The Loss of Balance Between the Art and Science of Management

The Immediate Postwar Years and Britain’s “Management Gap”

In the immediate postwar years, the debate over the need for and nature of education for managers can be seen in the context of concern in the United Kingdom over a “management gap,” especially as compared with the United States. Various sources reflect the opinion that the United Kingdom’s businesses and government had not carried out their side of the war effort efficiently (Larson, 2009; Perkin, 1996; Tiratsoo, 1998; Wheatcroft, 1970; Wilson, 2011). The study of “Business Administration” was seen as “a means of improving the theoretical training of the aspirant to administrative responsibility in business and of thereby raising the efficiency of management” (Branton, 1949, p. 1). Efficiency was the key goal in the 1950s and the 1960s, and education was seen as a way to reach that goal.

Among those involved in closing this supposed “gap” was Lyndall Urwick. Urwick was a British management consultant and head of the Ministry of Education’s Education for Management Committee in the immediate postwar years. Soon after the committee finished its work, he headed an Anglo-American Council on Productivity (AACP) group whose 1951 visit to the States was focused explicitly on education for management (Anglo American Council on Productivity, 1951). The AACP visits to the United States were focused on learning what were thought of as American “secrets” to efficiency and productivity. Urwick’s group’s report stated that British industry had “much to learn about the full utilisation of manpower and the efficient use of mechanical aid. If we are to improve or even maintain our standards of living a drastic change of outlook is necessary” (Anglo American Council on Productivity, 1951, p. 22). Overall, they attributed the difference between the United States and the United Kingdom in “outlook” to the “attitude of executives” and this they saw as being connected to differences in higher education (Anglo American Council on Productivity, 1951, p. 1). They noted that the degree programs they saw were generally longer than those in Britain and offered a combination of vocational subjects as well as a grounding in the liberal arts (Anglo American Council on Productivity, 1951). That is to say, they observed a balance between business subjects and those of more general educational value, such as history, English literature and composition, and philosophy.

But as well as recognizing the value of a broad and balanced education, many of those proposing changes to education for management in Britain wanted to see British managers using the most modern and “scientific” management techniques. The “scientific” side seemed to many to be what was missing from British management. As the AACP also noted, Britain needed “a more rapid spread of knowledge and application of management aids . . . to raise the general average of productive efficiency of our industry” (Anglo American Council on Productivity, 1951, p. 27).

Lyndall Urwick saw a link between the development of new technologies in general and the need for a more “scientific” approach to management. He acknowledged that the term “scientific management” had unfortunate connotations, but he believed that the term was “merely an affirmation that the methods of thought, the respect for natural law, which inspired the work of chemists and engineers” was something that would be beneficial to management (Urwick, 1943, p. 10). The equipment of the manager should be “a mind well versed in the underlying sciences on which the art of administration rests” (Urwick, 1943, p. 7). His view of “science” was about particular habits of mind rather than rigid adherence to rules or methods.

Urwick, himself the son of a successful businessman, had gone to Oxford and received a degree in modern history (Wheatcroft, 1970). Such education had long been the norm among Britain’s elites, but in Urwick, such education was combined with an interest in the family business. His work as an author on management is well known for its analysis and synthesis of many different views and approaches to management. For example, his own “unique and idiosyncratic view of scientific management” is not a disciple’s pure advocacy of the work of F. W. Taylor but was developed from his study of Taylor, Henri Fayol, Mary Parker Follett, as well as the human relations movement (Parker & Ritson, 2011). His willingness and ability to bring together such a wide range of ideas and sources may well have been an ability that owed something to his broad and balanced education.

Before the War, Urwick had already been writing on the state of management education in the United Kingdom. Then in 1946, he and coauthor E. F. L. Brech talked about the history of the divide in the opinion of how managers should be educated. There had been, they thought, two distinct schools of thought, “the ‘progressives’ and the ‘practical’ men” (Urwick & Brech, 1946, p. 134). The “practicals” had always been in favor of traditional apprenticeship systems of training in the professional disciplines, in particular engineering and accountancy. Managerial ability could simply be learned on the job. These “practicals” believed that attempts to formally teach such abilities were no more than “frills—useless additions of wider knowledge.” On the other hand, the “progressive” perspective had “pressed for the establishment of faculties of commerce as well as properly equipped junior schools to cater for the rank and file of the clerks” (Urwick & Brech, 1946, p. 134). The “progressives” had tried to shift the focus away from purely professional training to a broader education that would prepare individuals for “executive responsibility in industry and commerce.” At the time of their work, Urwick and Brech felt that the “progressives” had long ago won the contest because of the fact that a few university courses for management education had been established. And “By 1920 there were degrees in Commerce awarded by the Universities of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and others” (Urwick & Brech, 1946, p. 138).

