In 1967/68, I graduated from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and received my Master of Business Administration degree. Those were the days of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s “Whiz Kids,” and everyone was encouraging managers to be more scientific.

Soon management was taught as a science and a manager used economic analysis extensively in government or business. My bachelor’s degree was in engineering. I knew nothing about business, but being a practitioner, I knew something about management.

I knew that economic issues were important for profitability, for cost minimization in research and development and other military projects. The latter was my primary interest other than flying. But managing with numbers and quantitative analysis? This seemed a little extreme although it opened new possibilities.

With economic analysis, you got a numerical answer and arrived at an optimal economic decision. The result was based entirely on the numbers. We used complex quantitative models and it certainly made decisions easy. You just plugged the numbers into the equation and solved a mathematical problem. It followed the science! However, I could see that while useful, economic analysis frequently provided an incomplete answer.

Today, struggles with COVID-19 provide a ready example of problems even with strong quantitative skills if you “follow the science” and manage by numbers alone.

Lessons From the Pandemic

As COVID-19 became an important issue, most attempted to “follow the science.” However, they found that regardless of the objective, there were always other factors and sometimes conflicting goals and benefits that needed to be evaluated.

This got more challenging as time went on - more problems occurred and stronger strains of the virus appeared. The issue of relative merits of different vaccines and their effectiveness, even after Operation Warp Speed was successful, despite doubts by experts over whether a vaccination could be developed so quickly.

Recently, even more issues have surfaced: How many shots were needed, and who should receive them? When should this occur?

Experts looked at numbers and arrived at different conclusions. Some intended recipients didn’t even want to be vaccinated while others maintained they should be mandated.

An optimal decision requires a different and more complex analysis than the outcome of a single goal analysis or quantitative conclusion. The COVID-19 experience forces us to recognize that there are usually multiple and conflicting goal solutions and success, and reaching one goal might result in failure or a higher risk of failure in others.

Finding a solution that doesn’t ignore issues such as economic recovery, the need to educate school children, the worldwide nature of the pandemic, vulnerability and effect on different age groups and those with other underlying illnesses and more, is important.

All require consideration of a much wider range of situational factors - even the personalities and abilities of those involved in implementation as well as the culture, customs and belief systems of the groups we are attempting to help, available resources and what could be termed competitive issues need to be considered.

Moreover, politics might affect the interpretation of data and decisions made which are far removed from the injunction to simply “follow the science.” Experts can be on all sides of important issues, and they may differ greatly on what is “fake news,” scientific fact, or simply an opinion on what certain data means and what action should be taken.

Multiple Factors Complicate Management Decisions

Some geniuses began grappling with these problems by using liberal arts long before COVID. In 1905, Albert Einstein employed the liberal arts, and not quantitative analysis, to explore highly technical questions in theoretical physics.

Einstein developed the theory of relativity and the equation E=MC² for conservation of energy without computers, or even the use of chalkboards - only with the arts and his own imagination.

Two Experts who Rethought Management as a Liberal Art

Almost simultaneously, two leading management scientists, Peter Drucker and Henry Mintzberg, concluded that economic analysis alone was insufficient.

Both independently concluded that because management itself is an art, effective management cannot be accomplished solely by crunching numbers to make decisions or deciding on courses of action. Employing all liberal arts was necessary.

Economics and the physical sciences are not excluded, but other liberal arts must also be employed and might be of equal or more importance at different times and places.

What Two Management Scientists did That Others Didn’t

Both improved management decision-making. Drucker wrote that “management is what tradition used to call a liberal art: ‘liberal’ because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom and leadership; ‘art’ because it deals with practice and application.” He called knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership “the four essentials.”

Drucker wrote that leadership is the most important essential and results in 50% of the quality of the outcome of any endeavor. Where others said that integrity and social responsibility were desirable, Drucker taught that they were not desirable, but required.

