Why commerce needs Renaissance men
Oct, 2009
The first priority of any business school is high-quality education writes MBS Philosopher-in-residence John Armstrong.
The primary question for Melbourne Business School (MBS) and the University of Melbourne was never whether to merge.
When the now defunct proposal was first presented to the combined staff of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce and MBS, the University of Melbourne's vice chancellor, Glyn Davis, made a crucial comment. The rationale, he said, for any possible merger should be educational. The essential question, he suggested, was this: how can we provide the best possible business education to the people who will most benefit from it? The primary question was and always will be: what makes for a genuinely great institution of business education?
He was attempting to steer the discussion away from tactical problems - how to avoid competition and looming confusion over brands, problems that might occur because of the development of the faculty's Graduate School of Management.
The occasional talk of a lucrative market for masters of business administration is misguided. It is not the purpose of an educational institution to return a high profit but to provide the highest possible quality of education to the business leaders of the future. To do so, of course, a strong economic base is a necessary condition. It's necessary to pay good staff, to carry out research, to have excellent facilities. For educational institutions to have profitability is a means, not an end. And the primary question is always the specification of the end or higher purpose.
What are the characteristics of good business educators? What kind of research is valuable, what ethos (as well as what facilities) does a great business school need? Commercial activity is not self contained; in multiple ways, business makes the world. It is the engine of wealth creation. Economic power is social power; our lives intersect everywhere with markets and the decisions made by business leaders have consequences for everyone.
During the Renaissance, a change took place in the self-conception of artists, in their ambitions and in the way their activities were perceived. They moved from being respected artisans, craft workers with specific technical skills and their own private lore to being ambitious, serious makers of their society. Two changes went hand in hand: they developed an infinitely richer sense of what they were doing - they were not merely making ornaments and useful objects; they were shaping people's minds (so Michelangelo emerged as the great man of his time - a role inconceivable for an artist two generations before). Central to this was a vision of education, of what artists needed to know. They did not abandon the technical aspects of their training but added to it a wider humane education.
The commercial world is idealist, rather than realist, to put the matter in a provocative but very accurate way.
This does not mean that the commercial world is perfect. What it means is that commerce is governed by ideas, by ambitions, by psychology and human relationships, by argument and fear, by longing and imagination. What people want to buy, what they regard as desirable, what services are sought, what level of risk is accepted, what degree of security is required - these are ideas-oriented matters.
The sciences are realist: the structure of an atom or of the cosmos is unaffected by human culture; our hopes and fears have nothing to do with it. Whereas commerce is entirely dependent upon how we happen to think and what we happen to want. But commerce does not only respond to how we think and what we happen to want, it shapes and structures how we thank and what we want. Commerce to a significant extent makes culture. This is why it is so very important and so very risky.
We need a liberal concept of business education. The basis of liberal education is freedom. It asks: how should you use your freedom? You can aim at many things - what is important and good to aim at? A technical education says: the goal is set already by others; here are the steps by which you can carry out your appointed task.
Liberal education developed originally to form the minds and characters of people who would make the world, that is, who would influence the values and ambitions of their societies. Such education was intended for legislators and magistrates, and later for senior public servants. The vast development of commerce as the arena in which a society is made has not yet met with an equal development in the concept of business education.
Business is not yet well integrated with our wider culture, despite its pervasive role in our society. It is often regarded cynically: business leaders are imagined to have exclusively selfish motives. Our literary, artistic and philosophical culture tends to be dismissive, to see only the shadows.
The question for MBS is now, as it always was, what is the proper ambition for business education?
John Armstrong is the Melbourne Business School Philosopher-in-residence.
This article first appeared in The Australian Financial Review on the 20th October, 2009.
