Credit where credit is due

Harvard Business School and Boston, originally uploaded by zrrdavatz.

The Social Business contemplates B-school blurbs after the crash:

"Leeds alumni were responsible for wiping £8.7 billion pounds off the value of their companies as a result of the outdated management models that ours, and similar MBA programmes, encourage. This ranks 63rd in the world and 4th in Britain."

Will Business Schools radically alter their MBA programmes in recognition of the allegation/fact that the management styles that they tend to promote are largely responsible for the mess we're in? There's a very good piece by Simon Caulkin . . . in this month's Management Today magazine where he makes it very clear:

"The bomb that has blown up the heart of the world's financial system was not primarily financial. It's true that finance provided the high explosive in the shape of the structured vehicles, collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and derivatives devised by the rocket scientists of Wall Street and the City. But it needed a detonator to set them off: the unfit-for-purpose management model that has governed the way our companies work for the last 40 years."

The piece is well worth a read. He, and the people he quotes, such as Gary Hamel, sense that there's a real opportunity to throw out the discredited Management 1.0 model and come up with something far more progressive.