There is a big Drucker fan over here in Europe, Fredmund Malik. He is hit and miss in his observations, but his riff on Drucker's insight into 'learning' management fits my personal observations.
- MBA... Master of Business ADMINISTRATION. For some reason this morphed into management material, which it isn't. the whole thing teaches you about the administrative side of running a company. awesome, useful. it does NOT teach anything about making a company successful or how to make people within it successful. it is NOT a management course.
so where can one learn management then?
1., the product success side you can't learn anywhere. hence all these shitty companies with shitty products and services. the product side is sort of covered in engineering. technical founders, for example, understand the core principle of what works and what will be an issue down the line. what is right and what is wrong.
a generic 'manager' armed with an MBA and technical background of 5 years of XBox Live just doesn't. the concept of 'wrong' or 'down the line' does not exist. excel has no formula for that.
2., the people success part is very much a soft skill which needs to be learned through practice in an enforced learning environment. current organisations that do this are the various Armed Forces (NCO and Officers) and similar orgs like the Boy Scouts. some companies emulate this through trainee programs - Siemens has a structured way of giving you a team early on, then giving you challenges. which include firing 2 people from that team after you have worked with them for a while. for real. but now you KNOW first hand how a layoff looks like. not just a spreadsheet anymore.
the armed forces gradually give you more responsibility, group, platoon, etc. you have constant feedback loops focusing on your leadership abilities, not just the pure outcome of a task. after action reviews, the whole spiel. nothing grounds you like hearing in an AAR that your team had no clue what you told them, etc.
in austria we have technology and crafts-oriented higher colleges, which have an interesting concept. i completed one for constructional engineering. not only do you learn how to calculate a large construction project (both from a structural and a economic side). you actually learn to build it with your own hands. now you KNOW how much work it is to build 1m of brick wall. so shaving off a few minutes per 1m to make a project 'viable' to build 1000m of wall in a week with 5 men doesn't come so easily anymore, because you know that the workers will simply get exhausted and produce errors and accidents. no MBA on earth teaches you this insight. backache and blisters on your hands do. humans are stupid in that way.
- MBA... Master of Business ADMINISTRATION. For some reason this morphed into management material, which it isn't. the whole thing teaches you about the administrative side of running a company. awesome, useful. it does NOT teach anything about making a company successful or how to make people within it successful. it is NOT a management course.
so where can one learn management then?
1., the product success side you can't learn anywhere. hence all these shitty companies with shitty products and services. the product side is sort of covered in engineering. technical founders, for example, understand the core principle of what works and what will be an issue down the line. what is right and what is wrong.
a generic 'manager' armed with an MBA and technical background of 5 years of XBox Live just doesn't. the concept of 'wrong' or 'down the line' does not exist. excel has no formula for that.
2., the people success part is very much a soft skill which needs to be learned through practice in an enforced learning environment. current organisations that do this are the various Armed Forces (NCO and Officers) and similar orgs like the Boy Scouts. some companies emulate this through trainee programs - Siemens has a structured way of giving you a team early on, then giving you challenges. which include firing 2 people from that team after you have worked with them for a while. for real. but now you KNOW first hand how a layoff looks like. not just a spreadsheet anymore.
the armed forces gradually give you more responsibility, group, platoon, etc. you have constant feedback loops focusing on your leadership abilities, not just the pure outcome of a task. after action reviews, the whole spiel. nothing grounds you like hearing in an AAR that your team had no clue what you told them, etc.
in austria we have technology and crafts-oriented higher colleges, which have an interesting concept. i completed one for constructional engineering. not only do you learn how to calculate a large construction project (both from a structural and a economic side). you actually learn to build it with your own hands. now you KNOW how much work it is to build 1m of brick wall. so shaving off a few minutes per 1m to make a project 'viable' to build 1000m of wall in a week with 5 men doesn't come so easily anymore, because you know that the workers will simply get exhausted and produce errors and accidents. no MBA on earth teaches you this insight. backache and blisters on your hands do. humans are stupid in that way.