Business schools should stop operating as if they were selling products and take a leaf from modern businesses by deriving revenues from working in collaboration with the customer.
The problem:
Business schools tend to rely on a ‘banking’ model of education. They treat knowledge as a kind of currency.
The practical experience of mangers and business-people is gathered up by researchers, converted into general models and theories, stored in journals and books, and then sold back to practitioners. Even distance learning is the equivalent of the ATM.
But this is simply a distribution business model: knowledge is disconnected from practice, packaged in discrete parcels for later consumption.
Managerial knowledge comes in many types, is already widely distributed, and real learning comes from creative interchange, not one-way delivery.
The alternatives:
Important knowledge is embedded in managerial practice. We can create business education that makes use of this personal and tacit experience by using ‘close learning’ — students are all practicing managers and work with a personal tutor to make use of theories and models that encourage practical improvements.
Wikipedia provides an even more radical metaphor for management education Coachingourselves.com is a new company that helps managers to learn from their own experience.
Establishing knowledge about customer satisfaction, for example, rests with the managers responsible for delivering it.
CoachingOurselves pulls together the people with fragments of experience across a company and provides the intellectual framework, asking provocative questions to organize it into a well-tested theory.
Managers in companies like SAP and Sasken in India have hugely improved their understanding and become more engaged and creative in their managerial work using this approach.
Their new insights feed sessions for the CoachingOurselves portfolio, thus co-creating management knowledge as well as adding value to managerial practice. This is the Web 2.0 version of the business school — a wiki-school.
Close learning is a new metaphor for management education, and the wiki-school is a new way to think about a business school.
