The past is not the future

Abstract

Concentrating on manager development rather than management education - a subtle but crucial change of words - means moving away from the university and towards the work organization. It is realised that there are limits to how much teachers can teach about the practice of management in a classroom. The development of the future managers was effectively delegated to the programme director. Even the research that became the focus of attention of most of the colleagues was not the ground-breaking stuff of the physical sciences but rather a recording and interpretation of what was happening in the real laboratories of management, the businesses themselves. It is the sense, from perusing the excellent publications by Howard Thomas and others on the Future of Management Education for the EFMD, that most of the business schools of the world are at or maybe even beyond the peak in the curve.