Human Centered Management in Executive Education

Global Imperatives, Innovation and New Directions

Maria-Teresa Lepeley, Ernst von Kimakowitz, Roland Bardy, Maria-Teresa Lepeley, Ernst von Kimakowitz, Roland Bardy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781137555403
• eBook ISBN: 9781137555410
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Human Centered Management in Executive Education provides a comprehensive insight on innovation in Executive Education with a unique global scope. The book integrates studies and experiences of 32 distinguished scholars from 15 countries who are working in the development of theories and practices to advance the human centered management paradigm, sustainability-based quality standards and continuous improvement in education. The discussion presents a well-balanced outlook that combines and contrasts research and programs from 16 developed and 16 developing countries, and the visions of 10 female and 22 male authors from North America, South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Part I

Introduction: Why Human Centered Management in Executive Education?

Maria-Teresa Lepeley

It may sound redundant to start a discussion or continue debating why the human being should be at the center of management and organizations in the 21st century and into the well-advanced era of knowledge and the internet. But evidence shows that despite advances in management there are still organizations that focus on other interests over and beyond the needs and expectations of the people they serve.

To simplify this discussion I will organize my arguments in a list of principles to support why human centered management strengthens executive education (EE). These principles are based in my experience and how I perceive past, present, and future challenges and opportunities to improve EE.

Principle 1: Organizations exist to serve customers/users (not the other way around)

Modern management models, and particularly those associated with the Quality Management (QM) paradigm, are founded on the fundamental principle that organizations exist – private and public, business and government, for-profit and non-profit, in all sectors and industries, and worldwide – to serve the needs of customers, who either buy products and services, or users who benefit from public services they receive.

In all cases organizations act as problem solvers that help and make life easier for people: for customers, and for people who work in organizations, for owners, for shareholders and stockholders and, in turn, this contributes to the well-being and the continuous improvement of the surrounding community and ultimately society at large.

Principle 2: Organizations as problem solvers

But the problem solver role of organizations is still unclear and sometimes it is even questioned if human beings need to be at the center of management. Peter Essens identifies this critical organization dimension as “human is the engine” (2011). This is also the concern that motivated the editors of this book to gather and synchronize the voices and experiences of 33 scholars from 15 countries in four continents to develop a unique global vision of why human centered management is necessary and can improve EE.

Principle 3: Human capital in management and EE

The human centered dimension of management is important at all educational levels. But it is critical in EE given its specific responsibility to educate organization leaders.

Compared with other education levels, or training programs in general, when EE fails to meet the responsibility to serve executives and managers, who need to affectionately lead people to work effectively in organizations, the losses, in terms of human energy, human capital, time, resources and quality sustainability are exponentially higher (Lepeley and Albornoz, 2013).

EE instructors must be fully aware of the importance of their responsibility as specialists and faculty members in universities and corporate training programs, who mold people-centered leaders (who think about people before processes), and of the impact of their decisions in education that affect people and clients. EE clients and learners need to receive guidance and support to help develop the human capital of people who work In and For¹ organizations that must contribute to improve the community and meet the social responsibility.

With regard to human capital, Adam Smith in his 1776 economic master-piece An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations² gave the following definition:

the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of society … and the acquisition of talents by education, study, or apprenticeship … that make part of their fortune and so of the society to which they belong.

Principle 4: Education lags behind demands of the workforce

My concern for human capital and human centered management has been persistent throughout my career. But it intensified recently when I read the book How Google Works, written by two of its executives, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, in 2014. They scrutinize how deep and wide the changes that affect not only the tech industry but also society and the way people think, communicate and work, conduct business, and organize. Larry Page, Google’s cofounder and CEO, confirmed my apprehensions that people are not being educated to meet the challenges we have upon us. My perception is that this is a global phenomenon. Page alerts us to the danger of companies and organizations feeling comfortable with the way they do things and lagging far behind changes in the global environment that are revolutionary, not evolutionary.

A study conducted worldwide by McKinsey Quarterly (2014) cautions that education is lagging significantly behind changes in the productive sector and consequently its impact on economic growth has declined in the last decades. The study forecasts that a visionary attitude of people-centered managers in organizations and higher participation of women in the workforce will be the primary factors to increase productivity and growth in the future and worldwide.

This research confirms that management education programs must conduct systematic assessment of impact and concentrate efforts on innovation and continuous improvement to prepare people for the workforce with an accurate vision of the future, which, given the speed of change, is difficult for any of us to foresee.

I have seen many changes in education and in management in the last 40 years. And unfortunately evidence shows that changes in education occur at a much slower pace than changes in the workforce. There is still a high level of ignorance about the impact and the responsibility of education as one of the most critical inputs of workforce productivity, that is, preparing graduates who improve themselves continuously to improve organizations and society. Education must develop instruments to assess its impact effectively and must innovate faster to diminish this critical gap. EE is no exception.

I pursued undergraduate and graduate studies in education in Chile and the US, respectively. My purpose was to understand how education could prepare me – so I could help others – to advance in life and work. The deeper I delved into studies in education, the more complex the dilemma became. My specialization in graduate school was higher education management and leadership. Although I learned what was in vogue in management and leadership in the 1980s, and reading material and theoretical information were abundant, theories were difficult to apply in practice to improve processes, and it was even harder to help people learn how to improve themselves. But I learned a ruling human centered imperative: as instructors, we must first help our students discover their talents if we want to succeed in helping them improve. To be able to discover and use our talents properly is a pre-condition for everybody to improve productivity in organizations where we work and in the communities where we belong. Education is not isolated or self-contained. And education has a high impact in society which up until today has rarely been evaluated in a systematic way as a critical standard for quality education.

