Heidegger and Executive Education

The Management of Time

Toby Thompson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315451831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Global corporations and the senior executives who oversee them have been subject to great criticism in recent times: not only do such corporations hold extreme concentrations of wealth, but they continue to sanction staggering pay inequalities between the haves and the have-nots. At the same time, university-based business schools are conducting programmes of executive education seemingly customised to sanction these same inequalities. Heidegger and Executive Education is a piece of critical philosophy that has been written from within the business school in order to examine how this sheltered process of educating in-role corporate executives operates.

Thompson claims that executive education is based on a very simple premise: that an executive executes an order, and that executive education is an amelioration of that process. Thompson argues that the easiest way to conceive of executive education is to treat order and execution as cognates, as a single conceptual entity. Thus, he asks, if educating executives in line with the order-execution cognate involves swapping the boardroom for the classroom, and in keeping with the 'critical' tag, shouldn't executive education be about questioning not only the execution, but also the dominant order? The author uses 'time' as the philosophical method by which one can undo the order-execution cognate, question the sanctity of the cognate and thereby halt the seemingly inexorable temporal sequence from order through to those orders becoming executed.

This book uses Martin Heidegger's exotic philosophy of time in order to mount a philosophical challenge to the temporal sequentiality of executive education. It will therefore be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduates who are interested in Heidegger, the philosophy of education and executive education. It should also be essential reading for those involved in training, developing, and educating corporate executives.

Chapter 1
Introduction

If you want to make money, go into business. If you want to learn how to make money, go to business school. If you want to learn what money is and how it has functioned and what might be the point of making a lot of it, go to university.

(Stefan Collini, Speaking of Universities, p. 79)

This book is about educating mid-career corporate executives, as dull as that sounds. My argument is aimed at those who are willing to argue for and against the usefulness of every station in the short logical journey that the (pro-education) scholar Stefan Collini outlined earlier. The book will do battle with the strange sounding compound term “executive education” and propose that this innocuous seeming practice, as I will introduce it, deserves to be the new means by which we, collectively, can transform some of contemporary society’s greatest ills and iniquities, but not by the hubris usually associated with the corporate executive. This transformation is within the grasp of the corporate executive and the executive educator to affect, but like all transformations, it comes at a cost, which is twofold. Firstly, this cost is our willingness to challenge the dominant scripts, the scripts which tells us how we should act, think and feel in the face of the established orders and the predominant traditions. And on top of that, significant outlay lies a second and altogether greater cost, but one that helps offset the first: and this requires us to confront the fact of our death, our anxieties and our boredom in the face of the day-to-day orders we routinely execute. This is where I engage with the work of the twentieth-century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), using his reckoning on the theme of being and time to enlighten how executive education can be reconceived and practiced anew: cue philosophy.

The means by which I hope to effect this change is to use academic philosophy to challenge your thinking. As the book’s title suggests, I’ll be enlisting the specific, though not easy to understand, philosophical insights of Heidegger to mount these challenges, together with a range of other thinkers who share in the benefits of Heidegger’s philosophy, benefits I hope to convince you of. The next chapter will explain more of my personal reasons for choosing Heidegger as my principle philosophic yeoman, rather than any other philosopher. Though it will take the balance of this book to introduce you to Heidegger’s thinking. And when I say philosophy, I’m referring to a systematic body of thought that has been presented, extended and defended usually over a lengthy tenure in a professional academic role and setting, as Heidegger did. I don’t mean philosophy in the popular sense of a quirky rationale or a personal justification for pursuing a particular course of thinking in a certain idiosyncratic way, in distinction to many other possible personal “philosophies”. As such, almost stuffily, it is possible to conceive of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger as a body of work – almost independent of the man himself, as bizarre (and controversial) as that seems – that can be used as a means to reveal hidden assumptions in adjacent or contrary bodies of thought, which is what professional philosophers do for a living, and which is exactly as what I intend to do with regards to the normative thinking in executive education, which I’ll come on to.

For those unfamiliar with the philosophical method, this discourse may appear as mere brainy journalism, were it not for the fact that certain rules are nonetheless in play; namely, a cogent and clearly stated partiality to an otherwise balanced argument, whose claims are underpinned with a rigorous and defendable logic, put forward with recourse to historical precedents, and with well-argued discounts regarding that logic. Which leads me to ask, other than a human being of normal capacities, what is an executive? What is the justification for them doing the things they do, what counts as a dissident executive in that case and what constitutes an education of dissent from such an executive norm? What’s the reason for dissent anyway? Why should that norm be critiqued? Given these concerns, this book will get you fit, if a little strained, considering the case either way. Given its proper name, what you’ll be doing in these pages will be learning to philosophise – namely, about the crude distinctions called out in this opening quote of Collini’s, but about a whole bunch more besides. The ancient discipline of philosophy, with its reputation for abstract, hair splitting yak, seems a million miles away from the profitable talk of business and the plain doing of moneymaking: never has the pinstripe of business and the corduroy of philosophy seemed so at odds. Which is why you may suffer some straining in the following pages, since practicing philosophy calls on uncommon muscles.

