This episode is a continuation of my animated conversation with Professor J.-C. Spender, a nuclear engineer-turned-business school professor, author, expert on the history of business education, and former executive and business school dean.
At the onset of episode #30 I asked Dr. Spender if getting an MBA degree would provide what’s needed if someone wanted to efficiently manage a healthcare organization.
His response was YES. But he added “that’s a kind of modified and slightly tangled yes.”
What I heard was “No.” Take a listen and see what you think.
Professor Spender’s contrarian penchant is delightful and provocative. He offers no instant gratification: no conversational closure rewarding me with a satisfying hit of dopamine. No schmoozy cooperation providing a squirt of oxytocin. The effect of this professor’s conversational style is attention—what IS he saying? How does this comment jive with that last one? Where are we headed?!
He paints a bleak picture when it comes to the management training or even the management potential of someone who has been awarded an MBA degree. Non-partisan in his criticism, he also deemed my assertion that physicians must lead healthcare as “a misdiagnosis.” And what did I hear with that? I heard that Dr. Spender’s primary interest is spotlighting the “multiplicity, the plurality of conversations, that is the fundamental challenge for leadership.” Agreed.
When it comes to leadership and management he would have us attend to:
•The history of business education--from whence the “bullshit” came
•Practice (experience) vs. principles (rules)—and the true crucible of leadership when principles don’t serve us
•Uncertainty as the state which drives the engine of business
•The fundamental ethical problem of business: monetizing someone else’s imagination to serve oneself
•The lack of conversation in business school about human beings’ capacity for imagination—yet it is imagination which produces an organization’s value
In this episode:
•The balanced scorecard—developed as a remedy to the dominance of finance during board-level strategic conversations
•Business geniuses are those who flourish in business as an “artistic medium”
•The demise in popularity of managerial accounting and the ascendancy of financial accounting
•Clouding true intentions by invoking “trust” when monetization to satisfy shareholder demands is the business objective
•Economic discourse as an arena that is incapable of creating new economic value
•Tacit knowledge is knowledge derived more from practice than from principle
•Racism and oppression as actions to silence the language of entire communities
For more information including “A Glossary of Sorts” (aka Spenderisms) see the 11/9/21 newsletter
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