Educate so you may be rounded

Seen any loops recently? Kicked the addiction of left brain number crunching? If so, you are well on the way to being a manager of the future, if we are to believe Thomas Gladwin, professor in the international business group at the (left-brain sounding) Stern school at New York University.

Professor Gladwin featured in the recent Financial Times Business Education supplement. The FT reported: "Most business schools are not really addressing the issues executives will need [sic] in the future." The professor said: "They are all addicted to left brain number crunching, but we won't need our financial MBAs 20 years from now. Managers of the future must be systems thinkers, who see patterns and loops; who do not just think in a linear way."

This sort of analysis, particularly from academics, is now very commonplace, a soundtrack to managerial life. Creative, questioning, lateral thinking is good; linear, acquiescent, narrow reasoning is bad. For managers, that is. Another example was found far from the hallowed pink pages of the FT. In September's Finance magazine, Ms Valerie Pierce, a lecturer in philosophy and a training consultant, wrote: "Two activities central to making the most of intellectual capital are identifying and challenging assumptions; and exploring and imagining alternatives."

Ms Pierce and Professor Gladwin may indeed be right. A few challenges are in order, though.

First of all, does this sort of new thinking apply only to managers in business? Business schools offer degrees to potential or real managers, so almost by definition, the scope of their prescriptions is management.

If creative, lateral, systems thinking is good for managers, it must also be good for the managed. Aspirant managers are supposed to display some managerial characteristics, and the best ones display them very early on. Part of innovative, creative thinking is recognising it in others and finding the means to channel it from underneath.

As far as I know, the theorists do not recommend creativity for managers only; but sometimes in the enthusiasm for encouraging innovative thinking, the skill of absorbing, managing and applying creativity towards an identifiable goal gets a little left behind.

Isn't this sort of thinking recommended to nonbusiness organisations too? Could not academia, the public service, clubs and charitable organisations all benefit from creative, innovative, challenging thinking? Clearly, so. The language of management theory about building organisational effectiveness has been adopted by all sorts of organisations, from the civil service to religious orders. This may appear to be success, a demonstration of the validity of the insights of management theorists, but a small problem arises. Academics usually require that theories have some identifiable limits in order to be verifiable. If there is no limit as to whom and which organisations should engage in creative, challenging thinking, then logic leads to a fairly shrug-of-the-shoulder statement like: "Everyone should be creative".

The bit about managers of the future is problematic too. It would be hard to demonstrate that creative, innovative thinking was not really required in the past, let alone for managers of the present!

I don't wish to suggest that people who write and teach about organisational creativity are unaware of these problems. I'd just like to hear more about the limits.

An intriguing conclusion to the train of thought about creativity and innovation was given recently by Mr Chris Horn, chief executive of IONA Technologies, one of Ireland's showcase companies of the 1990s. He said: "Ireland should be looking to where the next quantum leap in industrial thinking will originate. Original thinking - creativity - is required to be a leader, a standard better". So far, so normal, in the world of software development, at least.

But Mr Horn went on to say that we have not educated enough of the thinkers. "In the rush for relevance, vocational training for industry is threatening to displace the traditional liberal education. There are attributes for which demand endures across all business, regardless of change creativity, entrepreneurship, strategic thinking, discernment, the ability to interpret data and to fashion judgments." Mr Horn has usefully taken thinking about organisational creativity further than relatively brief management courses. It's about something much more demanding than that: the long, hard job of a rounded education, to produce not just creative people, but wise ones too.

Oliver O'Connor is a former diplomat who manages a financial services company in Dublin