Abstract

There is an utterly different generation now achieving adulthood and entering business schools. Furthermore, businesses have become more customer-driven, flattened, and dynamic. Meanwhile, competition has turned global, time- and cost-based. Managers are also expected to facilitate the creation of the right environment where individuals feel motivated to work collaboratively in solving problems and realizing opportunities. Notwithstanding all the above, management education is still divided in silos of expertise (e.g., specialties, majors & minors, specific courses), and is still relying on lectures, case studies, and exams as tools for teaching, learning, and performance appraisal. To sum up it all, the market is in need of a very different type of manager, and yet our schools employ the same old approaches that seemed to have worked in the past. Using an oversimplified representation of management education, the same transformation process used ten, twenty or thirty years ago is expected to turn very different types of inputs (i.e., new generations) into very different types of outputs (i.e., 21st century Managers). The objective of this paper is to discuss the need for a new type of manager—the social knowledge manager, and a needed new approach to management education. This new approach to teach management is discussed according to four aspects: 1) the environment, in which teaching/learning takes place; 2) the teaching/learning process; 3) the role the professor/instructor plays; and 4) performance appraisal. To contextualize and support the discussion, innovative practices from various universities will also be presented.