The Marketplace Magazine May/June 2010

Page 20

Management as if values mattered

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hen it comes to teaching business students about management, Bruno Dyck thinks something has been missing. Values, for example. As a professor of business administration, Dyck looked in vain for textbooks that would say enough about things like corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. So he decided to write one. It’s titled Management: Current Practices and New Directions,* coauthored by Dyck, who teaches at the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business, and Mitchell Neubert of Baylor University. The title may sound dry to non-academics, but between It’s not the covers there’s plenty to warm the heart of anyone who believes the purpose of a business is more than simply to that values maximize profit.

(numerous Mennonites among them) who were known for “marching to the beat of a different drum.” “One of the things that kept bothering me while I was doing those interviews,” Dyck said, “was the recurring comment that several of the interviewees made about needing to unlearn the way of thinking they had been taught in business schools.” While the schools could teach how to boost productivity and profits, they didn’t offer much help in how to lead a well-balanced life.

have

Dyck and Neubert see their ap-

proach as unique because each chapter been absent from presents two parallel approaches to manWhile corporate social responsiagement to help readers consider how bility (CSR) has become a trendy phrase management is linked with future career management in recent years, Dyck found that there’s choices, such as ecological sustainability, often less there than meets the eye. globalization and corporate social respontexts, but often In an interview with Asper colleague sibility. Reg Litz, Dyck noted that “surprisingly One of those approaches is what they they are a mere little research” was being produced on call Mainstream management, which they best practices in CSR. He pointed to a see as the materialist-individualist view afterthought. recent review of some 30,000 scholarly that management is all about maximizing articles published by leading journals the traditional bottom-line of profit first. over the past quarter century, noting that Here they are In this they intend to cover all the bases only nine mentioned pressing issues like found in traditional books of this type. global warming, to cite one example. But there’s more, what they call Mulfully integrated. Even articles purportedly dealing with tistream management, which aims to find corporate social responsibility had more to do with prova balance among multiple forms of well-being (including ing CSR could be profitable rather than engaging issues of social, spiritual and ecological factors) for multiple stakeimproved behavior. holders (owners, employees, customers, competitors, In his interview with Litz, Dyck credited a series of neighbors and future generations). Here they pay homage to all those considerations that go into a multiple bottom interviews he conducted with Manitoba businesspeople line (described by some, for example, as Profit/People/ Planet). * Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Cengage Publishing Company, 2010, 624 pp. Not that values have been absent from management The Marketplace May June 2010

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