But the victory of the “progressives” was a bit overstated. In Urwick’s time, those in favor of more practical training had not, by any means, disappeared. A large number of “professional associations” of specialized middle managers would continue to offer their own narrowly focused classes and diplomas tailored to the requirements of their particular areas of business. Among these were organizations such as the Office Management Association, the Institute of Industrial Administration, the Institute of Labour Management, the Works Management Association, and numerous others (Wilson, 2011). They all offered specialized classes and diplomas in their areas of expertise. These were mainly offered in night schools to those already working and were mainly taught by practicing managers in their spare time. For example, the course devised by the Office Management Association was aimed at clerks with aspirations to management. It used courses in Accountancy, Business Law, and other business subjects offered by the Royal Society of Arts as well as courses on Personnel Management offered by the Institute of Industrial Administration. It combined these with its own courses on Office Practice and Office Planning to produce what it believed was a qualification for management (Wilson, 2011).

After the War, the Ministry of Education’s Committee on Education for Management, headed by Urwick, had the job of bringing all these groups together to try to create a single diploma in management (Wilson, 2011). The resulting curriculum, from the report published in 1947, was a combination of broad education as well as practical training. It was to be offered as a part time course in various technical and commercial colleges across the country. It had no connection to the university system (Ministry of Education, 1947).

In the Report on Education for Management, the program proposed was broken down into “introductory subjects,” “background subjects” and “tool subjects.” The “tool” subjects were those seen as being the “tools of management”—accounting, statistics, “work measurement and incentives,” and “office organization and method.” But these only came after the study of the “history and structure of industry and commerce,” economics, and psychology. Those subjects would themselves have been preceded by introductory study of “the evolution of modern industrial organization and management” and “the nature of management.” The latter included, not only an overview of the functions of management—distribution, production, personnel, and so on—but it also introduced the concept of “inductive thinking,” “responsibilities of management to different social groups,” “the relative values of theory and experience,” and “adjusting theory to the individual” (Ministry of Education, 1947, p. 21). And even before students could embark on any of these courses, it was necessary for those who did not have any postsecondary school qualification or experience to pass a compulsory test in English composition, that is, a test of their communication ability (Ministry of Education, 1947).

So even though Urwick and the other members of his committee were management practitioners and in favor of “scientific” approaches to business, the Education for Management course they devised still allotted importance to understanding context and background and a theoretical perspective on management, alongside practical training. The kind of education advocated was not wholly “practical” or “scientific” but was actually quite balanced. Even Lyndall Urwick’s admiration for scientific management (see, e.g., Urwick & Brech, 1946) did not stop him from arguing that management as a discipline could be the “basis of a broad and liberal education” rather than simply the accumulation of technical/vocational expertise (Ministry of Education, 1945-1952, January 1947).

Nor was Urwick’s committee the only one making recommendations for a balanced education for managers. A separate Ministry of Education committee on Education for Commerce recommended a secondary commercial curriculum that included “English, history with special relation to commerce,” as well as mathematics and accounts (Reported in Office Management Association, 1950, p. 12).

However, neither of these committees was contemplating education for students at university. The Urwick committee saw the Education for Management course as needing to be able to educate a variety of aspirants to managerial positions. They described four categories of students. There was the “cadet,” a person intending to become a manager and who had continued in formal education to at least 18 years of age, possibly at university. There were also the technical “professionals,” such as engineers or accountants who were already working in their area of technical qualifications but who were being drawn into more and more managerial responsibilities. The report also recognized those school-leavers who were already employed and already in part-time study. These were young people working toward a technical “professional” qualification. And finally, there were individuals who had entered work as “operatives” but who were rising to managerial positions due to “outstanding ability and personality” (Ministry of Education, 1947, pp. 8-9).

