The flowering of management development: a salute to the twenty-first century

Citation

Safavi, F. (1999), "The flowering of management development: a salute to the twenty-first century", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 18 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmd.1999.02618aaa.001

The flowering of management development: a salute to the twenty-first century

The flowering of management development: a salute to the twenty-first century

Smelling the roses

And there they bloom. In the flourishing gardens of management development, where thorny stems are planted to cut each other's throats for competitive gains, a new breed of roses is flowering with a fragrance that intoxicates managers all over the world. These roses are not DNA-engineered constructs of Ivy League research labs. They result from cross-pollination of a variety of roses in a century-long effort to cultivate the best flowers for the twenty-first century. Let us smell the roses as we salute the new century.

This issue of the Journal of Management Development (JMD) contains a bouquet of intoxicating roses both for you to take along on your global tour of management development and for others to smell the triumph of global management. Be sure to water them every day, and remember that they cannot grow unless you love them.

When Professor Harold Koontz of the University of California at Los Angeles first visited the garden of management theory more than a quarter of a century ago, he faced a semantic jungle of entangled theories full of confusion and waste. In his superb classical work, Management Theory Jungle, Koontz identified six conflicting schools of thought on management, ranging from management process to empirical management, human behavior, social systems, decision theory, and the mathematical school. Professor Herbert Simon of Carnegie-Melon disagreed. He believed that if there is indeed a jungle, the trees are planted in rows. After a quarter of a century of debate, the issue still is not resolved, and confusion plagues the students and practitioners as to what management is all about. And until the jungle is disentangled, we cannot render a theory of management development that is responsive to the emerging needs of management developers for global implementation.

We have witnessed the same entangled weeds in the flourishing gardens of management development. A polycentric orientation has claimed that development needs of managers are different in just about every country and thus require individually designed programs for each nation and, at times, for diverse ethnic groups within a nation. An ethnocentric orientation has focused on similarities between the development needs of managers across national boundaries and advocated application of the home-grown model to subsidiary organizations around the world. It has faith in the universality of management functions, and global applications of the North American management development model. A regiocentric orientation has assumed that management development needs within a geographic region are sufficiently similar for application of a unified approach, but different from the needs of other regions. Thus, a different model of management development needs to be developed for each geographic region. A geocentric orientation has offered a menu of management development applications and has proposed selection of various items on the menu for the management development needs of a specific nation, countries within a region, or areas around the globe. The garden has remained a field of entangled weeds. Confusion about what to offer, for whom and where, still plagues management developers all over the world. However, the gardeners (all those who have worked on this issue) have done enough research to weed out the garden and present you with a set of theories, models, and delivery forms which are applicable to most areas of the world. Take time and smell the roses.

Our experience supports the validity of the geocentric approach to international management development. To retain the elegance of a theoretical construct, we need to apply a deductive approach and search for commonalties between various cultures and socio-political systems. It would have been ideal to arrive at a set of models which have universal application in management development. Unfortunately, we have yet to observe such universally applicable models. Granted, North American management development concepts and practices have been pervasive due to the widespread use of US textbooks, cases, and simulation games. However, their popularity is largely due to the lack of alternative localized literature and software, rather than their perfect alignment with diverse needs of managers throughout the world. For reasons of pragmatism we had to group homogeneous needs of management development in various geographical regions and have offered a set of theories, tools, and methods that are applicable to clusters of nations with geographical proximity. Our articles on the charm of management development in German-speaking nations, among the Baltic states, in East African countries, and in Australia and New Zealand follow the regiocentric orientation. On the other hand, South Africa is a nation of peculiarities that can hardly be associated with its neighboring countries. Thus we had to follow the polycentric approach and provide a guideline to its management development, which is only applicable to South Africa. The same polycentric approach had to be made in the case of Vietnam, which poses a set of unique characteristics in Southeast Asia.

