Pioneer of teamwork still learning

By VICKI JAYNE

Remember the days when teams were found only on sportsfields, and managers elbowed their way to the top of the corporate ladder in single file?

The whole concept of what makes a good manager has changed since then. Sharp elbows are out, the ability to work cooperatively is in, says Professor Donald Jacobs.

"A good manager today is someone who works well with people, learns what it is they need and how they will best adopt what is useful and productive."

But the "management team" was a relatively novel concept when Jacobs introduced a team-learning approach to management education as dean of the Chicago-based Kellogg Graduate School of Management in the mid-1970s.

It was one of many innovations during a 25-year tenure that saw him credited with reinventing management education in the United States.

He stepped down from that role last year and, in New Zealand to speak at the American Chamber of Commerce Awards evening, rather modestly suggested he gets more credit than he deserves.

"The truth is that Kellogg is run by a management team and when you have an efficient team, their spokesperson often gets the credit for what they produce.

"There are a lot of very good people toiling in the vineyards, so to speak, at Kellogg."

They "toil" in an environment different to the one he inherited - where education and business operated at arm's length, courses were constructed top-down, and curriculums were subjected to infrequent overhaul rather than ongoing review.

That had to change because the business world had changed, says Jacobs.

A more market-driven, globalised economy and the impact of a rapidly evolving information technology saw management structures flatten.

Hierarchical organisations were ill-equipped to keep up with a world where success increasingly depended on adapting to change.

"Companies found a team-based organisation was more efficient, given that we had the technology to make it work.

"Information didn't have to come from the top down - a lot more could be pushed out to those who needed it so they could make decisions."

Today's big question, he reckons, is how management continues adapting to the growth of information technology power.

"As more information becomes available and we increasingly rely on computing power, that dictates where organisational change will go.

"We must continue to understand how to make maximum use of the information technology coming our way. It could be very valuable if used correctly and disastrous if not. It's an area we have to keep learning about."

The need for continual learning is a Jacobs dictum. Hence the shift at Kellogg from a best-practices model of management education - looking at what has worked and how it can be emulated - to a research-led approach. Management professors, he says, have changed from people who described practices to scholars who understand how to do research and apply the results.

That involves a two-way collaborative track between business practice and management education, and continual adaptation of curriculums to meet current market and customer (that is, student) needs.

These are the things Jacobs sees as an important part of his legacy as dean of Kellogg.

"Students are not children and therefore they should have a part in the governance of the organisation. They all have had work experience, have a feeling for what they need to know and how they want to learn it.

"I've also said we need to be flexible, not only in listening to students but to what is happening in the market. We need to remain open to new ideas rather than think we have already cornered them; accept that change is wonderful, not terrible, and that we need to have a research-based faculty to stay on the leading edge of change."

His efforts to catch the waves of change rather than chasing after them were behind his push to introduce a biotechnology major, which starts next month, into Kellogg's business management curriculum.

Jacobs says it seems the right time, given this is a huge new growth area and the ability to successfully shepherd innovative biotech products from lab to market is a vital part of the process.

"When I went before the faculty to get them to agree to this, I said I felt I had spent the past few years chasing waves that had already gone by and I wanted one time, before I gave it all up, to be there waiting when the wave came.

"That is my hope with biotechnology, to actually catch the wave. We'll see."

Not that he has entirely hung up his professorial hat. He stepped down as dean to go back to teaching corporate governance - with the aim of providing a link course.

"We used to have something called the 'capstone course' that came at the end of the programme and provided an overview of what had been learned.

"We don't any more, but every year at the open forums I used to run, there would be some students asking why not."

The problem is that management educators today tend to be specialists. Instead of a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none approach, each is pushing the frontiers of knowledge in his or her own specific area. And going deep rather precludes going broad, says Jacobs.

"We end up with management generalists but they are trained by highly specialised people. So we need a bridge between those specialist silos.

"I don't know yet if I can provide that bridge but I'm going to try."

At 74, this enthusiastic advocate of life-long learning is still on a voyage of discovery.

* vjayne@iconz.co.nz