All of these categories reflect the Committee’s belief that those who studied management should have some experience of the world of work or at least some formal education beyond what the law required. The study of management was to come after an individual had the intellectual skills to use it and think about it. The Report on Education for Management specified that an individual should not complete a specialized “professional” management course before the age of 25, and those pursuing the general management diploma should not finish before the age of 28. Thus, the study of management was viewed as a postgraduate or postexperience field of study. The first meeting of the Urwick Committee was in fact explicit in its opinion that management as a subject “was not a proper one for a University course leading to a first degree” (Ministry of Education, 1945-1952, October 1945). Implicit here is the idea that learning to manage effectively required something more than courses in management subjects. It required both experience and preliminary education in other subjects.

Changes After the Immediate Postwar Years

Urwick’s vision seems to have been for a broad discipline of management studies that would help develop the full range of intellectual skills needed to run a business. But employers seemed to persist in thinking that employees could learn that sort of thing on the job. And so the Education for Management scheme was never a great success. There is little evidence that the evening school pursuers of the Urwick Committee’s Diploma in Management gained any benefit in their jobs or job searches from the diploma (Wilson, 2011). But it must be remembered that, then as now, employers primarily hired for entry-level jobs. Few jobs are truly managerial at entry level, and so there is little concern for a full range of intellectual skills. It is perhaps because of this seeming mismatch between educating individuals for a long-term career and employers’ desire to fill immediate needs that the Urwick Committee’s Diploma did not succeed. However, this failure of the Urwick Committee’s scheme may be one reason for the disappearance of the idea of a broad, wide-ranging education for managers in the United Kingdom.

In the meantime, British universities had for various reasons become more receptive to the idea of offering education for management. Both the Robbins Report and the Franks Report, published in 1963 by two different government committees, recommended the creation of U.K. business schools. Two were formed at that time, one in London and the other in Manchester, but then other universities soon followed their lead (Engwall & Danell, 2011). Despite the tradition of liberal education that had been the core of universities, universities offering management education chose to offer very specialized management education rather than a traditional broad university education. They did not focus on the details of particular kinds of management practice as the “professional associations” had done. Rather, they created specialisms based on the research interests of academics who promoted their “scientific” research methods as the one best way to study and teach management. They then succeeded in promoting their “scientific” approach as the way to create economic value for society.

It is true that much of the Urwick Committee’s Education for Management scheme promoted what they saw as “modern” and “scientific” approaches to management. But as Michael Roper describes, the early academics who established management as a university discipline appropriated the mantle of science from Urwick and other “practitioner-theorists” (Roper, 1999, p. 55). Academic social scientists saw their predecessors as not actually scientific at all because their “principles had not been derived from systematic research” (Roper, 1999, p. 44). True science, they believed, was not about Urwick’s idea of “methods of thought” but about research methodologies that mimicked those of the physical sciences. A “theory-driven, discipline based” approach to management developed as a way to secure management’s legitimacy in academic environments (Thomas & Wilson, 2011, p. 444). Arguably, in this effort to create and legitimize management knowledge as an academic discipline, the actual education of future managers became a less central concern.

Outside the university itself, there were other changes that seemed to obviate the need for broad education in favor of training for management. Wilson and Thomson describe the shift in Britain from Personal Capitalism to what they call Managerial Capitalism. Among Managerial Capitalism’s characteristics was a growing division between control and ownership and also increasing numbers of institutional shareholders that required greater accountability. In addition, numerous mergers and acquisitions created larger organizations that needed greater control systems (Wilson & Thomson, 2006). Although such an environment may have represented an intensification in the nature of managerial work, there was a degree of straightforwardness and simplicity to what was needed. “Rule-of-thumb” decision making, backed by intelligence and broad conceptual knowledge, could be replaced by systems and standard procedures (Wilson & Thomson, 2006).

In Managerial Capitalism, managers were only answerable to the organization (Wilson & Thomson, 2006), and the organization was only answerable to the shareholder. As Milton Friedman and later shareholder theorists would claim, a business’s only responsibility was to increase its profits. It should do so legally and ethically, but the bottom line was the bottom line (Friedman, 1962, as cited in Smith, 2003). This would later be called a “dominant mythology” of business in companies reduced to “machines for making money” (Senge, 2006).

