Should Business Schools Teach Aristotle [Archive.org URL]

Many top business thinkers — including Michael Porter, C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel — argue that good communications are crucial for implementing strategy. Yet, while most chief executive officers say that more than half of their daily work involves communications, little in their education prepares them for the task. Their formal training is often limited to basic writing and speaking courses in college and graduate school, sometimes supplemented by trendy workshops at corporate training sessions. For others in the organization, the level of training and skills can be dismal.

After twenty years of teaching at top business schools, we are still amazed at how much emphasis is placed on written and oral skills instead of on more strategic communication issues. We all can benefit from skills training, but what good are enhanced skills if managers do not have the ability to judge, in a given situation, whether they should be communicating at all and, if so, to what constituency? Many of the major business schools devote plenty of resources to quantitative analysis and traditional business disciplines, but fail to leave enough room for the study of communication theories and practices and how organizations formulate and implement strategy.

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