Managing our emerging worlds

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Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 2323 hrs green world, one being reduction of effluents and other wastes, and the second being the conservation of fuels of all kinds. These two goals may be complementary (more efficient engines), or they may conflict (for example, ethanol use can reduce fossil fuel extraction, but harm biodiversity), increasing the complexity of the management task. Both goals ultimately aim to reduce damage to the ecosystem, and recover or protect the “green world”. Solutions require innovations in technology, public policy and social behaviour, and commercial sustainability of innovations can be an important contributor to sustainability.

The inner world, representing the drivers of human behaviour, is in some sense the last frontier of knowledge. Managing creativity and collaboration among fellow human beings is perhaps the most difficult and fundamental challenge of management practice, in capitalist firms, government organisations or voluntary associations. Intertwined innovations across many disciplines—neuroscience, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, and psychology are providing new insights into individual and social behaviour. Interestingly, the virtual world is a tool and an arena for exploring the inner world, through bioinformatics, games and simulations, and collaborative discovery, and provides a new set of tools for management education and practice.

What are some practical implications of this view of the future of management? The 1950s and 1960s saw a systemisation of management education whereby every business school graduate is expected to have a good analytical toolkit, and basic competence in areas such as economics, finance, marketing and accounting. Interpersonal skills have always presented more of a challenge. Surveys suggest that employers value them, but business school graduates do not. Part of the problem may be that “soft” skills are hard to measure and reward.

It is also may be that management education is behind the curve with respect to teaching such skills. The case study method, which has been the staple of management education, is based on a fundamental human ability to learn through storytelling. However, learning through experience is even better. Internships are a limited way of achieving this, since students cannot be let loose too freely on running businesses. Clearly, there is enormous scope for adapting the tools of the virtual world for teaching. Online games and online worlds are going to be an important new medium for management education, but they will have to be designed specifically to enable management students to master specific challenges such as negotiation and collaboration.