, he makes eight suggestions on fixing a bad situation: 1) Management education should be restricted to practicing managers; 2) the classroom should leverage the managers' experience; 3)Insightful theories help managers make sense of their experience -- managers must be exposed to theories so as to be expressive themselves; 4) Thoughtful reflection on experience in the light of conceptual ideas is the key to managerial learning -- learning is not doing, but reflecting on doing; 5) "Sharing' their competencies raises the managers' consciousness about their practice -- competencies are best learned on the job or from others who have gained them; 6) Beyond reflection in the classroom comes learning from input on the organization -- for management education to approach leadership, it must encourage to get beyond the benefit for themselves; 7) Steps one through six should be put into a process of experienced reflection that managers bring into the classroom; and 8) the curriculum, the architecture and the faculty must be shifted from controlled designing to flexible facilitating, where programs and ideas should be woven together.

What Mintzberg recommends is what he calls the "International Masters in Practicing Management that includes five mindsets: Managing Self -- gaining a reflective mindset; Managing Organizations -- gaining different perspectives on analysis; Managing Context -- better understanding the outer world; Managing Relationships -- creating meaning with shared space; and Managing Change -- focusing on leader-driven macro change, middle-management micro change and personal change.

Such programs, that are already in effect, can become self perpetuating. The people who graduate from them can help others who are in school. Perhaps, this way, the people who are running the show in the U.S. global businesses will be able to give the competition a run for its money.

References

Mintzberg, H. (2004). Managers not MBAs: A Hard…