Our wonderful clients

Now that you have a garden, free of weeds, you need to know who is going to smell the roses. Here at the JMD we have four segments of clients. Our first market segment is made up of the internationally-oriented management developers, who are trotting the globe to help managers of different cultures gain the new skills required for meeting the global challenge of the twenty-first century. You need to know what sort of new knowledge and preparation managers of each country or region need, and how such knowledge can be delivered. And here we have assembled a team of outstanding management development consultants who are willing to share their invaluable experiences with you at the very moment that you land at the airport. While escorting you to the conference hall, they brief you on the status of management development at the turn of the twenty-first century: what the hot topics are, how to package your presentation, how to evaluate the outcome, and how to seek new clients while you are there.

At least two MD consultants will greet you at the airport terminal. One will be a domestic consultant who is born and raised in that region and has extensive experience in MD programs offered in that region. Another is usually a management consultant from the West (Western Europe or North America) with significant management development practices in the same region. You are provided with a combination of views on management development that has originated from both inside and outside the region, and has thus excelled the quality of any comparable consultation. You will further note that at each location your team of consultants is composed of both men and women of prominence in management development. This assures you that gender issues in management development have been addressed and that the views expressed are filtered through the perspective of both men and women. We have not let you down. Utmost care has been taken to gather the cream of the crop of international management consultants and to assemble them into a team that presents a cohesive body for regional management consulting services.

Our second market segment is composed of managers from all over the world, employed in various industries, and at different managerial levels. They have seen on television how a new generation of scientists easily have directed the movement of the super robot Pathfinder on Planet Mars from 120 million miles away, but were frustrated on not being able to direct the activities of their subsidiary managers only two blocks away. There is big room for improvement, and the managers of the twenty-first century need to learn about new techniques of leadership that involve global staffing, sourcing, manufacturing, marketing, financing, and communication. Our consultants have responded to such emerging needs in their presentations.

Our third market segment is made up of public officials who are formulating national or global policies for management development. They have read the United Nations' The Human Development Report 1996, and have noted that the relative share of the top 20 percent of the richest countries in world production has increased from 70 percent in 1960 to 85 percent in 1991. Within the same period, the relative share of the poorest 20 percent of nations from global wealth has decreased from 2.3 percent to a mere 1.4 percent. The growing disparity evokes concern. Public officials, particularly from developing nations, attribute the gains of the rich countries to their well developed human resources, and particularly to the management factor. It is natural for them to monitor new developments in management training. To satisfy their particular needs, our consultants have also provided relationships between managerial performance and economic growth in the region of their service.

Our fourth market segment represents people in academia ­ students, researchers, professors, and everybody else involved in the exploration of new areas and invention of new techniques in management development. These people, by tradition, are interested in conceptualization and theory building. They also want to "survey the field" by knowing who has said what about management development in a given area of the world. Our consultants have met these expectations as well. Virtually every presentation embodies a well-constructed theoretical foundation and a thorough review of the literature.

All these benefits notwithstanding, the consultants also ignite such an excitement in your soul that you feel like jumping out of your seat and putting all their suggestions to work, even before finishing the text. In order to keep fueling the fire inside you I have supplied their access channels (addresses, telephones, faxes, e-mails; but not their Swiss Bank accounts!) so that you can reach them for instant consultation wherever you are, whenever you desire. If you cannot reach them instantly, they will be returning your call soon. Reach out and call them. You'll be glad you did.

Our incredible coaches

Your consultants are coached by a group of international experts on management development. It took me 26 years to visit 193 countries and some 50 territories around the world to conduct field research on the status of management development in every single country and territory of the world. The fruits of my worldwide research resulted in the assemblage of a team of highly qualified experts to serve on the board of reviewers for the international issue of the JMD.

Dr Barry R. Armandi is the Distinguished Teaching Professor and Chair of the Department of Management at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, USA. He has been recently the chairman of the Management Education and Development Division of the Academy of Management. He has been engaged in numerous management development programs for American and international corporations, and he has published widely on management development. Professor Armandi also served as the assistant guest editor of the present issue of the JMD during my visiting professorship at Tehran University in Fall, 1997.

Dr Norma Harrison is associated with the Macquarie Graduate School of Management in Sydney, Australia. She has been involved in a variety of management development programs in Southeast Asia and recently coordinated the fourth international meeting (1997) of the Decision Sciences Institute in Sydney.

