Need for focus on thinking in management education

The business landscape is constantly evolving and in this evolving landscape, the discipline of business management faces numerous challenges. This article focuses on an essential issue of thinking. Over the last 25 years in academics, the writer have repeatedly heard and observed some of the following comments / situations among management graduates:

1. In a classroom, a case analysis is presented without much thought about its purpose, how it should be done, and whether this is the right solution.

2. When a question is asked, the answer lacks depth, analysis, or structure.

3. After a case discussion, students expect spoon-feeding on the answer to the case.

4. Students talk about vision and mission statements of organisations but lack thinking on their own vision and mission statements. And about many such concepts.

These 4 situations and many more show that there is a severe lack of focus on thinking and its various aspects i.e. why to think about thinking, what is thinking, and how to do it and developing independent thinking.

The business education does not exist in vaccum or just for the sake of education. The students undergoing the education need to learn thinking to understand business, understand various nuiances of the business, the problems faced by the business and the opportunites to explore and so on. Without thinking in a right way, it is not possible to do these things by the management graduates.

There are various ways to solve this issue of thinking. One way to solve this issue is to start a core course on thinking looking into details its various aspects such as why thinking matters i.e. the business case for thinking; what is thinking including different types of thinking; and how to think including various approaches to thinking. This course must have a dual focus on understanding the theory and practice of thinking and the development of independent thinking among the students. To measure the effectiveness of the course an evaluation of the thinking of each student needs to be done before the corse starts and after the end of the course. This can give good feedback for evolving the course for subsequent batches.

Second way to improve the thinking and independent thinkinging of management graduates is is to add a module in each course focusing on thinking in the context of the course.

Third way is to generate on campus live projects on thinking. Another way is to organize competition on thinking within management graduates. And so on.

To justify its existence, the discipline of business education needs to create management graduates who are groomed in the theory and practice of thinking to performance in the real world which is constanatly evolving and survives from one challenge to another.