Mario Pagliaro's Newsletter, April 11, 2007:

Science and Management: A New Alliance under the Sign of Culture

Summary:
To face the challenges before our global society, scientists and managers need to expand their respective cultures.

Increasingly less students apply to study science in all the western world originating an epistemological and cultural paradox: because never in the past has science had access to such a cornucopia of communication tools (media, books, museums, internet etc.) and never before we have assisted to such a mass diffusion of social practices that deny the value and the usefulness of science.

On the other hand, companies everywhere -- under the siege of hypercompetition and of the sustainability crisis -- need more scientists as they have the urgent needs to radically rise producitivity and the quality of their products while reducing emissions.

We believe that there is a way to create a new, fresh interest of society for the scientific enterprise: To renew the methodological and cultural education of either scientists and managers, closing the the "two-cultures" gap and entering a new era of creative work in which science and management will be allied under the sign of culture.

In brief, we need young managers and young scientists who, thanks to their richer background, will be able to collaborate and work together to face the enormous challenges -- at environmental, economic and social levels -- before our societies.

A methodological mistake

«Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola -- wrote web usability guru Jakob Nielsen commenting the release of the new iPhone -- have many great designers and usability experts who know much more than Apple about how people around the world use mobile devices. But they don't get the backing from executives to force the network operators to prioritize user experience. Steve Job's real contribution is his willingness to bang heads together to force them to upgrade their network for the trivial reason that it affords a smooth user experience on the device. You could never imagine Ed Zander (Motorola's CEO) call up the head of T-Mobile late at night and yell until they changed their system enough to make the Razr easier to use».

This simple fact that concerns all of us, i.e., that most hi-tech products are ill-designed and difficult to use, is one of the practical consequences of the methodological choice to exclude science from the education program of the managerial élites worldwide.

Bringing science back into the general culture of the ruling classes

The education of international management takes place in public and private presitgeous schools: Yale and Harvard in the US; Insead and Ena in France; Imd in Switzerland; the London School of Economics or the “Säid” School at Oxford. Invariably, the programs offered to the clientele have in common the absence of science: no physics, mathematics, chemistry or biology in the curriculua of contemporary managers.

Accordingly, the managers who graduate from these schools cannot lead the technology innovation process. Eventually, innovation gets delegated to Chief technology officers of engineering background, with the results mentioned above.

On the other hand, a management education in which the foundations of science will be included among the ideas to be transmitted on shaping the general culture of a manager, would provide our organizational leaders with the competences needed to critically assess -- and thus lead -- innovation.

An adequate scientific education coupled to a solid classical education would allow young graduates to manage the innovation process not as a mere technical fact, but as an eminently social and human process. Only in this manner, the executives of tomorrow will be able to integrate in the production of goods and services those human and social factors that until now have been largely neglected (see the hi-tech or the software produtcs).

For instance, how could managers recognize that the natural sciences take part in making sense of ourselves and our actions, and thus establish strategies based on this awareness, if they don't know any naturalistic sciences?

Clearly, the third culture invoked by Gloria Origgi needs us to expand the curriculum of the ruling classes.

Expanding advanced education

The historical development of business schools has been analogous to that of scientific schools: specialization and division of labor. And exactly as in industry labor division and fragmentation of competences have led to enormous productivity gains until the crisis of today, so has the education of managers come to face today's serious legitimacy crisis.

Now, it is true that the task of a scientist is to produce new knowledge whereas applications concern technology. And it is also true that the quality of a scientist seldom are those of a good manager or communicator.

And yet, this should not impede us to rethink scientific education to include those elements of history, philosophy, sociology and economics that are nowadays indispensable resources of the scientific profession. As put it by Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, «Recognizing their cultural gap, scientists -- before willing to correct the deficiencies of profanes -- must add to their studies those elements needed for a better understanding of the public».

A new, broader cultural education will offer to scientist the resources necessary to face the risks of ultraspecialization; and above all it will enable scientific professionals to fight the social emargination that everywhere is putting at risk not only the financial support of scientific research but rather the very sense of the scientific enterprise.

Eventually, beyond to teach scientists the foundations of management and communication; and to managers those of science, we believe that a more profound and subtle task is needed: to bring science back into culture.

In other words, the foundations of science should be integrated in the general culture of the future ruling class.

Further information

In accord to this vision, we have established in Italy the Institute for Scientific Methodology (www.i-sem.net) which inaugurates its activities next January with the Master “Paul K. Feyerabend” open to graduates in all disciplines (enrolment now open). I warmly thank Professor Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond for recent enlightening discussions.

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