Dr Jan Jorgensen teaches Corporate Strategy and Strategic Management for Development at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He also directs the graduate program in Economic Policy Management which enables policy practitioners from developing and emerging market economies to gain analytical tools and management skills. He is working with donors (the Canadian International Development Agency, African Capacity Building Foundation and the World Bank) to establish similar graduate programs at the University of Ghana (Accra campus) and Makerere University (Kampala, Uganda).

Dr Catherine Leger is associated with the Faculty of Management at the University of Paris-Dauphine, Paris. She has extensive involvement in executive development programs for European corporations and has contributed to a number of journal articles on strategic management.

Ms Lizette Michael is a Senior Expert in Public Administration, Training, and Staff Development Department at the African Training & Research Center in Administration for Development (CAFRAD) in Tangier, Morocco. She has conducted numerous executive development programs for African senior administrators across the continent and has published essays on human resource development and the place and role of senior women managers in African enterprises.

Dr Alfred Jaeger is a member of the Faculty of Management of McGill University. He has extensive international involvement in MD programs and has been involved recently in a similar program at Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration.

Meeting fascinating consultants on your global tour

A bouquet of flowers for German-speaking managers. I assume you are taking your flight from Bradford, England where the JMD is published and where the garden of management development is flourishing. You will be traveling eastward and making presentations to managers of various regions on the knowledge and skills that they need to salute the twenty-first century. Your first destination is the German-speaking nations. They are Austria, Germany (unified), Liechtenstein, and Switzerland. There you will be greeted by four regional experts in management development. Dr Martin Hilb is the Director of the Institute for Leadership and Human Resource Management at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland. He is known not only as a capable administrator of a well-established European center for management training, but also as a scholar and theoretician. I came to know him a few years ago when we were working on a scientific paper and was impressed by his professional abilities. Dr Wolfgang Gick is associated with the Center for European Studies at Harvard University and is a well-known figure in European management and economics. Austrian-born Dr Otmar Donnenberg is a consultant in Management and Organization in Zeist, The Netherlands and has served many clients in German-speaking nations. And finally, Dr Gayle Avery of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, has spent more than ten years in Germany, before and after the unification, where she researched and practiced management development.

Hofstede's findings that Austrian, German, and Swiss managers appear to be less individualistic and less risk-taking, but are more concerned with the common welfare than their counterparts in the USA, provide a groundwork for your MD program. There are subtle differences in management behavior of the German-speaking nations as well. Professor Hilb believes that executives from the western part of Germany manage by facts, Austrians and people from the eastern part of Germany by improvisation, and the Swiss managers by a mixture of facts and intuition. This means that you may have to develop different versions of your MDP for German-speaking managers. Local markets are saturated in the entire region and with decreasing foreign investment in the German-speaking areas executives are looking outside the region for investment and marketing. Therefore, topics on globalization, strategic alliances, and working with people from foreign cultures would be of interest to German-speaking managers.

Your consultants will escort you to the conference hall and advise you not to use presentation styles that are popular in the North American management culture. So if you want to enter the conference room with a big smile, take your coat off, loosen your tie (dressing casually if you are a lady), introduce yourself by your first name, and refrain from mentioning the titles of the people when you address them in order to create a relaxing atmosphere, you'll be on a wrong angle right from the start. German-speaking people adhere to formal relationships. They also place a high value on the time they allocate to your program. So if an attendee raises a question that leads you to a discussion of a personal experience, your omnipresent consultants will prompt with a sign that reads, "Cool it off, baby! Here ain't no America. Retread and stay on course." Wow!

All in transition in the Baltic States

Your next destination is the Baltic states of the former Soviet Union, namely, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. At Tallinn airport (Estonia) you will be greeted by Dr Tatyana Poljeva, dean of correspondence studies and a member of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at Tallinn Technical University. She is accompanied by Dr Peter A. Manning of Bentley College (Massachusetts, USA). Dr Manning has been a Fulbright scholar in Hungary, has taught in the Estonian Business School, and has consulted on accreditation of their business programs. Both have valuable experiences in MD consulting, and they know the Baltic region very well. So you are in good hands.

