Reviews

Management as if values mattered

When 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 the covers there’s plenty to warm the heart of anyone who believes the purpose of a business is more than simply to maximize profit.

While corporate social responsi-

bility (CSR) has become a trendy phrase in recent years, Dyck found that there’s often less there than meets the eye.

In an interview with Asper colleague Reg Litz, Dyck noted that “surprisingly little research” was being produced on best practices in CSR. He pointed to a recent review of some 30,000 scholarly articles published by leading journals over the past quarter century, noting that only nine mentioned pressing issues like global warming, to cite one example. Even articles purportedly dealing with corporate social responsibility had more to do with proving CSR could be profitable rather than engaging issues of improved behavior.

In his interview with Litz, Dyck credited a series of interviews he conducted with Manitoba businesspeople

(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. Dyck and Neubert see their approach as unique because each chapter presents two parallel approaches to management to help readers consider how management is linked with future career choices, such as ecological sustainability, globalization and corporate social responsibility. One of those approaches is what they call Mainstream management, which they see as the materialist-individualist view that management is all about maximizing the traditional bottom-line of profit first. In this they intend to cover all the bases found in traditional books of this type. But there’s more, what they call Multistream management, which aims to find a balance among multiple forms of well-being (including social, spiritual and ecological factors) for multiple stakeholders (owners, employees, customers, competitors, neighbors and future generations). Here they pay homage to all those considerations that go into a multiple bottom line (described by some, for example, as Profit/People/ * Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Cengage Publishing Company, 2010, 624 Planet). pp. Not that values have been absent from management

It’s not that values have been absent from management texts, but often they are a mere afterthought. Here they are fully integrated.

Bruno Dyck, center, confers with PhD students whose interest in values-based management encouraged him to co-write his new textbook.

texts, but often they are a mere afterthought. Here they are fully integrated.

Each chapter treats its topic first from the mainstream perspective, then looks at the same issue from a multistream approach.

By so doing, they intend to encourage students to think about management from more than one point of view and see how their own moral commitments to social justice and ecological sustainability can be expressed in their management careers.

“By juxtaposing the Mainstream and Multistream approaches to management, we prompt readers to recognize that no approach to management is value-neutral,” the authors say.

One example of their approach is a feature

on philanthropy, which asks whether corporate giving is ethical (because it helps charitable endeavors) or unethical (because it spends money that belongs to shareholders).

The chapter on setting goals covers territory ranging from small-scale Manitoba vegetable grower Dan Wiens to Wal-Mart, the world’s largest food retailer. You won’t find many books with so long a reach.

How about competition? The authors acknowledge the widely-held view that “competitiveness is good for society because it motivates people and organizations to do their best” and “encourages organizations to continuously improve, promotes efficiency, and reduces opportunities to gouge the consumer.” But, they quickly add, even proponents of competitiveness would admit that “competition can go awry” and can “bring out the worst in people.”

The book is richly enhanced with sprightly sidebars, case studies, cartoons and questions that highlight moral issues with a fresh slant, Students are a new face of the prism. These make it easy and asked: For interesting for students to decide, for example, if whom would they want to become a manager like Jack Welch or a servant leader like you rather work Robert Greenleaf. “For whom would you prefer to — hard-nosed work?” the authors ask. “Which person would you Jack Welch, like to be your role model? Which person would you or servant like to be at the helm of a firm in which you’ve leader Robert invested?” Greenleaf? Along with the academic treatments, readers get a virtual “who’s who” of socially responsible business. If you’ve kept abreast of this magazine, you’ll recognize many names. A few of those who have also appeared in The Marketplace and/or at the podium of MEDA conventions are: Charles Loewen, Arthur DeFehr, Ken Blanchard, Dennis Bakke, John Beckett, Tom Chappel, David Miller, Laura Nash, William Pollard and Ralph and Cheryl Broetje. There’s even a painting by Marketplace designer Ray Dirks.

Dyck says that in addition to the regular “Instructors Resource Package,” the publisher has created a second “special issues” version for use in Christian schools. It features topics such as the place of management in the Bible, stewardship, and what it means to be a Christian manager.

Anyone wanting a comprehensive management textbook that pays heed to managing from a values perspective need look no further. This is as good as it gets. — Wally Kroeker