Not surprisingly, at this time, there was also an increase in the numbers of accountants in managerial positions. Accountants had always been a significant presence in the management of U.K. firms, but this increased dramatically in the 20th century (Matthews, 1998). And with them, presumably came a prizing of the clarity and certainty that numbers offer. In such a context, management academics’ “scientific” approaches to management seemed to offer similar clarity and certainty. It seemed possible and desirable to extract from management practice those skills or rules or models or formulae that were arguably most relevant to economic success. Business schools could focus on the dissemination of such “instrumental knowledge” rather than the “explanatory and contextual knowledge,” which is the hallmark of many liberal arts disciplines (Harvey & Wilson, 2007, p. 3).

Instrumental Knowledge, Narrow Expertise, and Relevance

Where management education has become the focus of undergraduate degree programs, purely instrumental knowledge of techniques and models of management can be particularly problematic. In undergraduate management education, instrumental management knowledge is passed to students who have never received any other higher education; nor do they usually have significant work experience. Either of these might have taught them how to think critically about management knowledge. But without experience or other education, students who follow and complete programs in management education may end up simply as uncritical consumers of management models, fads, and fashions—fads and fashions that are rarely “rigorously interrogated” (Starkey & Tiratsoo, 2007, p. 214). Many such students see learning as the acquisition of a commodity as if management knowledge were a technique like double entry bookkeeping. They do not accept an idea of education as an engagement with the broad body of knowledge that has been built up over human history. They are encouraged in this by the commodification of management knowledge itself and the rhetoric of student recruitment that appears to be selling skills that will result in immediate economic benefit.

A commodification of instrumental management knowledge may have begun with the overspecialization of the “professional associations” involved in the Urwick Committee’s diploma in management education. But that degree was intended for, if not postgraduate, at least postexperience students. The narrowness of the techniques they were taught by the professional associations may have been tempered by their ability to contextualize these ideas based on the experience of their working lives as well as the education they had received before undertaking specific education for management.

But many, if not most, U.K. undergraduate degree programs specialize in management subjects from the start, when undergraduates have limited experience of the world of work. As students progress through business degrees, the focus is often on narrow, empirical, and “scientific” modes of analysis. The “scientific” analysis is then seen to be a completion of any problem or project. Undergraduates accept this because they have no reason not to. And when they carry out their own research, as in an undergraduate thesis, they have difficulty trying to consider the context within which their small study is embedded. They have been taught little about how to think about causality. They miss the larger questions that their small studies might beg. They are unable to argue for the validity of any generalizable conclusions that their small study might suggest. For while “scientific” analysis may be part of solving a problem, it does not give full solutions. But students have few other resources on which to draw.

The stress on empiricism, rather than creative, imaginative, “outside the box” thinking also means that when undergraduates are presented with problems in, say, organizational behavior, they insist on seeing the problem (whether it be one of structure or culture or leadership) from the point of view of the consumer of the company’s goods or services. Their only experience with business is as consumers, and so, that is the lens through which they see organizations. They have difficulty envisioning the internal functioning of the organization. This could be seen as a failure in imagination and creativity. It may be that study of subjects outside their field of specialization might help develop other ways of seeing their world.

The focus on instrumental knowledge that has been seemingly extracted from management practice has led to the dominance of narrowly defined fields of expertise. Over time, such expertise has become so narrowly defined that all academic disciplines (not just management) have become “self-perpetuating secular priesthoods, members of whom are answerable only to themselves, talk only to themselves and have the single objective of furthering their increasingly self-enclosed, self-referential discipline” (Coleman, 2010, p. 5). Teaching such insular disciplines to any student does not help that individual connect to the complex business environment he or she will work in.

Despite the narrowness of the expertise that is celebrated in universities, these disciplines are the subjects that are defined as “relevant” to business and that are taught in management programs. There is an explicit rejection of subjects whose “relevance” to business is not explicitly apparent. However, it is not just U.K. universities themselves that reject the idea of broader education. Successive U.K. government reports have called, implicitly and explicitly, for more vocational university education. These reports are argued to be evidence of an ideological shift in the way education is viewed by the government. Where once higher education was seen to have a “cultural rationale” it is now only seen as a contributor to the nation’s economic prosperity (Wilton, 2008). These need not be mutually exclusive purposes, as Lyndall Urwick seemed to believe in his stating that management as a discipline could be the “basis of a broad and liberal education” (see above). However, society appears to have followed the government’s lead in seeing higher education as only valid when it leads to some immediate economic benefit. Students demonstrate this belief with their emphasis on “relevant” subjects and their rejection of nonbusiness electives, even when such electives are available.

