Conference examines ways to reconnect the study of business with creative humanism
By: Lauren Otis
In the academic realm, running a business is too often imagined, and taught, as a non-human, mechanical enterprise, involving principles of return on investment and shareholder profits, when it is in fact a creative, and inherently human, activity.
So posited two faculty members of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, at a recent two-day conference at Princeton University’s Friend Center entitled "Rethinking Business Management: An Examination of the Foundations of Business Education." The conference was organized by The Witherspoon Institute, and co-sponsored by Princeton’s Bendheim Center for Finance, The Clayton Fund, The Social Trends Institute, and The Philadelphia Trust Company.
"We’ve built this view of business as a non-human enterprise," said R. Edward Freeman, Olsson Professor of Business Administration and director of the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics at the Darden Business School.
In fact, people running businesses "are actually excited, stimulated, passionate they are fully alive as human beings," said David Newkirk, CEO of Executive Education at the Darden school.
At business schools "if you get business wrong you get management wrong," said Mr. Newkirk. "Our view is there is a serious problem (at business schools) currently which stems from the flawed view of business itself, that it is impossible to insert human activity and ethics into it," he added.
"We’ve been tending to focus on management as decision rather than creation," Mr. Newkirk said.
If business is embraced as a human enterprise, and management and leadership as an art, then the world of business becomes one aspect of the human condition, as it should be, said Mr. Newkirk.
This in turn "leads to a new more clear vision of what a manager is and does," he said.
"If human beings are what is making business what it is, we need to rethink business education," said Mr. Freeman. Opening up to the creative side of business people, and "bringing the humanities into business" is already happening at companies across the country "but I am not optimistic this is going to happen in my world of business schools," he added.
Mr. Freeman described what he termed a "separation fallacy" whereby there is "business on the one side, ethics on the other side and never the twain shall meet."
"It makes no sense to talk about business without talking about ethics, talk ethics without talking business, talk business without talking about people," he said.
Mr. Freeman cited the "ethically thick idea" of marketing being built on promises as an example.
In their use of case studies, business schools need to take pains to show "how the kinds of stories we tell about business are more fundamentally human," he added.
Noting that "the inventions of managers change the nature of business," Mr. Freeman acknowledged that, as a discipline, business is inherently different from other areas of academic study. Citing some of the "great waves of change in business" the advent of limited liability companies, management as a profession, and huge changes brought about by dot coms using the Internet for business purposes Mr. Freeman said: "When you have a paradigm shift in physics the atoms don’t change. When you have a paradigm shift in business the nature of business changes."
Mr. Freeman and Mr. Newkirk admitted that the truly creative and innovative in the business world, the entrepreneurs, probably have no reason to be in business school. But for the purposes of study and education, business schools should embrace the full humanistic spectrum of business endeavor, they said.
Mr. Freeman and Mr. Newkirk both concluded by giving musical analogies to describe the true nature of management, and it’s portrayal in business education. When examining "management as creativity, the metaphor we may want to think about is jazz," said Mr. Newkirk.
Mr. Freeman quoted Warren Haynes, a slide guitarist: "He said, ‘When you play the blues it doesn’t matter how many notes you play, you just have to mean the notes you play.’ It strikes me that we have to look at the notes we want to play and mean them."