What Does the Boss Really Do? Business Education and the Liberal Arts
An address given to the Ciceronian Society at Mount St. Mary’s University, March 3.
At the start of each semester, I ask my MBA students, “What are you here for? An education or a credential?” The students neither hesitate nor equivocate: they answer unanimously and instantaneously that they are there for the credential. While this may come as a disappointment—or even a shock—to those of us who call ourselves, “educators,” in truth, they have correctly determined how the system works. They are mostly working students who have been given to understand that they can go no further in their careers, no matter what their skills are, unless they get the MBA. It is not the content, but the credential that matters.
Liberal Arts schools, on the other hand, are finding that their students have difficulty getting jobs commensurate with their level of education. Too often, they leave school with a Bachelor’s degree only to find themselves with high debts and low pay. This has led to some hand-wringing on the part of Liberal Arts colleges as they struggle to prove that they are “relevant” to the business world. Often, this reform takes the form of curtailing or even eliminating core requirements to make room for “practical” courses, or for a self-designed curriculum, as if the student were the best judge of these things. One can debate the efficacy of such “reforms,” but I would like to start the discussion of reform in a different place: the reform of business education, the field in which I have labored for the past 10 years.
Insofar as an education is considered as professional preparation, it must start with the question, “What does a member of this profession do?” Only with this question in hand can we answer the question of what preparation he or she ought to have. For those who wish to be prepared for business leadership, this question comes down to, “What does the boss really do?” One might be tempted to answer this question in terms of some function, say finance, or marketing, or operations, etc., but that would only address what some particular boss might do, while we want an answer that applies to what every good manager must do.
I believe that there are two things that apply to every manager. The first is that he must discover the alternatives for action and select the most appropriate course. The second task is that he must discover the arguments that will persuade people to accept this course of action. In regard to the first task, it is evident that, unless the boss is omniscient, this is a dialogic process. The manager will be in conversation with customers, employees, suppliers, superiors, experts, etc. He will be required to weigh evidence, assign priorities, and make judgments before arriving at some conclusion. To this first task we can easily apply the name dialectics. Note that dialectics are not an option for the manager. He or she will perform this task. The question is whether he will perform with some actual knowledge of what it is and some actual practice in performing it.
The second task is persuasion, which involves discovering the arguments that will motivate people to move along the chosen course, not because they have to but because they want to, because they are equally convinced that this is the best course of action. To accomplish this, the manager must know how to construct arguments, and how to appeal to the reason, emotions, and values of his hearers. This of course is the art of rhetoric.
Rhetoric and dialectics do not operate in a vacuum, but are themselves dependent on other sciences. Conclusions reached in a dialectical process must be rooted in the evidence, and the manager will need skills in evaluating that evidence. Two of these skills are history and “languages,” in the sense I will describe later.
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