Problems and Possible Solutions

With that rejection has come a loss of the habits of mind that may once have been nurtured by the study of history, arts, and languages. The focus on seeing management education as a collection of discreet bits of management technique is also profoundly ahistorical on a number of levels. Such a focus ignores the fact that modern management education is not anything like the education and/or training received by the “captains of industry” of Britain’s successful economic past. It also ignores the changes in context that have occurred and continue to occur in the world in which British business operates. A real assessment of the needs of Britain’s economy would entail figuring out the connections between education, economic environment, and economic success over time. From that, one might begin to see what truly relevant and useful management education might consist of.

There is evidence that the time for regaining balance in management education may be coming. As early as the third quarter of the 20th century, shareholder theory was being challenged (Gamble & Kelly, 2001). There was and continues to be criticism of the view that an enterprise should seek only to maximize shareholder return. Lagemann and Lewis believe that the sense of a company being part of the greater community was lost and needs to be regained. The employees of a company, including its managers, should see themselves as citizens with a responsibility to their society and the world (Lagemann & Lewis, 2013). That is, as stakeholder theory puts it, managers need to consider the rights of shareholders and also of any entity that has a stake in what the company does. This would include customers, employees, suppliers, and the local community and environment (Smith, 2003).

Trying to take account of the many and varied needs of numerous stakeholders is arguably a more complex task than simply maximizing the bottom line. It means seeing and understanding context in a very full way. Taking account of all stakeholders is not simply a fashionable new piece of management knowledge that can be added to management studies. It requires the ability to see the whole of one’s context and the interrelation of the elements in that context. Moreover, the argument in favor of attending to stakeholder needs is not a done deal. The debate over whether shareholders or stakeholders are more important for managers continues, and it is never likely to be settled because such disagreements are “rooted in the most basic beliefs that people hold about their goals in life” (Adams, Licht, & Sagiv, 2011, p. 1350). There are no rules or formulae that can help people navigate such complexity, “contingency” theories notwithstanding. Wisdom is required. It may be a bit much to claim that education can produce wisdom, but a broad and balanced development of all an individual’s mental abilities would seem to be a good place to start.

This is not to say that simply going back to the exact content and manner of management education promoted by Urwick is what is needed. But Urwick’s view of the need for balance in management education should be revisited. Exposure to a mix of disciplines makes an individual aware of the different “methods, insights and standards” that each discipline teaches, with the goal of becoming not only able to use all of those intellectual tools but also able to challenge them (MacIntyre, 2009, p. 353). Such an education might then have the possibility of producing an “educated mind” rather than “victims of the expertise of those trained to see things only in the narrow focus of their own discipline” (MacIntyre, 2009).

The irony then is that the narrow expertise of the university academic should actually fail the relevance test because of its narrowness. There is an overemphasis in academic research on empirical studies that connect to previous empirical studies but frequently do not connect to real life. Or research is so narrowly focused that the conclusions may speak to the next researcher, but they do not seem recognizable in the chaos of real organizational life. In reality, “in the contentious, messy, contingent, constantly changing world of the practical, unlike that of the theoretical, no one is an expert” (Coleman, 2007, p. 5). Education focused on narrowly defined disciplines taught by a few “experts” will not prepare people for the world they will try to prosper in, because “the world does not match the static demarcations of university departments and discipline” (Grey, 2004, p. 180). In an age of constant job changes, portfolio careers, and increasing numbers and categories of stakeholders, narrow education is what is not relevant.

