单项选择题
| The study of management is at a turning
point. What began as the study of "best practice" among large manufacturing
firms has grown to encompass specialized fields ranging from finance to
government. As the subject matter has changed, so has the role played by its
masters. Business schools and management consultants used to spend most of their
time training the inexperienced, bringing them up to speed on case studies of
"excellent" companies. Now they also create their own theories to challenge the
wisdom of businessmen. And those theories have the power to change the ways in
which even the best companies do business. The new scope and power of management theories have created an identity crisis. Are teachers of management like historians, distilling the wisdom of the world into a form that others can absorb and imitate Or are they innovators, changing the world with their new theories and ideas And, if they are to be innovators, what are to be the doctrine and dogma from which their theories spring Bright management ideas abound, but two factors make it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. One is the "Hawthorne effect". Early in the twentieth century, managers at General Electric’s Hawthorne plant began a study of how better lighting might increase productivity. They turned up the lights. Productivity went up. For exactitude, they also turned down the lights, expecting productivity to fall. It didn’t; it went again. In fact, just about anything done to the Hawthorne workers increased productivity. They liked the attention. Given workers’ ability to respond positively to extra attention—however abjectly lunatic and misguided—a fallback criterion for measuring the success of a management theory is profits. But here the past seven years of steady economic growth, combined with roaring bull markets, have shown virtually all business ideas in their kindest light. For the time being, professors themselves are left with great leeway to decide which ideas are worth teaching and which are best forgotten. But the perspectives from which they make such decisions are changing fast. Management schools first started cropping up in America at the tuna of the century. Their role was to mould a new type of top manager to run a new type of corporation: the diversified manufacturer. Paragon of the new breed of company was General Motors—as redesigned by Alfred Sloan, who also founded the Sloan School of Management at MIT. To tap economies of scale and scope GM was one of the first firms to organize management by function, creating a finance department, a marketing department, an engineering department and so on. This new organization, in turn, required a new breed of manager at the top—where the functional divisions came together—who could get the most out of the vast and specialized resources spread out beneath him. The new breed of magnate had to understand the various skills he commanded, from finance to manufacturing. Few had time to gain all that knowledge on shop—and trading-room-floors. The new managers also had to be able to translate their knowledge into a common language, which often meant the rows and columns of management accounting. And, because of the complexity of their empires, they had to be more conscious of the theory and practice of organization. In many ways, the logical culmination of this management philosophy was Harlod Geneen of ITT (MBA, Harvard). He created a vast conglomerate based on "management by numbers"—the idea that if one could read management accounts right, one could manage just about anything. But neither conglomerateers nor big manufacturers have had an easy time of late. Not only have economies shifted towards service industries, but the turbulence of recent years has encouraged the break-up of big firms into smaller chunks. Though the required "core" curriculum of most business schools still prepares graduates for life in a firm like GM, only a minority of MBAs now go into big manufacturing companies. Some of the best-publicized successors to Harold Geneen’s manage-by-numbers philosophy have drifted into the mergers and acquisitions departments of investment banks. Others have scattered across the world of business. If today’s MBA can be said to have a typical career, he would begin in finance or consulting and end up founding a business. Business schools, meanwhile, encourage diversity by expanding the number of subjects which they teach. Though programs vary greatly, most MBA curricula can be divided roughly into three parts: a core curriculum of required subjects; a specialized subject that the MBA studies in greater depth; and the educational process itself, which emphasizes the sort of teamwork that MBAs will have to adopt in the real world. The core curriculum includes the facts and skills which every MBA must master. At most business schools it includes marketing (how to discover who might want to buy your product and why), finance (how to get and use capital), management accounting (how to keep financiers abreast of how you are doing), organization (how to create teams that work), manufacturing (how to tell people who make things what to do), and information technology (what computers can do). By the standards of any other graduate program, much of the core MBA is remarkably rudimentary. Business-school students are not expected to know what a bond is, or a share. Accounting courses do not take for granted even the basic principles of double-entry bookkeeping, let alone the basics of reading a balance sheet. Though the level of these courses is a humbling reminder of the lack of business education elsewhere—the average 18-year-old in America or Britain probably knows more about nuclear physics than about business—it can hardly justify MBAs high salaries and high-flying reputations. For that, MBAs must rely on their specialized studies and the sheer process of MBA instruction. Mr. David Norburn, head of the MBA program of London’s Imperial College, is fond of ribbing his students and staff with the argument that his school might as usefully offer a "Masters of Advanced Plumbing" as an MBA. Much of the real value of an MBA, he argues, lies in recreating in MBA studies the feeling of working in business. Problems are structured so that they can be solved only by teams. Pressure is kept high. There is never enough time or information to reach definite conclusions, encouraging inspired guessing and "quality bluffing". And, at the end of the day, there is no pretence of sharing rewards equally among the team—an individual takes the best prizes. For employers, the best part of an MBA often lies in his specialized training. Given inflation into the technicalities of, say, bond trading or market analysis, an MBA can often go straight to work at a level which untrained colleagues may take a year or more to reach on the job. Better, he can bring new ideas to an organization; most home-grown experts cannot. So it is no surprise that some of the most frantic innovation in business schools is the fine- tuning of specialized curricula, and the introduction of new special subjects. The dean of the Stanford School of Business, Mr. Robert Jaedicke, has compiled a list of the new features proposed for tomorrow’s MBAs. It includes: Globalization. As competition increasingly ignores national boundaries, so too must managers. That means that managers must be able to build teams which include various nationalities working side by side. Regulation. Governments and regulatory agencies from GATT to America’s Food and Drug Administration—play a growing role in defining how businesses compete. Managers must be increasingly good at working with (or around) them. Ethics and social responsibility. Businesses have gradually assumed a broad social and political role. They are patrons of the arts. They have become embroiled in social and political change—e. g., in the controversy over apartheid in South Africa and, at home, in "affirmative action programmes" to promote minorities. That means that managers must become sophisticated about balancing their duties to shareholders with their social roles. How will business schools get all this new knowledge Mr. Jaedicke, for one, plans to borrow it from other parts of his university. He is now trying to get political scientists interested in the problems of business and regulation. He wonders whether, in a few years, he might be recruiting moral philosophers to help businessmen sort out their ethics. Borrowing, he argues, is how management theory grows most healthily—witness the transformation that economists recruited by business schools in the 1960s have wrought on financial markets. |
Management professors ______ what management ideas are the brightest.