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- Title
Response ot Donaldson.
- Authors
Pfeffer, Jeffrey
- Abstract
The article presents the author's response to Lex Donaldson's long critique of Henry Mintzberg's book "Managers Not MBAs." The author says that Mintzberg never argues that experience is the only teacher and that nothing can be learned from conceptual knowledge conveyed in a classroom setting. To the contrary, he explicitly talks about the various analytical techniques that can be learned in precisely that way. Donaldson's example of teaching lifesaving is particularly interesting. It is certainly true that rescuing and reviving drowning people is taught to individuals who themselves have not drowned. There are two other notable instances where Donaldson's arguments depart from the evidence. When he talks about the unimportance of intuition and the importance and superiority of formal methods of thought and analysis, he ignores the large amount of scholarly research on the power of intuition, including evidence cited in Malcolm Gladwell's recently published "Blink." When Donaldson defends traditional pedagogical methods as being necessary for grading, he ignores the large body of educational research that consistently demonstrates that grading is not helpful to and is probably harmful for the learning process.
- Subjects
MANAGERS Not MBAs (Book); MINTZBERG, Henry, 1939-; MANAGEMENT; TEACHING; EDUCATION; DONALDSON, Lex
- Publication
Organization Studies, 2005, Vol 26, Issue 7, p1105
- ISSN
0170-8406
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/017084060502600712