Nevertheless, society has accepted, even encouraged, the authority of the “expert” for quite some time. Business schools and both undergraduate and postgraduate business degrees are undeniably popular in the United Kingdom and globally (Birnik & Billsberry, 2008; Wilton, 2008). However, criticism is beginning to develop both inside and outside the academy. The spate of scandals and crises in business and banking in recent decades has turned critical eyes toward how managers are educated. Business schools on both sides of the Atlantic have been accused of “churning out jargon-spewing economic vandals” (Schumpeter, 2009, p. 82). They are seen as “complicit in the current financial crisis” (Currie, Knights, & Starkey, 2010, p. S1). In response to the most recent crisis, there has been a push to add ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) to management curricula (Rasche, Gilbert, & Schedel, 2013). But as Elizabeth Coleman pointed out, after the Watergate scandal uncovered similar kinds of amorality, if not immorality in the legal professions, the response of law schools was to “add an ethics course, leaving the curriculum otherwise untouched, as if ethics is an add-on rather that something intrinsic to the practice of law itself” (Coleman, 2011, para. 24). And just as the addition of ethics in law school curricula has not yielded marked results, it is likely that simply adding ethics or CSR courses as another discreet package of management knowledge will probably not change how businesses operate.

Education for management could become actually relevant by reclaiming some of the educational territory that was lost as the “scientific” ethos and the reign of the expert became dominant. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of the arts and humanities in management and management education. Adler contrasts the high levels of “stability, continuity, and certainty” that characterized much of the 19th and the 20th centuries with the increasing “chaos and complexity” of the 21st century and concludes that “machine-like models” of management are no longer suitable. And that “strict reliance on traditional managerial planning models no longer works” (Adler, 2006, pp. 490-491). Instead, she notes instances of companies using input from the arts to teach their managers to be innovative and creative in problem solving. Bennis and O’Toole believe that a “solid grounding in the humanities” is necessary to properly understand and contextualize organizational behavior (2005, p. 104). And Spender seems to recall the early 20th century when he argues that management is “an art form rather than the skilled implementation of an externally warranted or regulated body of objective knowledge” (Spender, 2007, p. 38).

Nor is the view of the need for art to understand management a completely new one. When James March taught at Stanford, he used War and Peace as a course text. He drew on literature “to exemplify and explain the behaviour of people in business organizations in a way that was richer and more realistic than any journal article or textbook” (Bennis & O’Toole, 2005, p. 104). Like Urwick, March valued insights from many areas of knowledge. Both operated in a time before the extreme specialization of modern academic management scholars and did not feel the boundaries that now isolate one discipline from another, and so balancing the art and science of management came more easily.

The disciplinary boundaries that exist now would appear to cut students off from the broad sweeps over time, across geography, and among different ways of seeing the world that might impress on them the limits to their own view of the world. With an awareness of the limits of their own perspective, students could begin to engage their imaginations to work toward envisioning greater possibilities for the future of the species and the planet or simply envisioning possibilities for problem solving in the context of a group of people working together.

Limitations to one’s own world view can also be revealed by recognizing that perceptions are affected by context and change over time. Cummings and Bridgman’s (2011) study of the changes in how Weber has been portrayed by management writers reveals the absence of objectivity in much of that writing. Interpretations and reinterpretations of Weber have reflected pressing concerns and agenda of various authors’ times. Such an understanding of management knowledge can reveal the fact that there is no set of hard-and-fast issues and ideas, techniques or processes that can or should be passed on to students as how to do management. “It is not the latest theories that run organizations but managers making judgments about the relative merits of different ideas and how these might be interpreted” (p. 89). The skills of critical thinking that can analyze change in ideas and practices over time are what a manager needs to assess how to solve particular business problems. Starkey and Tiratsoo (2007) believe that incorporation of the thinking of political science, psychology, and business history “to name but three” would produce business practitioners who were capable of “more balanced assessments and less fad and fashion” (p. 214).

Alongside learning how to understand and analyze, students need to learn the basics of effective communication. Such basics were taken for granted as the outcome of primary and secondary education in the mid-20th century, but effective communication cannot be taken for granted now. Students are no longer taught deep familiarity with the structure and function of the English language and, at the same time, there are today what seem to be more forms of communication. What is appropriate for social media is not always appropriate or effective for business communication. A reengagement with the great writing of the past and an awareness of how “greatness” in writing has changed over time could give students a basis for critiquing and improving their own written communication.

Studying most liberal arts disciplines is as much about learning how to communicate and how to assess information as it is about learning from examples. Yes, history and literature can teach how the world works, how people interact with one another, and how problems can escalate to the point where there is little that people can do. But these subjects are also about learning how to talk about and write about such complex issues so that one can communicate imprecise and possibly nonrational ideas to others. This kind of communication requires intelligent explanation of and support for claims of cause and effect. It requires recognizing the difference between proof and opinion. Overall, communicating complicated ideas requires untangling the threads of complexity and explaining each so that the reader/listener gets a complete view of a situation clearly and without ambiguity. Such skillful communication is as necessary in business as it is in university. The issue of good writing is not about the luxury of aesthetics but about the necessity for effectiveness in communication.

