Management Education for Contemporary Challenges: the Role of Business School Essay Example

management skill in the paradigm shift of managing business. The first section of the paper evaluates the changing scenario of managing business organizations, the second section explains the reshaping of management education with the emerging needs of the business management, and finally the roles played by leading business school have been analyzed in the context of changing situation.

As such, the research aims at examining the changing need of management education to produce future leaders of the corporation. The research question comes in the study is whether the roles played by leading business schools can be considered as the ones according to expectations of the corporate management generally. Specially, the question is, whether the products of leading business school have got all the required management skills to meet the contemporary challenge of business management. 1. Methodology This research is mostly done on existing literature of management education.

The firs two sections of the research have been done on reviewing the literature of the issues raised in the study. So, a good number of published papers on the issues has been reviewed and examined to get clear idea on major aspects of the research. This exercise gives a clear understanding of the changing scenario of managing business today and the management skills required to face the challenges of management. Then, the research has got today’s situation of management education to meet the needs. This critical review of management education has been used to get the roles played by eading business schools of USA and of Asia Pacific. In selecting the leading business school, the research used the ranking given by different organizations. So, the required information according to

the research question have been collected from web sites of ten top ranking business schools of each of the two regions; the USA and Asia Pacific(Table 1). The thoughts on management education according to literature review have been used to analyze the information from MBA brochures of top ten business schools of two regions studied in the research.

This must be achieved against a background of intensified competition, incessant change, a power shift to the customer, collaborations across organizational and geographical boundaries, and a need to maintain high levels of talent (Tannenbaum, 2002). Business programs across the nation recognize the need to change in response to external pressure from key stakeholders. An important dimension of such change is the redesign of business 651 Mohammed Abdullah Mamun and Ariffin Bin Mohamad curricula. Achieving greater integration across curriculum is often a central focus of such efforts (McCuddy & Pirie 1988).

Business organizations continue to transform themselves in response to the challenges posted by increased competition, the globalization of business, and rapid change in information technology (Hammer & Champy 1993). Pfeffer (1994) argued that because of the accelerating rate of change, the workforce in terms of human and social capital should be seen as one of the critical factors in developing and maintaining competitive advantage, joining traditional factors such as technology and protected market. He also claims that an appropriate development of the workforce is closely related to appropriate management.

Related to this perspective and from a knowledge based view of the firm, Leonard-Barton (1995) saw core capability as comprising managerial activities and systems or what she describes as “the whole system of knowledge management” bound up with a particular competitive

advantage. Conger, Spreitzer, and Lawler (1999) argue that intense and global competition, rapid technological change, new complex organizational forms, organizational alliances, and international capital markets are creating an increased demand for change leadership at a time when such leadership is increasingly difficult to find.

Quinn and Snyder (1999) suggests that before expecting others to change, a leader must understand strategies such as those based on confrontation, facilitation, persuasive discourse, and the management of meaning to ensure that their actions are consistent with their vision of the future. These scholars and others are suggesting that individual employees, not just top management, must become leaders who can work with the technological revolution and globalization of business and can continually acquire new knowledge and remain flexible (McDonald 2000).

Therefore the business schools, responsible to educate future leaders of business organizations, need to understand the challenges faced by the organizations. This is how; they can try to bring necessary changes in their curriculum according to the needs of the changing situation of the environment. Which challenges are important to consider is more important to them? The following section of the paper describes the nature of the organizational challenges today. It can be termed as ‘paradigm shift’ of managing today’s businesses.