The Learning Curve Book – Santiago Iniguez

October 10, 2011

Some of the quotes used in Chapter 1 – Why management matters

“So whether you are managing a software company, a hospital, a bank or a Boy Scout organization, the differences apply to only about 10 per cent of your work. This 10 per cent is determined by the organization’s specific mission, its specific culture, its specific history and its specific vocabulary. The rest is pretty much interchangeable”, Peter Drucker.

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other“, John F. Kennedy.

“Corporations and managers suffer from a profound social ambivalence” (leading theorists) Sumantra Ghoshal, Christopher Bartlett and Peter Moran.

October 10, 2011

Quotes used in Chapter 2 – Out of the crisis

“With the economy in disarray and so many financial firms in free fall, analysts, and even educators themselves, are wondering if the way business students are taught may have contributed to the most serious economic crisis in decades”, The New York Times.

“It’s like trying to teach psychology to a person that has never known anybody”, Henry Mintzberg.

“Today’s troubles have been driven not just by greed, but by a lack of confidence. I think the average employee, maybe a business school graduate, lacks the confidence to ask the tough questions”, Frank Brown (Dean Emeritus of INSEAD).

“To give style to one’s character — a great and rare art! He practices it who surveys all that his nature presents in strength and weakness and then moulds it to an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason, and even the weakness delights the eye”, Nietzsche.

From The Learning Curve:

October 10, 2011

Quotes used in Chapter 3 – Developing better managers

“In future those who stump up [for the cost of a business education] will do so because they want to learn the skills, not because they think they are buying entry into a cool end exclusive club”, Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times.

“A large number of employers use coaching to enhance the value of learning and this may be a growing field for executive education purchasers to maximize the value of individuals learning. Looking ahead, one of the main requirements of purchasers is a greater focus on personalized learning plans”, EFMD-Carrington Crisp.

October 10, 2011

Quotes used in Chapter 4 – The changing landscape

“Almost all UK not-for-profit universities now work on a businesslike basis and are expected by their funding bodies to accumulate surpluses in order to finance expansion and capital investment”, 2010 annual report by Universities UK

October 10, 2011

Text from Chapter 5 – E-Learning

It’s not about the platform

What we have learned is that technology alone is not the answer, but it is a significant part of the answer. Blended delivery, combining on-line and face-to-face teaching offered, continues to offer tremendous potential for management teaching. Among its advantages are:

• Easier and friendly access.
• Flexible and tailored to student needs, with asynchronous sessions.
• Participation in “Learning Communities”, since technologies allow for a wide acces to social networks.
• Continuous feedback and personal assessment through sophisticated applications.
• Keeps the momentum of learning, as opposed to the static and transilient experience of the traditional classroom session.
• Creates new markets and clients, with the potential of reaching the entire world.

October 10, 2011

Text from Chapter 6 – International stakeholders

Evidence of the “hubization” of management education is the fact that some analysts cite some particular cities as centers that host a critical number of leading business schools. The Financial Times, for example, listed New York, Chicago, London and Madrid as hubs of executive education institutions in an article some years ago, and The Wall Street Journal has pointed out how some cities in Europe –notably London, Madrid or Paris — host an important number of highly ranked business schools.

From Book: Figure 8.1 shows the most relevant stakeholders in business education.

October 10, 2011

Quote used in Chapter 7 – Melting pots of knowledge

Amartya Sen, the Indian Nobel Price Winner in Economics. In his widely commented book The Argumentative Indian, he explains: “There was a great strength in the old Indian tradition, where you took plurality as the natural state of affairs. Ashoka in the 12th century BC mentions the fact that we have different beliefs, we should listen to each other, we must argue with each other. That was an acceptance of heterodoxy.” [1]In his brief essay “A Lecture in India: Large and Small”, he confirms this view: “The intellectual largeness of India links closely with the reach of our argumentative tradition”

October 10, 2011

Quote from Chapter 8 – The purpose of business schools

“Contrary to what many believe, literary fame has nothing to do with excellence or true glory or even with a writer’s position in the syllabus of a university’s English Department, itself as remote to the Agora as Academe’s shadowy walk. For any artist, fame is the extent to which the Agora finds interesting his latest work. If what he has written is known only to a few of other practitioners, or to enthusiasts … then the artist is not only not famous, he is irrelevant to his time, the only time he has.”
Point to Point Navigation, the second installment of Gore Vidal’s memoirs

October 10, 2011

Quotes from Chapter 9 – The students of tomorrow

“you know nothing”, Socrates to his new pupils.

Ted Snyder, the Dean of Yale School of Management, succinctly noted: “The best students don’t view themselves as customers, and they shouldn’t be treated as such”

Howard Gardner of Harvard University argues that there are at least nine forms of intelligence: “spatial; linguistic; logical-mathematic; bodily-kinesthetic; musical; interpersonal; intrapersonal; naturalistic; and existential.”

Derek Bok, Harvard University’s President Emeritus: “proactively to encourage students to be more understanding of the differences they meet among their fellow undergraduates” and that “officials have encountered a minefield of human emotions requiring exceptional sensitivity and skill in striving to create an environment in which everyone can feel welcome and respected.”

October 10, 2011

Quotes from Chapter 10 – Faculty and knowledge creation. How does it work?

Text from book: Professor Costas “Markides’ (London Business School) proposals to encourage younger scholars to publish not just in academic journals, but also in professional publications, are the way forward. In this way we will see the transfer of research to teaching, as well as encouraging cooperation between businesses and consultancies to identify new ideas and models for research”.

Peter Lorange, as President of IMD: “interactive, two-way approach, where propositional knowledge meets prescriptive knowledge.”