6/4/09 - Design and Management Education (Roger Martin)

Add a Comment

Comment by Brett Barndt on June 4, 2009 at 11:29pm

Martin's talk is so supported by so many great writers today. Nassim Nicolas Taleb's books "Black Swan" and "Fooled by Randomness" are all about how these financial engineering models are misapplied by MBAs throughout the business world to devastating consequences to shareholders and lots of other stakeholders. The other great book is "The Origins of Wealth" by Eric Beinhocker about new work in behavioural and complexity economics which explains 20+ years of new solid research that shows how Social Capital and Social Technology are completely forgotten by traditional or neo-liberal economics a la Friedman et al, but play the most important role in determining future prosperity for a nation or society. This oversight is a major flaw of traditional economics training for gazillions of MBAs out there with static ideas in their heads about how economies work. Bad enough traditional econ never dealt with negative or positive externalities, indirect costs to the environment, or human toxins, etc. which has led to devastating unintended consequences of our business economy, but they overlook all the social investments which it turns out really make the difference between prosperity potential of two nations with equivalent natural or commodities resources. I always love how everybody I've worked with for the last 20+ yrs can't remember what a public good is. They forget what they learned that the 'market' will always fail to deliver them adequately according to even Smith and Locke et al and instead all they can do is talk about privatizing everything. Big trouble that so many people got educated with these overly simplistic ideas since the 1980s. Really refreshing to hear how Martin is leading change in MBA education at Rotman, and the amazing coverage of B-schools from US and Europe who are in synch with this great new trend. Mine is conspicuously missing from the list! Oh well. They'll hear from me soon!