Remember to Challenge Your B-School's Management Teachings

Management sage Gary Hamel on why MIX decided to open its management innovation competition up to MBA students:

We are trying to underline a message to those students that the way organizations operate today may not be the way they operate in the future and that the embedded assumptions that are at the heart of a lot of business school teaching are open to challenge. One goal is to surface some great ideas and to hear what the next generation of leaders is thinking. By virtue of creating the contest itself, there is a meta-level message that today we need to be teaching our future leaders how to become inspired management innovators. They need to go out thinking about how they are going to challenge the existing assumptions and how they are going to reinvent the technology of management, given all the new challenges that are out there. This is one way of seeding that idea in the minds of these up-and-coming leaders.

If Hamel is right, and we are on the verge of management revolution, then it would indeed be a good idea to remember that many professors are of the old guard, entrenched in Industrial-Age-influenced, soon-to-be-ineffectual management principles.

[Forbes, HCL MBA M-Prize]