The EBF site is dead. If you click through you will be taken to the Internet Archive site to find an archived copy.
Business schools are invaluable for laying the foundations for the practice of management. This is especially true for marketing, finance, or human resources, but far less so for strategy. The problem with the current system is that it forces strategy into the direct and narrow approach to teaching. If the shortest distance between two points in geometry is a straight line, then the shortest distance between teaching and learning consists of making students internalize concepts as rapidly and as efficiently as possible. A deep grasp of strategy, however, resists this approach because understanding strategy means seeing and understanding parts and wholes simultaneously.
In strategy, good foundations consist of understanding the whole and the parts of strategy, separately and together. Business schools are ideal for understanding the parts, less so for the wholes, and not at all for the relationship between the two. Understanding this relationship is at the heart of strategy.
There is a balance between talking and thinking, analysis and reflection. Teaching strategy moves back and forth between these dualities. The desired outcome is strong intuitive capabilities combined with a developed ability to articulate. Intuitive capabilities are essential for recognizing the parts and wholes that make up strategy; articulating is necessary for exploring and developing an understanding of how they interact. The process exists to ensure that intuition helps articulation and articulating reinforces intuition.
The process can easily go wrong, and our present educational systems almost ensure that it does go wrong. Direct learning reinforces the tendency to over-articulate. Students learn to apply SWOT analysis, industry analysis, or value chain analysis but these tools drain strategy of its complexity and nuance. The opposite is also true. Paradoxically, direct learning reinforces the tendency to be over-intuitive. Students learn strategy as a set of disconnected and abstract words. From there it is a small step to mastering words like ‘competencies’, ‘vision’, and ‘leadership’ which explain very little.
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