Professor Martin Parker: Business schools are actually quite dangerous institutions

... many of the kind of aspirations, the ideas that are encouraged at business schools, are essentially about obedience rather than creativity and insolence.

The quote above by Martin Parker as well as the headline of this post are from the BBC show presented below.

The core of Parker's critique against business schools is identical with what I say about the whole Academic cult.

Or to be precise. The effects of the Hidden worldview of Platonism, promoted by the Academics, that I demonstrate in Section One are identical with Parker's distinct perspective regarding the business schools.

It is simply so that any systematic and truly independent study of any Academic topic will result in the same kind of critique.

Parker's page, University of Bristol

Parker’s Twitter


Contents

Parker in BBC's Business Matters
The Long Read in The Guardian
Parker's Book
My Comments
Closely Related Posts



Parker in BBC's Business Matters

Here follows a condensed part of the BBC show Business Matters 18 May 2018 where Parker is interviewed by the host Fergus Nicoll (Wikipedia/Twitter).

Parker:

I don’t think business schools are helping at all; largely because they are not addressing the huge challenges that face the human race on this planet.

Business schools are largely complicit in reproducing the kind of economic system that we have a present and that means they're not really attending to questions of, for example, carbon emission, climate change and so on let alone ideas about social justice and equality and so on.

This effectively means I think that Business schools are actually quite dangerous institutions that preventing us from making the kind of social economic changes that we needs to in order to survive as a species on this planet.

Nicoll:

Dangerous that's a pretty strong word. We will come back to that in a second Martin. What to undergraduates, what to post graduates say when they come to the faculty? What are the reasons they give for signing up for business? Signing up maybe for an MBA?

Parker:

… It's fairly clear that they've would rather have done physics or the history of art or something like that. They're really picking business and management because they think it's a safe choice and nothing more.

Nicoll:

Can you teach entrepreneurship, for example, I'm willing to bet a lot of the world's most successful start-ups; their protagonist did not go to business school?

Parker:

… Indeed I think you can argue that schools of business and management are really much better at teaching people to be corporate drones than they ought to be entrepreneurs.

Because many of the kind of aspirations, the ideas that are encouraged at business schools, are essentially about obedience rather than creativity and insolence.

So I don't think that, say you know, the idea of an entrepreneur sits very easily with the rather regimented attitude within the business school.

Nicoll:

Conversely, Martin, would it be fair to bet that most of the boardrooms in the banks and companies that precipitated the global financial crisis was stuffed with business qualifications?

Parker:

Yeah, I think that is really true. There is certainly a great deal of evidence that many MBA qualified individuals go out and do enormous harm.

That's not to say that everybody with an MBA is necessarily immoral, corrupt or stupid or anything.

But certainly doing business qualifications doesn't seem to prevent people from doing that doing daft things.

And we know about corporate scandals and so on. Enron, for example, is a classic example of somewhere that was being celebrated as a fantastic organization run by highly qualified managers and then proved to be nothing more than a tissue of lies and corruption; this is not an unusual story.

Listen to the full interview and the following short discussion with

Therese Tucker, CEO and founder of Blackline,

Andrew Peaple, Deputy Asia Finance Editor for the Wall Street Journal

Online or download pod: Business Matters 18 may 2018, Suzanne Scott Becomes Fox News CEO

The section regarding Parker's critique begins

26:39 in the online version that includes the news

25:25 in the podversion



The Long Read in The Guardian

Why we should bulldoze the business school, There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many. And I should know – I’ve taught in them for 20 years. Martin Parker, The long read, The Guardian, 27 April 2018.

This is one of Parker's best formulations in The long read.

… the assumption that human behaviour – of employees, customers, managers and so on – is best understood as if we are all rational egoists. This provides a set of background assumptions that allow for the development of models of how human beings might be managed in the interests of the business organisation. Motivating employees, correcting market failures, designing lean management systems or persuading consumers to spend money are all instances of the same sort of problem. ...

Parker’s Book

Martin Parker’s book, Shut Down the Business School!: An insider’s account of what’s wrong with management education, was published earlier in 2018.

On the publishers site you can read the beginning of the first chapter.

Here is the contents.

Introduction
1. What Goes on In Business Schools?
2. Teaching Capitalism
3. What's Wrong with Management?
4. What's Wrong with the Business School?
5. The Business School and the University
6. What is 'Management' Anyway?
7. The School for Organising
8. The Politics of Organising
9. What Do Students Want?
10. The Business School of Tomorrow

This review that is written from the perspective of cooperative organisation.

Book review: Shut down the business school – What’s wrong with management education, Anca Voinea, Co-operative News, 27 March 2018.


My Comments

From my perspective it is possible to transfer the core of Parker's Excellent critique to the Dimension of Platonism or to a critique against the whole Academic cult.

Business schools are of course a branch of the Academic cult and Platonism.

Accordingly it is the whole Academic field that is dangerous not just the business schools. Or it is not just the business schools that produce “corporate drones”; the main objective of the Academic cult is to produce citizen drones.

So to scrap or remake only the business schools will not have any effect whatsoever.

What is needed is to dissolve Platonism and the Academic cult.

However, to reach to the point where many realise what Platonism is all about there is a need of the kind of specific critique that Parker delivers.

Or like this. In the spring of 2018 have the major promoters of Platonism the BBC and The Guardian been forced to at least accept that there is a need to talk about that a large part of the Academic terror is not acceptable.

This means hopefully that the unconditional surrender of the Academic cult is not so far away.


