Discussion of IA education

["Livia Labate" <liv AT livlab.com>]

I read this article and thought you might be interested:

 The Five Minds of a Manager
 by Henry Mintzberg* & Jonathan Goslin
 Harvard Business Review, November 2003

It sums up what they have been doing with the MBA course they teach - made
me think of IA education all through it. Don't want to clog your emails, so
get it here:
http://livlab.com/stuff/mintzberg-goslin_five-minds-manager.pdf

Abstract:

The world of the manager is complicated and confusing. Making sense of it
requires not a knack for simplification but the ability to synthesize
insights from different mind-sets into a comprehensible whole. What the
authors came up with--a structure based on the five aspects of managerial
mind--has proved not only powerful in the classroom but also insightful in
practice.

Action and reflection are the two aspects that establish the bounds of
management. The practice of managing involves five perspectives, which
correspond to the five modules of the authors' program: Managing self;
Managing organizations; Managing context; Managing relationships; and
Managing change. Organizations may not need mirror people, who see in
everything only reflections of their own behavior. But neither do they need
window people, who cannot see beyond the images in front of them. Analysis
loosens up complex phenomena by breaking them into component parts--by
decomposing them.

By getting out of their offices and appreciating what the world looks like
from the places where products are made and customers are served, managers
can become truly worldly instead of merely global. The dominant view of
managing change is Cartesian: Action results from deliberate strategies,
carefully planned, that unfold as systematically managed sequences of
decisions. INSETS: From Global to Worldly; Two Ways to Manage; Mind-Sets for
Management Development.


* Mintzberg also wrote on of my favourite management books, Strategy Safari,
also a worthy reading.

Cheers,

Livia Labate
liv AT livlab.com | http://livlab.com | http://aifia.org