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Chapter from: "How the Harvard Business School Changed the Way We View Organizations"
Published by: Business Expert Press
Originally published in: 2024
Revision date: 19-Mar-2024

Abstract

This chapter is excerpted from 'How the Harvard Business School Changed the Way We View Organizations'. Listen, observe, test - these three words lie at the heart of a powerful method for businesses' transformation. Behind this method is a eceptively simple idea: managers and management scholars must first take the pulse of a real business, get its case history, diagnose its problems, and only then solve them. Invented by the scholars who launched the Harvard Business School (HBS), this medical model will still cure companies today. Damningly, during the last 30 years business schools embraced the presumptions of economists, game theorists, and other calculators of abstraction. The solving of real-world, real-time problems has atrophied and stagnated. In this book, How the Harvard Business School Changed the Way We View Organizations, renowned scholar and emeritus professor Jay W Lorsch marshals evidence, history, and insights from his more than 50-year career at HBS to make the case for a return to the medical model - the practices of listening, observing, and testing in which the fields of human relations and organizational behavior are rooted. By telling the history of the development of his field, Lorsch demonstrates how the medical model emerged in the years before World War II and for decades helped managers, management scholars, and consultants diagnose and solve the problems besetting companies large and small. Explaining the case studies that define the practice, he discusses how the model has been refined and reapplied by later generations and how it can continue to address issues such as diversity, leadership, competition, and optimal corporate board structures.

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Abstract

This chapter is excerpted from 'How the Harvard Business School Changed the Way We View Organizations'. Listen, observe, test - these three words lie at the heart of a powerful method for businesses' transformation. Behind this method is a eceptively simple idea: managers and management scholars must first take the pulse of a real business, get its case history, diagnose its problems, and only then solve them. Invented by the scholars who launched the Harvard Business School (HBS), this medical model will still cure companies today. Damningly, during the last 30 years business schools embraced the presumptions of economists, game theorists, and other calculators of abstraction. The solving of real-world, real-time problems has atrophied and stagnated. In this book, How the Harvard Business School Changed the Way We View Organizations, renowned scholar and emeritus professor Jay W Lorsch marshals evidence, history, and insights from his more than 50-year career at HBS to make the case for a return to the medical model - the practices of listening, observing, and testing in which the fields of human relations and organizational behavior are rooted. By telling the history of the development of his field, Lorsch demonstrates how the medical model emerged in the years before World War II and for decades helped managers, management scholars, and consultants diagnose and solve the problems besetting companies large and small. Explaining the case studies that define the practice, he discusses how the model has been refined and reapplied by later generations and how it can continue to address issues such as diversity, leadership, competition, and optimal corporate board structures.

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