Conclusion: Regaining What Was Lost

As I have discussed in this essay, the process of developing education for management has been going on for generations in the United Kingdom. In the early 20th century, British belief was that management was an art rather than a science, and that the best candidates for management were those with a traditional university education in the classics. But by the end of the Second World War, some critics felt that more than a classical university education was needed to foster efficiency and competence in the United Kingdom’s managers. Lyndall Urwick and others tried to introduce what they considered a more “scientific” element to education that was more formally focused on teaching management knowledge. Nevertheless, these early proponents of education for management did not reject the art side of education for management. They still acknowledged the need for breadth and balance in a manager’s education.

But the views of Urwick and others like him fell victim to a more explicit framing of management as an academic science complete with empiricism, models, experimental hypotheses, formulae, and theories. The development of management as an academic discipline happened at the same time that changes in the structure and success of mature Western economies had, not unreasonably, brought concerns for economic success to the fore. Universities presented themselves as a source of aid to individuals and nations searching for economic success. University research in disciplines like chemistry or information technology could bring economic benefit, and so too might the “scientifically rigorous” discipline of management serve economic needs. The whole purpose of the university came to be seen as utilitarian, in service to the economic needs of individuals and the nation. Arguments for education that fostered the development of intellect and a broad understanding of the world did not seem to offer economic advantages, and so arts input to management education became vanishingly limited.

Perhaps a wrong turn was taken somewhere in that desperate focus on the economic utility of education for managers. Narrowly defined expertise was offered and accepted as the road to economic utility. But debates that see management education as being either for the economic prosperity of the individual and the nation or about fostering the development of intellectual rigor and analytical habits of mind are misleading. Ideally, university education should provide the student with the ability to achieve both. In fact, it is a disservice to students not to foster such abilities. Acquisition of a set of management models and techniques may be seen as skills that a graduate can take into the labor market and use to begin his or her working life. However, any management models or techniques or skills will become outdated long before that individual’s 50 years of working life are over. As a graduate develops into a manager, he or she will need a well-developed intellect, the ability to think critically, and a capacity for continuing creativity if the mature manager is to continue contributing to the economy for an extended period of time. In essence, an obsession with the practical utility of education is profoundly short-sighted.

It is possible to argue that the focus on the narrowly pragmatic and useful in educating managers did yield positive economic results. The logic of efficiency and the practices of maximizing profits have allowed some companies to be “efficient” and to remain profitable. But there have been consequences. Workforces “racing for the bottom” in trying to offer the lowest wage costs and the “economic vandals” of the financial sector have offered both great economic gain on paper and great economic destruction in reality. In response to the problems of the world’s mature economies, concepts such as “business ethics” and “corporate social responsibility” have had to be, more or less, invented. But much of business ethics and CSR are about taking a broader view of the world than a focus on the bottom line allows. This broader view of the world has always been a key aspect of all liberal arts disciplines.

Students in higher education now are preparing for careers in a chaotic and demanding business environment, where they will do many different kinds of jobs in many different organizations in the 50 or more years of working life that they will experience. They need a true understanding of just how complex and messy the world can be. They require education that will help them understand context and connections so that they will be able to learn from all their varied work experiences and adjust to each new one. As Elizabeth Coleman has said, “What you are capable of figuring out as you go—your ability to learn, to adjust, as events unfold—is a good deal more important than what you think you already know” (Coleman, 2007, p. 5).

U.K. management education needs perhaps to return to a place where broad education, in a variety of disciplines is considered to be what managers, indeed citizens, need. There is a need to create or regain balance. The intellectual skills of imagination, creativity, critical thinking, as well as the ability to communicate complex ideas clearly should be developed alongside the acquisition of management techniques and procedures as well as knowledge of the breadth of context within which we all live. A balanced education that encourages the development of all aspects of intelligence and that offers a variety of perspectives on the world can help students get to a place where they are able to figure things out, adjust to events as they unfold, act in ways that will serve their own economic interests, and contribute to their companies, their communities, and their countries.