As for the audience to whom this book is directed, you may be undertaking such a course of improvement yourself as an upcoming executive within a company, or feel the need for such improvement, or be the course director of such a programme within a company, a training outfit or a university. It is the latter body of reader to which I’m most concerned to address, since this book has emerged from my experience working in executive education at a UK University business school (as I’ll explain in the next section). Whichever of these you embody, this book is dedicated to those professionals employed by, or on behalf of, firms and enterprises who are nonetheless dissatisfied with their current state of affairs, afraid of what their profession is becoming and looking for an alternative way of thinking about the role of the corporate executive in contemporary and future society. If you’re sufficiently intrigued or annoyed by these issues, sitting as you do in a career pause as part of your role as an executive educator, then I encourage you to read on.

The task set here will be hard to achieve, but the reward is membership of a vanguard that pushes executive education out from behind corporate parents – whose low level expectations are conditional on short term changes in competence – into the bright lights of a world looking for inspiration and hope in a vision that exceeds the limited horizons of business as usual.

1.1 What is executive education?

For those unfamiliar with executive education I would like to ease the reader in to the site of the work I hope to undertake in this book by situating my own involvement in executive education. I work at the Cranfield University School of Management (hereafter, Cranfield), a graduate-only business school in the UK, where management is just one of the specialisms of the wider Cranfield University.¹ Though it does confers its own degree-awarding programmes, Cranfield also run a wide range of unaccredited programmes which make up its portfolio of executive education² that are of roughly equal proportion in revenue and student numbers to the accredited programmes. My role in executive education is currently within Cranfield’s Centre for Customised Executive Development. This centre provides non-credit-bearing executive education and development (a distinction I will elaborate later) for the management and senior executive³ populations of large, mostly international, corporations. The teaching faculty for these programmes is drawn from Cranfield’s academic faculty who teach on Cranfield’s flagship masters of business administration (MBA). A typical (if parodied) individual consumer of this executive education – in distinction to the corporate client who may commission such a programme for a population of senior executives – is often, though not predominantly, male, mid-thirties to fifties in age, greying, wearing a dark suit, working for a large corporation, well paid, and principally as someone who gives and receives orders.

In order to build on the unusual and non-credit-bearing status of the executive education that I’m involved in running, and which forms the context of my argument here, and in order for the reader to gauge the nature of education referred to in this book – if the reader, in fact, deems this education at all – it is worth reiterating (for the sake of mainstream educator say, or possibly those unaccustomed to non-credit-bearing, graduate-only teaching, or those unfamiliar with education for executives in corporations) that while I am based in higher education I am not addressing in this book the business-studies student normally conceived: not undergraduates, nor postgraduate students, nor part-time higher education students. My referencing of the executive’s late-career juncture is not simply to differentiate amongst institution-oriented provisions of executive education – where, say, some institutions, for whatever andragogic reasons, favour training a workforce in preparation for their subsequent employment, versus those which offer ongoing education to those already in employment – but rather to differentiate between the attitudes towards the workplace, towards the society in which work in general does or does not make sense for this echelon, and how these views are influenced by successive life stages. As will be seen later, the (sometimes comic) spectre of a mid-life crisis, and a late-career executive’s corresponding appetite for existential reflection in the midst of their hyper-capitalist endeavours,⁴ are all-important contributing factors in how and whether executive education is conceived. Crudely speaking, our appetites for existential reflection increase along with our age, placing my study here firmly at the far end of a simplistic educational spectrum that begins with primary, then secondary, thence to tertiary and higher, but proceeding to what I am tempted to call “terminal” education – a coinage in contrast to the more palatable descriptors in common use such as “lifelong learning”⁵ or “adult education” or “professional” or “workplace learning”. As bleak and as nihilistic as the terminal note sounds, the subject of this book – given the Heideggerian theme that I will be using – will not flinch from such time-related topics as death and finitude as they operate on the corporate executive tasked with executing, as well as operating under, the capitalist order. Quite the contrary; as the reader will have glanced from the contents page, my analysis will emerge through the rather melancholy sounding Heidegger-inspired themes of death, anxiety and boredom, as well as through the less melancholy but still time-related themes of technology, history and the event.

