2005-07-12

Managing as Creating

This position paper endorsed by a diverse range of people - executives, deans, professors, researchers, artists, students - argues that there is an urgent need for a balance between the "professional approach" and the "academic approach" within management schools, whose mission is to train managers who are capable of acting, as opposed to turning out academics who spend their entire career within the walls of the university interacting solely with other scholarly researchers and evaluating each other's work.

In presenting their argument, the authors are inspired by the training approach used in art schools. They ask: What would one think of a school that purported to train artists by merely dispensing formal lectures and communicating knowledge? Yet this is exactly what often occurs in management schools. When it comes to the training of artists and managers, intellectualism becomes a perversion of genuine intellectual effort.

source: http://www.hec.ca/ijam/731.htm

an article by Laurent Lapierre in: International Journal of Arts Management (Spring 2005)