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“Managers probably need financial and accounting, marketing and strategic skills more today than they ever have done. But they also need something else. They need grounding in the messy realities of the human condition, an understanding of politics and culture and an awareness of the historical forces that have shaped the world in which we live. …and they need role models from whom to learn.”
(John Hendry)
“The Western tradition will still have to be at the core, if only to enable the Educated Person to come to grips with the present, let alone with the future. The future may be ‘post-Western‘. It may be ‘anti-Western‘. It cannot be ‘non-Western. Its material civilisation and its knowledge rest on Western foundations: science, tools and technology, production, economics, money, finance and banking.”
(Peter Drucker)
To function in the long term, the modern knowledge society, according to Drucker, needs the educated person to be the determining social type. Before I go into definitions, in order to avoid misunderstandings, I should explain the term “post-capitalist society” used by Drucker to describe the modern knowledge society. In his book of the same name, he defines it as follows: “The new society – and it is already here – is a post capitalist society. It surely … will use the free market as the one proven mechanism of economic integration. It will not be an ‘anti-capitalist’ society. It will not even be a ‘non-capitalist’ society; the institutions of capitalism will survive. … but the center of gravity in the post-capitalist society … is and will be knowledge”. Knowledge has become a crucial social resource.
The structural change that is taking place in all areas of the post-capitalist or knowledge society requires, as already mentioned, the educated person as predominant social type – someone who is not only a carrier of knowledge, but is able to use this knowledge to effectively contribute to shaping the economy and society. I would like to describe Drucker’s ideal Educated Person as a cognitive-formative social type.
Drucker believed that modern knowledge society needs this social type like no other society before. This applies in particular to the elites, foremost to management as society’s major leadership group. And this leads Drucker to his understanding of management: “Management is more than a bag of skills, competence and tricks … Management cannot be concerned solely with results and performance. Precisely because the object of Management is a human community held together by the work bond for a common purpose. Management always deals with the Nature of Man … Management will increasingly be the discipline and the practice through and in which the humanities will again acquire recognition, impact and relevance“.
For Drucker, management is not a humanity, but the humanities and social sciences are an indispensable foundation for management education and for the managerial profession. In this sense, management is a liberal art in itself, an interweaving of “art” or “techne” with the humanities. According to Drucker, “Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal art: ‘liberal’ because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, “art” because it is practice and application. Managers draw on all the knowledge of the humanities and the social sciences, … But they have to focus this knowledge on effectiveness and results … In Management, however, the Liberal Arts become what they have always been when they flourished: kinetic energy and guidance to action”.
Based on this insight, Drucker defines the integration of the liberal arts as a central task of management education. Because the society of knowledge workers, to which the managers – the knowledge executives – belong as a “society’s major leadership group”, is a society in which the central social resource is neither physical labor nor capital: “… we do not know precisely how to link Liberal Arts and Management. We do not yet know whether it is going to be a marriage of convenience or a love match – although we do know that they have to have mutual respect. We do not yet know what impact this will have on either party … But what we in Claremont are pioneering is making the Liberal Arts an organic part – indeed a key resource – in the teaching of Management, and Management into a ‘growth market’ for the Liberal Arts.”
Drucker sees another challenge facing education to become an “educated person” in the need to interlink the various areas of knowledge, since these are all of equal value in a knowledge society: “General education which does not integrate the knowledge into one universe of knowledge is neither liberal nor educated. They fall down in their first task: to create mutual understanding – that universe of discourse without which there can be no civilization. Instead of uniting, such liberal arts fragment”.
Under the title Inner Contradictions of the German Universities, the philosopher and sociologist Max Scheler wrote more than 100 years ago: “Rich in knowledge, poor in being able to take a stand and poor in the sense of responsibility and shared responsibility for this stand – the impression is that which our academic youth leaving university so often exposes to the objective eye”.
The goal of a university education for managers, including managers of the economy, in the spirit of Peter Drucker, would be precisely the sense of social responsibility that Scheler missed. Of course, in designing the curriculum, care must always be taken to ensure that the business manager’s first social responsibility is the long-term economic success of the company, something Drucker always insisted on.
Scheler’s criticism has lost none of its relevance today. For example, in his book Theory of Uneducation the Austrian philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann complains that lacking a well-founded educational concept, the universities have let themselves be “… sold as the latest trend in the leadership industry” and impart purely operational skills. “The flexible person who puts his cognitive abilities at the disposal of rapidly changing markets throughout his life. Despite everything that people need and can know today – and that is not a small amount – this knowledge lacks any synthesizing power. It remains…piecemeal, quick to produce, quick to acquire and easy to forget.”
Similarly uncompromising sentiments are expressed by US philosopher and management consultant in his book The Management Myth: “I interviewed, hired, and worked with hundreds of business school graduates, and the impression I formed of the MBA experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like ‘out of the box thinking‘, ‘win-win situation‘ and ‘core competencies’“.
According to Stewart, the same thing is true of management management development post university, with the result that “many of today‘s Managers are well trained enough, but their training does little to improve their level of education. If Henry Adams came back to life, he would recognize them instantly. ‘They are a crowd of men … who seem … ignorant that there is a thing called ignorance‘. This lack of education does more harm to society and individuals than do any deficiencies in training“.
To get to the point, it sometimes makes sense to use the ‘Going beyond the goal’ method. This is shown by the very pointed quotes from Liessmann and Stewart from 2006. How can the current state of management education be summarized in the spirit of Peter Drucker? My impression is that awareness is there, theory and practice are also slowly gaining momentum. I can share an example from my own experience: at the Technical University of Munich, rightly nicknamed the ‘’entrepreneurial university’, where I have lectured in the department of knowledge and research management for 10 years, flexible teaching programs give students plenty of room for creativity. This goes too for formal and content-related integration of the humanities into degree programs. Thus coursework achievements in politics or philosophy from other departments can be credited to the TU. These freedoms are based on far-sighted decisions made 20 or more years ago that students are increasingly making use of today. The growing popularity in my seminars, in which the work of Peter Drucker is the focus, is part of the same phenomenon.
Similar changes in curriculum frameworks are now on the agenda at many universities and business schools. For this reason, there is hope that the Stewartian “straight face” of the business school graduate will increasingly be guided by a “reflected head”. With regard to management development, there is also a positive shift towards the Druckerian ideal of management education, albeit not quite as marked as that of higher education: The awareness is there, theory and practice still have to get going! I will comment on this in detail in my next post.
About the author:
Management consultant for more than 40 years, Peter Paschek shared a close two-decade friendship with Peter Drucker. His book: Peter F. Drucker – Memories of a Conservative Christian Anarchist – was published in 2020.
Join Peter Paschek at the Forum on November 14 at panel 2: Did Drucker Get It Right about Knowledge Work? It’s been twenty-five years since Peter Drucker outlined what he called the greatest challenge facing management in the twenty-first century: improving the productivity of knowledge work. What did he predict would prove hardest, and what did he never imagine?