50+20 Management Education for the World PART 1: Designing a radically new vision of management education

Business schools are - at least in the public eye - key representatives of management education. Substantial material exists which describes how business schools are performing, including increasingly critical voices concerning their performance over the past decade. Interestingly, we find very little available material concerning the wider landscape of management education, in contrast to the wealth of information and critical analyses on business schools. Despite this lack of information, the vision is not limited to business schools but rather addresses the whole management education landscape, defining and developing key roles its various players can fulfill.

The 50+20 vision seeks to define areas of responsibility and opportunity, identifying clear roles which management education can play in order to assume responsibility in contributing to the creation of a society and world worth living in. These roles can be embraced by any player involved in management education, including corporate universities, consultancies, executive training centers, vocational training, think tanks or research centers - as well as business schools and management departments within the larger universities.

Thus far we examined what is needed in society and the world, and what different players in the field of management education can contribute to make the world a better place. But what about our own stakeholders? We engaged with key representatives of our broader community to better understand how various stakeholders interrelate and influence each other in the complex system of management education. During our retreats we shared and developed points of view with members of this community as equal partners. The global survey, the resultant discussions and the integration of new members into our visioning process stirred very different feelings towards these people. Our shared experience led us to identify a potential paradigm shift from a more mechanical "stakeholder involvement" to a "community engagement" approach: an emotive, whole-person collaboration similar to an animated family discussion.

The perspectives and expectations of our community point toward a very different model of management education. These views further shaped our thinking as we continued to study the challenges of the world, the economic system, business, leadership and management education. In the process we developed a sense of tapping into the higher consciousness of the broader global community concerned with the future of management education. From this larger field, a new vision slowly emerged, outlining a new type of management education.