Management Education—Current Action and Future Needs
Authors: Foy Nancy 
Published: March 2008

Various scenarios for the eighties give remarkably coherent pictures of the environment in which companies will operate, especially with respect to the kinds of managers that will be needed. One finds increasingly familiar descriptions of smaller work elements and rising unemployment, of more demanding employees, of intervention from outside in the form of government control, consumerism, community demands, union demands—and an increased ethos of social responsibility in business. These consistent pictures of the eighties have important implications for the future of management. Industry will need faster, more flexible responses. So will other kinds of organisations, related to the public sector. This, in turn, demands organisations able to adapt themselves to their environment more easily than most can demonstrate today. The individual manager in this environment will be valued not for his techniques or specific knowhow so much as for his breadth, his ability to project pictures of forests as well as trees, and his ability to deal with a wide variety of constituencies. He will have to listen as much as he talks, using a variety of vocabularies. He will have to be equipped to bridge boundaries both inside the organisation and to outsiders. Some of the most difficult boundaries to cross in today's organisations tend to be those nearest to home—the boundaries between faculties or disciplines in a university, for example, or between functions in a company. I believe the problems inherent in these scenarios for the eighties are actually opportunities for management education. If companies will need managers who can cross boundaries, this presents an opportunity for external management education institutions to act as agents for change, as catalysts, taking early initiatives rather than reacting with “products” after problems emerge. In short, management education could be helping managers learn how to bridge the important boundaries, as well as bringing together people from different places who have similar problems, opportunities or interests. If this is the role management educators recognise and accept for the eighties, they will need to develop and exercise boundary‐crossing skills within the often difficult environments in which they operate. Standing at the boundary between the industrial culture and the academic culture, each management centre or business school has to define its own objectives. For what purpose do they exist? Is it to improve the nation's economy; to improve corporate management; to develop group skills; to develop individual managers; to educate; or train managers; to develop management teachers and researchers; to extend current “best practice” to a wider audience; to develop new approaches; to achieve professional or academic standing? Objectives need not be mutually exclusive, nor even ranked too firmly. But mismatches have been observed between professed objectives and observed behaviour. The situation for the trainer inside a company is often analogous; he, too, stands at the boundary between the culture of his company and the demands of the academic world, and must reconcile often conflicting objectives