The Rise of the "Renaissance MBA"

Just how much blame the business community should shoulder for the financial crisis is open to debate. Rather than dwell on what has happened in the past (and the rather embarrassing number of percentage of major players in the crisis who boasted an MBA from a top school), many voices in the community are instead pointing out the need to create a new generation of more responsible business leaders - leaders who will hopefully avoid the herd mentality which led their predecessors into such trouble. Their argument is that the traditional emphasis on teaching subjects such as finance, strategy, operations and the like is outmoded.

The renaissance period in Europe once produced leaders who were as grounded in science and the arts as they were with diplomacy and war. Now Gauthier suggests that business education needs to create "renaissance MBAs," managers and professionals who are as familiar with history, philosophy and design as they are with a business plan or a balance sheet.

Gauthier believes that one of the ways to achieve this would be to open up MBA programs to individuals with a much wider range of backgrounds so that bankers and management consultants would find themselves rubbing shoulders with artists or political scientists.

This idea of broadening the remit of business education is, of course, not new. Back in 2006, well before most people even knew what a sub-prime mortgage meant, Nancy Adler of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill in Canada wrote an essay stating that business leadership in the 21st century would call for "levels of inspiration and creativity that have been more the domain of artists and atavistic approaches than of most managers." In her view, this meant the time was right for the cross-fertilization of the arts and leadership because "designing innovative options requires more than the traditional analytical and decision-making skills taught during the past half century in most MBA programs."

Adler, who combines her academic work with a second career as a highly respected water colorist, uses an innovative approach to learning, with paintings that are used to get business students to look at the world in a different way while enhancing self-awareness and helping to develop their own leadership styles. "Art doesn't serve up answers to specific business problems on a plate," she insisted, "But what it can do is get you to step back, reflect and come up with your own solutions, solutions that are often beyond the constraints of accepted practice."

Read full article: The Washington Post, September 25, 2010