Educating responsible leaders: managing a project or business as usual?

Abstract

Project management (PM) is widely offered as a degree programme or single modules in many UK business schools. The schools, which tend to develop responsible leaders who could contribute to sustainable development (Lozano et. Al, 2011). Leaders who are expected to be accountable for their actions in tackling dynamic and complex problems, ‘inherent’ as well as ‘emerging’ ones, of the modern business environments (Pless & Maak, 2011; Smit, 2013). Equipping business graduates with traditional, pre-developed and prescribed resolutions for managerial issues is less likely to enable them to fulfil the expectations of the real world (Lozano et al., 2011). Businesses have been increasingly moving towards management by projects to survive and enhance their capabilities of coping with the challenges of the modern business world (Turner et al., 2010). This conceptual paper explores whether and how far academics should/ could put PM into practice in their approach to managing ‘management teaching’, to enable the business schools to develop leaders for sustainable development. The debate indeed establishes links between Business Education and PM fields. Looking at the UK HEIs in recent years, it would not be difficult to note the increasing pressures on academics as the results of the more and more demanding internal and external environments. Various rankings, league tables, the National Student Survey (NSS), student evaluations, etc. have become inseparable parts of the forces shaping the dynamics of such environments. To cope with and to respond to the potential changes in any of these areas have inevitably become inseparable parts of the academics’ responsibilities and HEIs’ obsessions. However, the question remains as whether the context surrounding academics and particularly the governing HEI systems would let and facilitate acquiring a PM approach to teaching business or not.

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