The Quest for Earnesty

The erudite voice of “Biz Deans Talk” and Dean and Professor of Strategic Management at Madrid’s Instituto de Empresa, Santiago Iñiguez de Ozoño, whose predictions for trends in management education in 2006 I recently wrote about here on The Global Perspective gave a benevolent appraisal of this weblog and offered my criticisms an engaging and warm response on the popular high-profile business education site on Sunday, in turn demonstrating a sincere quest for the truth far too infrequently seen in today’s society of both academic and management practitioners.

“One of those precious occasions that academics value and enjoy most is when they are lucky to find sharp and intelligent critics,” he wrote in post entitled “A Community of Constructive Criticism”. “Acute and smart criticism is what has fostered the progress of human thinking in all fields from philosophy to the sciences and the arts. Criticising and questioning lies also at the basis of the methodology used at the fundamental stages of professional academic life, such as the defence of PhD dissertations or the publication of papers and books.”

Professor Iñiguez de Ozoño’s optimistic attitude to the critics is prescient, for if only such brazen willingness to accept challenges to ideas was more commonly embraced in both the Common Room and the Board Room then progression might be made far faster and more often, and consequently everyone might benefit from the increased rapidity and frequency of innovational change and subsequent capital flow that would come as a result. Almost always failure in progressive performance is fuelled somewhere by the inability of someone to let down the guard of humility and admit to occasionally having made a miscalculation.

Professor Iñiguez de Ozoño’s willingness to share in the formation of his ideas so publicly is noteworthy too: writing regularly on a weblog, interacting and commenting with notable journalists such as Della Bradshaw, the Business Education Editor of the Financial Times, he takes steps towards constructing a public dialogue that few in positions of such leadership responsibility can claim to have even considered. With so much of academia and business being permeated by competitive paranoia, it is encouraging to see a public intellectual and professional with great distinction casting off the chains of fear and genuinely pursuing the act of knowledge progression.

With all the draconian attempts at making public organisations more perspicuous to investors over the past five years, managers and market watchdogs alike might learn a thing or two from the continental Dean’s modus operandi, for corporate transparency and accountability is as much about creating an open dialogue about management practice and internal corporate strategy as it is about opening up financial accounting statements. Indeed, the point is perhaps an understatement – after all, it is usually one form or another of corporate paranoia that leads to balance sheets being misrepresented since the construction of financial accounting statements starts with the premise that Management is honestly revealing the strategic intents of the company.

Professor Iñiguez de Ozoño concludes his arguments: “Again, let me thank Mr. Harrison for his comments. I hope he is joined by many other bloggers to expand this community of constructive criticism” – I too hope that a wider audience, both academic and professional, joins him in the search for truth and verisimilitude in the dawning of this new corporate era.