Don’t wait for the Business Schools to catch up!
Recent research conducted by Professor David Garvin of Harvard Business School has caused a large scale rethink of the MBA. In a recent interview he recognises the need for ‘field work’ to address the balance between the academically based current MBA and the need for businesses to embrace such practical skills as people management, influencing, communication, creativity and problem solving – what he calls the ‘doing and being’ of business as opposed to the ‘information’.
Where has Professor Garvin been hiding? Businesses all over the world have been recognising the shortfalls of MBA’s for years – hence the proliferation of courses to bridge the huge gap his research has confirmed. Professor Garvin talks about degree courses incorporating practical, on the job experience as though they are something new – degree courses in just about every other subject, certainly in the UK if not in the USA include some type of practical experience. We have been teaching people with MBA’s the finer points of business relationships for many years using the tools and techniques offered by NLP. It makes me wonder what life would be like if we always waited for researchers to catch up and confirm what the world already knows. I am sure innovation would grind to a halt – take the innovative IT skills teacher I spoke to recently who gave up writing manuals for her courses because by the time they were published they were already out of date such is the speed of technological change.
In our experience of coaching and working with successful Chief Executives they don’t wait for research, or commission expensive management consultancy – they intuitively know the right decisions to make. For example, Mark is the Chief Executive of an international pharmaceutical company. He was frustrated with his CFO because he sensed he was overcautious and judging his decision making strategy in a negative light. When we modelled Mark’s decision making strategy and fed it back to the CFO they were both able to understand the lightning speed at which Mark could make successful, strategic decisions. Similarly Craig, CEO of an International Engineering Company – knew instinctively what was required to get the company back on track. He had the vision and the strategy for making the necessary changes. He acted fast and the company was soon back on track – if either of these two CEO’s had waited for the academic research both their companies would probably be floundering by now.
So what has all this to do with NLP – Richard Bandler, the originator of NLP, admits that he was never interested in the academic research when he was developing NLP. He was only interested in what works. To this day people have been using NLP in a wide range of arenas from therapy to business, education and sport with amazing results. It is only recently that a number of academics in the field have started to do some research. If we had waited for research think of all the people who would have missed out on the incredible changes they were able to make to their thinking and behaviour in order to achieve exceptional results. Think of the teams who may still be dysfunctional and the sports people who would not have been able to improve their performance.
Don’t wait for the business schools to catch up – come and join those forward thinking people who know that being and doing are just as important if not more so than information in the world of 21st century business.
Pat Hutchinson
Quadrant 1 International