A typical client of executive education would be a large multinational corporation, whose Human Resources department is often responsible for commissioning a programme, and for whom there is often a senior company official, a senior vice president, acting as a sponsor to the development initiative. A typical participant of a programme of executive education would be the previously mentioned senior executive, who is usually drawn from populations of between 100 and up to 1,000 executives, depending on the size of the company: the cohort size of a typical programme is around 20, and the content of the programme will vary depending on the client, but usually include management-oriented themes such as leadership, strategy, finance, supply chain, marketing and organisational culture change. What then is the purpose of one of these programmes of executive education?

In the capitalist order we operate under, each company must achieve sufficient profitability to cover the cost of capital. Otherwise known as financialisation – and given that the sole duty the executive has is towards his or her shareholders – this value-based approach requires executives to maximise shareholder value in each financial period, to ensure a favourable evaluation in the stock market. When the stuff of business can only be described in terms of “assets”, executives are effectively labouring-rentiers, directing the production of income from assets, principally human assets. As Michel Aglietta explains,

This approach influences human resource management practices at two distinct levels. First, corporations have systematically deployed strategies of labour-cost minimization in order to satisfy the profitability constraints imposed by financialization. For a given size of the workforce, such a strategy may take the form of a restrictive pay policy or the limitation of training expenditures. Second…. by using temporary labour arrangements through fixed-term employment contracts, temporary-agency workers and subcontracting, companies can recruit a workforce without any long-term commitment.

(Aglietta, 2016: p. 126)

Normative executive education is, inter alia, intended to promote this neoliberal and exploitative agenda. Whatever the stated intention of such a programme, all programmes of executive education are intended to improve the corporation’s competitive advantage in its marketplace: a basis of productivity which I will challenge, using the thinking of Martin Heidegger.

1.2 The problem with executive education

However, executive education embodies a paradox of values. On the one hand, represented by “executive”, is the dominant neoliberal ideology in the guise of the corporate executive. Executing on behalf of the neoliberalist doctrines of freedom of enterprise and boundless market exchange, this regent of the dominant economic order carries out, as effectively as he or she can, what is obviously required by, and for, this order – i.e. to make money and accumulate capital (more on these obviousnesses in a moment). On the other hand, in “education” resides a different set of values, the most obvious of which, for the philosopher Judith Butler at least, are those which “address how we learn to think, to work with language and images, and to read, to make sense, to intervene, to take apart, to formulate evaluative judgements and even to make the world anew” (Butler, 2014: p. 17). Across this divide of values, the glances exchanged are a mix of eye-glazing bafflement, risible smirks, pious disdain and, quite possibly, since we’re working with language here, askance glares of withering insouciance. The coinage “executive education”, together with the university-based business schools that have minted (from) this lucrative provision of non-accredited training programmes – aimed at executives, leaders and functional managers within corporations – in no way inaugurates this nettled derision across the divide of values outlined: the battle lines have been drawn these centuries past, with the “executive education” incarnation of the distinction emerging as recently as the 1940s and the GI bill.

The paradox on prominent display in the compound term “executive education” is that between commerce and the humanities, between the progressive goals of business and the equally progressive values of the liberal arts, with a slew of (mostly pro-humanities) commentators keen to prove – though annoyed to have to – the obvious historical precedents to this distinction. Both Michael Roth (Roth, 2014: p. 21) and Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum, 2010: p. 13) place the birth of the distinction coincident with the founding of the United States; Stefan Collini (Collini, 2012: p. 23) rewinds this commencement to the Middle Ages, with the founding of the universities of Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett (Brooks & Jewett, 2014) restrict their survey to the twentieth century, mostly, whereas Rens Bod leads the historical survey with his A New History of the Humanities (Bod, 2013). Perhaps it falls to an examination of Plato’s Republic (Cooper, 1997) at 360 BCE the earliest surviving European utopia, to differentiate the educative needs for Rulers, Auxiliaries, and workers (Plato’s utopia makes no educative provision for workers), as well as question the staggering wealth inequality familiar to us today.

This scramble for the high ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The false necessity of executive orders
• 3 Death and the execution-less execution
• 4 Anxiety is nothing
• 5 No time for boredom
• 6 The gods of technology
• 7 Being mindful of history
• 8 The event of appropriation
• 9 Ideal romantic remainders
• 10 Considerations
• Index