Your highly prepared hosts will give you a tour of the three states, where you will observe vast differences in cultural dimensions. However, their Soviet imprinting has provided commonalties in management structure and a shared desire for learning western management techniques, fluency in English, and short-term, area-focused programs in management development, which facilitates transition into the market economy. You will be provided with a clear, no-nonsense consultation on how to solicit, design, deliver, and evaluate desired MD programs in the Baltic states. You will find their list of prominent leads quite useful in contacting potential clients. And you will enjoy their escort along the way to guard against pitfalls and to adapt well with the peculiar conditions of the Baltic states.

The fascination of East Africa

Now you may head south to East Africa and meet two regional experts on MD in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Dr Abainesh Mitiku is a native of the region and has taught management for several years in Ethiopia and has participated in management development seminars in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zambia. She has studied in Kenya as well. Although she has been associated recently with the West Virginia State College at Charleston, West Virginia, USA, she has maintained her interests and contact with East Africa and has stayed abreast of new developments in management training. Dr John Wallace of Marshall University, Huntington, West Virginia, USA, has been involved in East Africa for about 30 years, first as a department chair at the University of Nairobi, and then for 15 years with the MD branch of the International Labor Office, collaborating with the World Bank, USAID and other international agencies. Their combined experience in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda provides you with the best of management development consultation in East Africa.

You will note that the four countries in your tour enjoy a well-educated population, at least relative to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, and a corps of highly trained managers. They further enjoy well established MD institutes and deliver programs comparable to their counterparts in the West. There were even innovative MD programs that yielded remarkably positive results, such as the campaign-style MD programs in Ethiopia, punctuated short courses in Kenya, and targeted small and medium enterprises in Kenya and Botswana. However, there have been chronic problems of government intervention in the MD programs and the international development agencies' support of the MPDs, as well as discontinuation of the innovative programs after change of the MD directors. So your consultants see problems with MD to start from the top, and they choose to address the public and international officials more than yourself for creation of an environment conducive to MD in East Africa. Unless this is done first, your effort in delivering a new managerial skill that improves productivity and morale would be futile. If you note that your consultants use many acronyms in their presentations, and you are lost as to which acronyms correspond to what phrase, do not waste time on glancing through earlier pages. They have graciously provided a key to all acronyms at the end of their article. Should you prefer to read their work on a Web site, double click on the acronym; the full title would appear on a window. It is as simple as that! (Dr Wallace launched his first course on the Internet last Fall and had 38 students enrolled in the course. So the Web is your best bet!)

Dancing your way around in South Africa

Your next destination is South Africa, and what an exciting place to be. When I visited South Africa for the first time in the mid-1970s, there was only one city in all of East Africa from which one could fly to South Africa, and that was Blantyre in Malawi. Almost all African nations had abandoned South Africa because of apartheid. Now there is extensive communication between South Africa and other African nations, but the pattern of their management development is somehow different. So advice that you received in East Africa might not be applicable to South Africa.

Dr Connie Mogale-Pretorius of the University of South Africa will meet you at Johannesburg airport. She has been involved in organizing and delivering MD programs for South African corporations and has served as a trainer and consultant on many projects. She is accompanied by Dr Edward A. Coster and Dr Dean B. McFarlin, both of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. Dr Coster is a graduate of the University of South Africa and taught there more than ten years before joining the Central Training Unit at Anglo-American Corporation. Later on he formed his own MD consultancy and had a very successful practice when he decided to join the Department of Management at Marquette. He has published widely on management and MD in South Africa and is highly regarded as a scholar-consultant-trainer in the South African management field. Dr McFarlin has provided US corporations in South Africa with consulting services on MD and has high caliber publications on this topic. The team of three consultants provide you with one of the most valuable consulting services on South African MD today. I guarantee it.

