Often, the question of whether management can be effectively taught is reduced to the question of whether it's an art or a science, and that's too binary. It's both.
Renaissance man extraordinaire Leonardo da Vinci blended art and science quite nicely and in a highly individual way, particularly with his inventions. So did Gaudi, the Spanish architect who designed the huge, whimsical church La Sagrada Familia. So has Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who has written beautifully crafted essays about his patients' neurological disorders.
You'll notice a lot of disparity within this highly distinguished group, and that's for good reason. The trick to blending art and science successfully is finding the right combination for the individual and for the moment.
The art/science debate isn't unique to business academia. When I was working on an MFA in creative writing, it was fashionable--among many of my peers and professors, not just people who exclusively wrote for a living--to argue that artistry couldn't be taught. We were, the argument went, just jumping through academic hoops to get employed or published. No one was actually there to "learn" the craft. Writers had talent, or they didn't.
Some of the art-can't-be-taught people were downright uppity when they got going on this topic, and I never understood that. Set aside the fact that the cynicism wasn't constructive. For me, the bigger problem with the argument was that it was so narrow, just like the art/science dichotomy many folks are so eager to impose on business.
Yes, it's true that complex business problems involving conflicts of interest or conflicts of ethics don't always lend themselves to the tidy kinds of solutions you're likely to cook up as you're discussing a case study in an MBA classroom. It's also true that you don't need an MFA to write the great American novel--and that, in fact, many such novels wouldn't stand up very well to being "workshopped."
But there's certainly no harm in practicing and refining your skills in the relatively safe environment of school so that once you're set loose in the big, bad world, you're better equipped to handle a bolt of brilliance when it deigns to strike. And if you're already a successful manager with a flair for, say, talent development, but you decide to go back to school to brush up on some technical skills to improve your bird's-eye view of your organization, no harm there, either.
Maybe we can usefully divide responsibilities for the ethical management of businesses along these lines: Schools need to cover as many bases as can reasonably be covered in a curriculum, and individuals need to take it from there. It's the individuals' responsibility to figure out what precise balance of instruction and finesse--of science and art--makes sense for them, given their own circumstances.
To the extent that great management is a work of creative genius, it's incumbent upon the manager to come up with his or her own recipe for success, as Da Vinci and Gaudi and Sacks did. Schools shouldn't be absolved from accountability for the quality of managers they turn out--but intelligently and responsibly designed curricula will take us only so far. MBA programs can set up people to succeed. But then the individual's values and ambitions will inevitably kick in, for better or worse.
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