Drucker and his dean, Paul Albrecht, established a Ph.D. program, which though it offered a few traditional courses, offered mainly courses that he himself developed and taught which were focused on management and were outside of the traditional specialty graduate courses offered in a management program. Some called it “the Drucker Sifference.” (I should add that I was the first graduate of this program in 1979.)

The approach used behind Drucker’s work was uncovered by Minglo Shao and C. William Pollard, both members of the Drucker Institute Board at Claremont Graduate University where Drucker taught.

With another Board Member, Bob Buford, they funded and promoted the concept as “management as a liberal art” or MLA and furthered its development at several schools including Centennial College in Hong Kong, Claremont Graduate University, The Peter Drucker Academy in China, the California Institute of Advanced Management and elsewhere.

They also commissioned a book, Drucker’s Lost Art of Management by Joseph Maciariello and Karen Linkletter (McGraw-Hill, 2011), which introduced the social responsibility aspect of leadership in MLA as a prime philosophy of management. Professor Maciariello also developed and taught a non-degree online course on MLA primarily based mostly on his research.

Henry Mintzberg’s Innovations

Meanwhile, at McGill University in Canada, Henry Mintzberg, an internationally famous professor of management came to similar conclusions to Drucker regarding the need for better analysis and practice of management decision making.

He wrote that “management, is above all a practice, where art, science and craft meet.” But he went further.

He theorized that many of the survey courses in accounting, finance etc. taken by managers for an MBA were unnecessary as the material was already part of programs for attaining specialty graduate degrees. He suggested that the time spent on these courses was needed for mastering actual management. Once on the firing line, specialists already assisted more generalist managers with support in their areas of expertise.

Along with partners in other countries, Mintzberg developed an accredited graduate management degree that was not an MBA. In 1989 he convinced senior academic administrators and others at McGill to let him test his concepts in a fully functioning academic and accredited program outside of the school of business.

Based on its success, the program has grown considerably since and he wrote a bestselling book, Managers, not MBAs (Berrett-Koehler, 2004) which explained his views of the shortcomings in the MBA for educating managers.

Many of his ideas dovetail with what has been taught under the MLA banner, but there are also new ideas, including the notion of reflective mindsets, shared competencies and an emphasis on teamwork and global culture.

Mintzberg recognized that reflective mind-sets impact how a manager looks at any problem. These help frame how problems are perceived. Therefore, his students practiced one of five mindsets in each of the five countries as they traveled from one country to another in solving management problems and completing his program. These were:

1. Reflective mindset
2. Analytic mindset
3. Worldly mindset
4. Collaboration and Cooperation mindset
5. Action mind-set.

Mintzberg also recognized that experienced managers look at any problem a little differently and might develop different, but equally effective solutions.

This fitted with another of Drucker’s observations. This was that the biggest breakthroughs and innovations frequently came when employees with backgrounds from different industries or companies moved to new ones.

They brought with them their ideas, thinking and procedures that had been used in their previous organizations. However, these were frequently unknown to the new organization with which they were now affiliated.

Mintzberg also developed the concept of shared competencies of participating students by which to practice this idea for more innovative solutions to problems using groups of management-experienced students.

Drucker’s work, which resulted in MLA and Mintzberg’s successful development and application of the liberal arts for management decision making, demonstrates the flexibility and almost unlimited potential of the MLA concept for success and additional development and that MLA is adaptable to all organizations for more effective problem solving and decision making.

This article is syndicated.

References:

• A Class with Drucker by William A. Cohen (AMACOM, 2008)
• Consulting Drucker by William A. Cohen (LID, 2019)
• Drucker’s Lost Art of Management by Joseph A Maciariello and Karen Linkletter (McGraw-Hill, 2011)
• Drucker’s Way to the Top by William A. Cohen (LID, 2019)
• Managers, not MBAs by Henry Mintzberg (Berrett-Koehler, 2004)
• The New Realities by Peter F. Drucker (HarperCollins, 1989)