Closely Related Posts

Reflect on Steve Jobs' Speech and the Other side of the Static Wall – In Memory of the Deceased Future Part 2, 30 March 2018

A Groundbreaking Speech by the British Minister for Universities and Science – Will Perhaps – Open Up To Real Education, Real Science and Real Democracy, 27 December 2017

The Guardian Demands Officially that the People Must be Ruled by Mysticism, 1 November 2017

BBC and the Academic Cult Demand You to Replace Understanding with Faith, 29 September 2017

What's Wrong with Science? – Propaganda Galore – Learn How they Hide the Static Religious Dogmas to Fool you to Trust the Academic Cult, 6 May 2017

3 HyperEfficient Intros

The earlier post, with the same title, became somehow corrupted.


Images and texts:

Intro 1 You Rotate

Intro 2 The Surface

Intro 3 The Basics, previously called The Best Short Presentation


The main messages as images.

Reflect on Steve Jobs' Speech and the Other side of the Static Wall – In Memory of the Deceased Future Part 2

Three embedded videos – may take time to load.




Steve Jobs (1955–2011)

Commencement speech

Text of Steve Jobs' Commencement address (2005) Stanford Report, 14 June 2005


Mentioned in the Speech

Calligraphy

Serif

Sans-serif

Apple Inc.

Macintosh 128K (1984)

NeXT

Pixar

Toy Story (1995)

The Whole Earth Catalog (1968–1998) published by Stewart Brand

- Read about Stewart Brand, homepage, and you will read about the beginning of the digital revolution.

Scanned "Stay hungry, Stay foolish" images from The Whole Earth Catalog,


Contents

Intro

About Jobs' Speech

Jobs Was a Flip-Flopper

The Hidden Static Demands

Arcade Fire – Creature Comfort


Intro

I will soon publish the first chapters of Section Two, Promo, of my book.

I have had reflections from many perspectives of what is the very best thing to say before.

Because this section can be a burden if you do not follow what I try to say and especially for them that has not read the first section.

So, my answer is: Listen, read and reflect on Steve Jobs commencement speech from 2005.


About Jobs' Speech

In a way are Jobs' messages not just directed to the graduates that day in 2005; as his words can be understood as a prelude to our new culture.

For sure this is not an especially original conclusion.

Jobs' words are essential as he is recognised as successful in today’s Western culture; a culture he, more or less, openly disliked.

The undeniable and brutal fact is that Jobs rejected the Academic perspective to be able to establish his own path.

It must be observed that Jobs had no clear understanding of Dynamic relations, for example, he says.

...

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

...

These relations are simply not true as, for example, to be able to write depends on the Dynamic capacity to know in advance HOW TO MAKE the connections.

That Dynamic relations are not acknowledged to be real, concrete or systematic depends only on the Static ideals of the Academic cult.

Accordingly Jobs was forced, like all other Western victims, to replace the Hidden Dynamic relations with Spirituality.

Observe I have nothing against Spirituality; but the confusion that makes it impossible to grasp simple Dynamic relations as concrete.


Jobs Was a Flip-Flopper

Here is short and amusing video where Tim Cook gives ample proof of that Jobs had a somewhat concrete understanding of Dynamic relations.



Cook says.

… he was the best person in the world about doing this. He would flip on something so fast that you would forget that he was the person that was taking the 180 degree polar position on it the day before. … It was an art. You could never know that he thought the opposite. … I saw it daily. I saw it daily. This is a gift. This is a gift, because things do change, and it takes courage to change and courage to say, ‘I am now wrong. Maybe I was right before. But maybe not. Maybe I was never right”. It takes courage to do that and I think he had that.

The Hidden Static Demands

The correct judgement, according to the current Western culture, of Steve Jobs without the slimy Propaganda must be like this.

Jobs was a sloppy daydreamer as he did not care about Logic and always changed his mind.

He was confined to a fantasy world, that consisted of un-real things; things that don't yet exist.

Therefore he could not handle to study or a real job where he had to obey correct Static facts and superiors.

Such bastards like Jobs must accordingly be taken out by a responsible Authorities before they create an unruly disorder.

Thankfully are most of these un-humans suppressed by teachers in the schools and driven to be outcasts by responsible citizens.

But we must be better. That Jobs created several businesses are sad evidences of moral decline.

They who go against the Static order of the Nature and believe that they are creators – like gods – must be eliminated in order to save the Academic cult and the Western system of total suppression and exploitation of every citizen.

Everyone must feel the hopelessness of to exist in their bones!

But, Arcade Fire says it much better from the other side of the compact terror.


Arcade Fire – Creature Comfort



Note: Lyrics in the video

Here follows some of the lyrics from the song Creature Comfort (2017) by Arcade Fire on the album Everything Now from the same year.

... 

... God, make me famous
If you can't just make it painless
Just make it painless
It goes on and on, I don't know what I want
…
Born in a diamond mine
It's all around you but you can't see it
...
The white lie of American prosperity
We wanna dance but we can't feel the beat
...

...

On Väggen försvinner/The Wall Disappears are there lots of other examples of how Art is used to express hidden Dynamic realtions

Alvin and Heidi Toffler – In Memory of the Deceased Future Part 1, 12 January 2018

This 13 minutes video Exposes the Trick of Platonism and How to Fool the People by Propaganda

One of the primary desired effects of Platonism, that rules the current Western culture, is to be able to fool the People by propaganda.

Or like this. Platonism is all about to eliminate concrete understanding so the People are forced to Accept and Obey.

This means that they who produce the most effective propaganda also owns the victims.

So, the recent exposure of harvesting and use of Facebook profiles in order to construct and spread propaganda exposes also the rule of Platonism.

Just listen to Christopher Wylie's story.

The video above from

The Cambridge Analytica Files, ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower, Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian, 18 March 2018

...

Closely related post:

The Film and the Book The Society of the Spectacle Exposes HOW You are Tricked, 12 November 2017

Perhaps my best summary so far about Platonism:

The False Democracy is Based on False Science – The Minimum Requirements To Get It, 20 November 2017