What does this have to do with enterprise performance management? Plenty. The success for how its various methodologies get communicated and implemented is highly governed by managers and employee teams. If there is a culture for learning, metrics, and discovery, that will be a good start. If not, these social issues are barriers that will need to be overcome.
Why is this relevant to our job and career today? Like many of you, I went to college, took classes, and received grades. But when I left my scholastic education, which is formal and supervised, I then began my experiential education working in organizations. This is no different than you, and we all now know that the experiential education is much more behavioral and emotional than in the academic world where you are doing your homework and raising your hand in class to show off to a professor that you know the correct answer.
What can you do to overcome what an MBA degree does not provide?
Maybe I should have paid more attention to those MBA behavioral courses. Why? Because I find that understanding how to influence, persuade, and educate people is arguably more critical to transform an organization than understanding the principles and concepts of performance management methodologies, such as strategy maps, measurement scorecards, dashboards, customer value management, and activity-based costing. Business analytics software, such as that offered by my employer, SAS, can very effectively model performance management solutions. But it involves people and assumptions.
The more you study, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you learn. So why study? The less you study, the less you learn. The less you learn, the less you forget. The less you forget, the more you learn. So why study?
I recall laughing when I first heard this contradictory prose from my university days 40 years ago, but I had no choice but to ignore it and do the opposite. I was an industrial engineer then at Cornell University competing with top-notch high school honors students. There was no option but to study hard.
During the past five years Economics, I have realized how much I underestimate the importance of the behavior modification of people and especially overcoming their natural resistance to change. I do not believe this involves begging, badgering, and bullying people — it involves, rather, educating them. My style is to enable senior executives to educate (training comes later) their subordinates and colleagues by having them read one or more well-written articles Economics, then bringing them all together like a book club meeting. At this point, 90 percent of the work for the executives is done! That meeting can cover what each person in the group learned, what issues and concerns exist to overcome, and what next steps can be taken.
You can get an MBA to learn about the discipline of management. I received one from Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Its curriculum taught me about management, but I can candidly say that it did not teach me how to manage. There is a difference. Management involves strategy, analysis, and decisions from choices. How to manage involves people.
The experiential education is unstructured and somewhat random. It comes at you. There is no course syllabus. You just start accumulating knowledge and wisdom through all the interactions emanating from your assigned tasks or projects plus the colleagues, customers, and partners you work with.
Why study and learn?
Real life vs. the university
With the experiential education, your direct line manager is like the professor. Hopefully, you have worked for good ones. Real life doesn’t happen in the same way as with your scholastic education. In a university, information comes directly to you via lectures and textbooks, and then you get tested and measured. With experiential education, you are continuously tested, but you never really see it happen or how it happens. Others, who may have a profound influence promoting or impeding your career progress, are always judging you.
Organizational transformation is about people changing practices and systems – not the other way around. ###
Admittedly, there are courses in an MBA curriculum on organizational development and change management. Despite my being an engineer, with its impersonal quantitative emphasis in the university, my qualitative MBA behavioral courses fascinated me. I felt a little like Star Trek’s Dr. Spock, the Vulcan who thought logically but was aware that emotion somehow plays a role in making change happen.
Business school is not like law school or medical school
The professional disciplines of law and medicine are codified with decades, even centuries, of a body of accumulated and layered knowledge. The discipline of management is not codified and structured to facilitate learning. Most managers learn from their prior managers. Ever work for a lousy manager?
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