Your consultants focus on the development of black managers and discuss the findings of a survey that they have recently conducted with senior managers and academicians on the outcome of the Affirmative Action program. Based on their findings and their other research, they have constructed a conceptual framework for MD in South Africa that can be understood easily and applied readily by visiting management developers. But perhaps their most interesting and delightful offering is their encounter with ubuntu, a concept of group solidarity among many African cultures. If organizational effectiveness depends on alignment of its structure and bonds with cultural norms and values of its members, then South African enterprises need to strip themselves of the western molds of individualism, competitiveness, and formal communications and realign themselves with the ubuntu models of collectivism, sharing, supportiveness, and cooperation. This is a big challenge, but there seem to be no better alternatives.

Here you are bemused at how the concepts of management are redefined, and repackaged, and how they are emitted in color and sound. Performance objectives, surely for the teams rather than for the individuals, are set by the employees in Sunday's production festivals that involve singing, dancing, storytelling, and the ritual slaughter of cattle. Have you ever imagined that you would be training managers by doing these? Or, better yet, by inviting local rainmakers and mediums to perform their own rituals? Your hosts will take you to a number of prominent South African corporations, including Eastern Highlands Tea Estates and South African Airways, where the ubuntu principles of management were successfully implemented. You will note that virtually all familiar concepts of western style management (productivity, management by objective, strategic planning, etc.) are found in an ubuntu-based organization. The difference is in their value construct and modal application. The task is not one of adaptation, but of building new constructs by examining the roots. And when you see the rewards you wonder why the indigenous approach was not carried out before, in South Africa, in the rest of the continent, and even around the world. Your consultants are equally bemused!

Vietnam: the Yankees are coming again!

A long flight will take you to your next destination, Vietnam. At Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) you will be greeted by Mr Cuoc, founding president of the Ho Chi Minh City University of Foreign Languages & Information Technology. Mr Cuoc has been working with the Vietnamese government on issues relating to higher education and training. He has been active in organizing management development seminars and will inform you of one of these experiences that involved participation by both US and Vietnamese experts. There are two other consultants at hand. Dr Drew O. McDaniel is Professor of Telecommunications Management in the College of Communication, and a former director of Southeast Asian Studies at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, USA. He has worked extensively in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, as an educator, researcher, and consultant. Dr John R. Schermerhorn Jr is the O'Bleness Professor of Management in the College of Business and director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Ohio University. He has conducted MD programs in Vietnam, developed student consulting projects, and worked with local educators and business leaders. This team of three consultants is equipped best to offer first hand experience on application of western-style MD to Vietnamese management. And they will prove it.

In Vietnam you will be faced with a unique environment. It is a country that has won the war, but lost the peace. I remember vividly my conversation of July 1983 with Professor Nguyen Dinh Tri, vice president of Hanoi Polytechnic, when he referred to the war period with nostalgia as a time of economic prosperity. I understood his feelings when I visited factory after factory that was shut down due to lack of materials. Today the factories are back in operation, but there are still seemingly insurmountable obstacles to economic development that make the practice of MD a real challenge. The government intervenes in virtually every aspect of the economy; its bureaucracy is awesome, the corruption overwhelming in the south. Corporations are overly sensitive to information that makes them visible to the public. This environment makes the task of training managers for a clean operation very difficult, if not ridiculously unrealistic; and preparation of localized cases that involve management pitfalls is almost out of question.

Against all these odds you will find the Vietnamese people to be lively and helpful. While back in Germany managers and workers would not have shown up at work unless they had their six weeks of paid vacations, here in Vietnam almost everyone is willing to work seven days a week and would auction off their vacation if the price is right. And the price is right when you pay about two dollars a day for their hard work. Because of this and the enthusiasm of the population, Vietnam has been a great place for foreign investment in the past few years. Your consultants are eager to show you the way to prepare the indigenous managers and to guard against the pitfalls.

