Maybe Management isn't a Profession After All

Faculty at Harvard Business School are among many thinkers arguing that business management should be considered and held accountable as a profession, much like doctors and lawyers, complete with a code of ethics, codes of conduct, perhaps even certification processes.

Which makes Cambridge University's Richard Barker's counter argument in Harvard Business Review such interesting reading.

Professional status is awarded to people who have knowledge and skills we don't, such as doctors and judges, he says. (No, plumbers and mechanics are not professionals.)

So why isn't business management a profession? Here are three of his arguments.

• Business Schools do not agree on a requisite body of knowledge needed to qualify students to manage, as medical schools do in producing MDs. People lacking MBAs can still run a company, but you don't want a nurse doing brain surgery.
• Business schools do not produce highly specialized skills in their students, as do, say, law schools. MBA candidates are taught a broad set of general skills. "In general, the professional is an expert, whereas the manager is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none -- the antithesis of the professional."
• Professional training and testing results in the profession certifying expertise of its members. An MBA does not certify expertise.

"Neither the boundaries of the discipline of management nor a consensus on the requisite body of knowledge exists. No professional body is granted control, no formal entry or certification is required, no ethical standards are enforced, and no mechanism can exclude someone from practice. In short, management is not a profession. Moreover, management can never be a profession, and policies predicated on the assumption that it can are inherently flawed."

Is Barker right? Can the teaching of business management be made into a profession? Or should the rules by which we judge professionals be changed?

(Businessman image by p0kp0k, CC 2.0)