Management courses for people without a few years of management experience are a waste of time.
What I would like to see—and what I have practiced now for many years in my own teaching—is:
- Management education only for already successful people. I believe management courses for people without a few years of management experience are a waste of time.
- Management education for people from the private, the public, and the not-for-profit sectors together.
- Planned, systematic work by the students while at school in real work assignments in real organizations—the equivalent to the MD residency.
- Far more emphasis on government, society, history, and the political process.
- Teachers with real management experience and enough of a consulting practice to know real challenges.
- Major emphasis on the nonquantifiable areas that are the real challenges—and especially on the nonquantifiable areas outside the business—at the same time much greater quantitative skills, that is, in understanding both the limitations of the available numbers and how to use numbers.
ACTION POINT: Take executive development courses that pertain to your current position and the position to which you aspire. Apply the concepts directly to your work assignments.
“An Interview with Peter Drucker,” The Academy of Management Executive
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker