The Hindu Business Line : High-value decision maker

A reassuring thought for B-school students can be that the ‘demand for the MBA degree currently exceeds supply by a healthy margin,’ as a new book from Oxford ( www.oup.com) informs.

“However, a number of vehement critiques of the MBA degree have emerged,” Mihnea C. Moldoveanu and Roger L. Martin caution in The Future of the MBA.

These critiques raise questions about the economic, intellectual, practical, moral, and ‘all-things-considered’ value of the MBA, and its relevance and viability.

In response, the manager of the future has to be a ‘high-value decision maker,’ the authors suggest in a chapter titled ‘The integrative thinker’.

They explain how such a manager “must motivate, monitor, coordinate, negotiate, and argue with experts with disparate disciplinary backgrounds and produce arguments patterned on the underlying logics and discourse ethics of different basic sciences, each based not only on a different vocabulary and technical code drawn from mutually disjoint basic disciplines but also on a different set of standards of argumentation, reasoning and interaction and different modes of behaviour.”

As information becomes currency within the organisation and task-specific, hard-to-transfer knowledge confers de facto decision-making authority on its legitimate holder, the value of the integrator to the organisation increases, observe Moldoveanu and Martin.

“The integrator’s core skills are tacit in the sense that they cannot be captured by algorithms and can never be fully explicitly represented.”

The authors define the integrative capacity as ‘the ability to think and act responsibly and responsively in the face of multiple, incommensurable, and possibly conflicting models of oneself, the world, and others.’

Of special interest to those in management education should be the chapter titled ‘Business School 3.0’ on ‘the design and development of integrative cognitive-behavioural modules for the thinker of the future.’

Rigorously researched.

D. Murali

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com