The world upside down: the fabulous Australia and New Zealand

I just watched a TV program about an intriguing theory that Australia and New Zealand were located on the northern hemisphere some billion years ago. If it took them that long to make a 90 degree change, it may take them another billion years to straighten up! But you need not wait that long to change their managers when you get there. Three consultants will meet you at Sydney airport. They are Dr Gayle Avery of Macquarie University (the same charming person that gave you a tour of MD in the German-speaking countries, and who is here giving you a tour of her homeland, Australia, where she is researching leadership and training managers). Ms Anne Finkelde is a freelance MD trainer who designs and evaluates competency-based MD programs for Australian corporations. Ms Kolleen Wallace is the manager of training at a large Australian public service organization and has approximately ten years of experience in management development and training. The selection of an all-women team for MD consultancy has been no coincidence. Crocodile Dundee and TV commercials have brainwashed the world to think of Australia as a macho country where the man is the boss at home, work, and the boardroom. However, there is tangible evidence that women will play significant roles in corporate Australia in the early twenty-first century, although this can be said for just about any country as we salute the new century.

But your hosts are not there to brief you on the status of women in Australian management; they present the system of management development in Australia and advise you on what to do and not to do to be successful whether you are training men or women managers. They have long experience with both genders. To sweeten the deal, Dr André Everett from New Zealand joins their consulting team. He is associated with the University of Otago's Advanced Business Program in Dunedin, and has considerable experience in research and design of MD programs for international and domestic firms in New Zealand. This is because Australia and New Zealand share a similar historical background, almost the same cultural heritage, and roughly the same need for MD programs. We felt a regiocentric approach to their MD would be justified. And the team of four qualified consultants have taken this into account on their thoughtful advisement.

Here again Hofstede's studies find relevance in the cultural dimension. Both Australia and New Zealand are found to be high on the individualism and masculinity indexes. Managers strive for individual success and material gain. Their working environment, however, is rapidly changing to defy relevance of these traits. There has been a large influx of managers from southeast Asia to Australia and New Zealand. In New Zealand the Maori culture has been influencing New Zealand corporate norms for team work and common interest. There is an emerging need for managing diversity, and for ascribing to a multipurpose mission rather than to strictly maximizing profit. So you are well advised to look far beyond the national culture and consider traits of corporate civilization. The bottom line is that the Australian and New Zealand managers are tired of listening to canned presentations. They want you to do your homework by investigating their real development needs and customizing your presentation to address their specific needs. Better yet, follow through your presentations to see if the participants have successfully adapted their learning to their work and that the host organization has noticed short-term improvements as a result of your MD offerings. Granted, this is a far cry from the all familiar touch 'n go presentations, and indeed is time consuming and expensive, but if you do not have time to give your whole self, there would be no real improvement in managerial performance, and the host organization may write off the entire MD cost as a loss. So commit yourself to the management development program, weed out the garden, and smell the roses.

Hats off to the British

The flower arrangement for your global touring was made by Dr Andrew P. Kakabadse, Professor of International Management Development at Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield, UK, and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Management Development. Professor Kakabadse is an internationally reputable scholar and the author of many publications on management development. In fact some of his work is cited by the contributors to this issue.

The fabulous garden was cultivated by Professor Barrie O. Pettman, the former editor of the JMD,who encouraged me on this truly international mission and rendered his assistance in transmitting "call for papers" messages to prospective contributors. He prepared the ground for planting those beautiful roses which the authors sent from all over the world. The wonderful staff of MCB University Press at Bradford graced me with their charm during the three years of gardening for this issue. They gave me the inspiration to start working on the garden every day before 6 a.m., and at times all day until the next day at 4 a.m., weekends included, in order to reach a multitude of highly capable researchers, consultants, reviewers, and scholars in management development throughout the world by electronic media and in face to face communications. It has been truly fascinating to receive a manuscript by e-mail from one part of the world, package it and forward it to at least three reviewers in various corners of the globe, and be constantly on call for advice on how to improve and polish every detailed work. I felt as if I was walking through a "time tunnel" when I was receiving e-mails dated "tomorrow" and had to respond to them "yesterday."

So what if the British "lost" their beloved Hong Kong! They have won the minds and hearts of many scholars who have brought the world to a level of knowledge that was never dreamed of by the Lords of the British Empire.

Farrokh SafaviProfessor of Business Administration,Western Washington University,Bellingham, Washington, USAand Visiting Professor of Management,Tehran University, Tehran, Iran