I decided to switch discipline from education to economics to search for new answers and solutions to recurrent human centered concerns. An academic change of that nature – across disciplines and schools – was almost unknown and nearly forbidden then. I had to demonstrate to university authorities my special interest and capacity to transfer. Today, my alma mater requires multidisciplinary studies from students as conditions for graduation. Change happens in education. But it takes decades, as Page says.

The transition from education to economics was difficult but definitely worthwhile. I suffered through the high mathematical focus of economics but learned to see the world from a very different dimension and solve problems with a different set of tools. I wrote my economics thesis on the impact of higher education on economic development. In the late 1980s I was the first student in the Economics Department to conduct research in economics of education. I was excited. I had gained a broader vision integrating two very different fields. The gap between education and economics was significant because few economists, and no educators, to my knowledge, had sought correlations between these disciplines.

Principle 5: “The Measure of our Ignorance”

When I was conducting research for my thesis (Lepeley, 1987), I was puzzled and enlightened with the finding of economist Edward Denison,³ who had discovered serious shortcomings in the measurement standards of economic growth in the US, based on the traditional formula of accumulation of capital, land, and labor. Denison called this gap “The Measure of our Ignorance” (Lepeley, 1987). By then I had a solid idea about the economic gap he was describing. This also confirmed to me that Adam Smith had said the right thing two centuries earlier. The knowledge people acquire along life (formally and informally) and put to practice at work is a critical element to attain Integral Sustainable Development (ISD), which I have defined as a systematic economic, social, environmental, and technological progress. Today this kind of balance is supported by emerging OECD development formulas that alert about the need to measure well-being⁴ beyond the limitations of just growth of national gross domestic product (GDP) (Hanauer et al., 2014). This is an overdue development concern expanding rapidly and worldwide.

However, economic development also depends on management practices and leaders able to manage organizations effectively. Economics and management sciences are deeply correlated. And this relationship is defined to a larger extent by human beings, not merely processes, as it has been traditionally assumed and is still monotonously stressed.

Principle 6: The transition to human centered management

Management has been a significant driver of progress in organizations in the last century. In the US, in 1910, Frederick Taylor created the Scientific Management school of thought based on a systematic approach to deploy and assess efficiency in the manufacturing industry. This was at the boom of the Industrial Age when machines captured full attention in production functions. Taylor’s theories were based on process analysis and the rationale to eliminate waste and his theories have prevailed across sectors and nations.

The concern for humans – over machines and manufacturing – in organizations started to capture the attention of researchers with the well-known Hawthorne studies (1924–1932) at the Western Electric Company near Chicago. The Hawthorne Effect was coined in 1950 by Henry A. Landsberger, who was commissioned to observe the effects of changes in levels of light in the place where workers performed their tasks. He discovered a significant motivational effect on productivity. Workers’ productivity improved when they felt the company showed concern for them by adjusting the level of light to improve their well-being. When the study ended, this policy stopped and workers’ productivity plummeted. Hawthorne studies pioneered the theory that productivity improvement is rooted in human motivation and that it grows when executives and managers express care for the needs of people whose work they supervise in the organization.

Along my long road to human centered management I have had two invariable and unconditional supporters. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, and specifically an adaptation of his, which I made and use in all my classes, taken from “Hierarchy of Human Needs” (1943), published in his paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”. And Douglas McGregor, a management professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, with his enlightening and contrasting Theory X and Theory Y, presented in his book The Human Side of the Enterprise (1960). McGregor argued that a manager’s ethical principles about human nature and behavior determine how they manage their employees. I was attracted to Maslow because he observed humans’ innate curiosity from a new dimension that integrated “physiological”, “safety”, “belongingness”, “love”, “self-esteem”, “self-actualization”, and “self-transcendence” to define patterns of human motivations to move ahead and because he was an innovator when he studied what he called “exemplary people”, rather than psychological and psychiatric pathologies that had been the focal point of human behavior disciplines.

Later on, Peter Drucker, Austrian-born American, educator and management consultant, who is recognized as the founder of management education, produced a voluminous amount of publications exploring how humans get organized and manage organizations, in business, government, and non-profit sectors of the economy and society. Drucker was a visionary practitioner and scholar who in the mid-20th century predicted major developments of later years: privatization and decentralization, the rise of Japan to economic world power, and the emergence of the information society that would create critical need for lifelong learning, among others. In his book Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959) he forecasted the future and rapid expansion of the knowledge society and described the “Knowledge Workers”, stating that their productivity would be the next management frontier. And here we are!

Chris Argyris, an American Harvard professor, born in a Greek family, who studied psychology, physiology, and organizational behavior, became best known for his seminal work o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables, and Boxes
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I: Introduction: Why Human Centered Management in Executive Education?
• Part II: Introduction: What Content and Curriculum for Human Centered Management in Executive Education Is Needed?
• Part III: Introduction: How Should Human Centered Management in Executive Education Be Delivered?
• Index