why do they call it an MBA - with A for administration?
the thing you learn in these books is that management is _not_ about administration. management is about leadership!
leadership, of course, is this extremely amorphous characteristic -- if you can even call it that.
carrol sent me something off list and it reminded me that there is like a dual curricula in all this. the MBA that's geared toward mastering the discipline broadly understood as: how businesses make money. the MBA that's geared toward mastering the discipline of managing people.
here's a random course description for an MBA in the US: http://bschool.washington.edu/mbastud/descriptions.shtml
now that i look at it, i'm reminded that the administration thing comes from the history of the rise of the occupation of management to begin with. it was the technocrat's vision: that you could use technology and science to figure out how to most efficiently keep people, systems, machines, and flows of money running.
the administration of things was the goal.
anyway, from the link above, you can see that the bulk of what is being taught is about the administration of things: information systems, finance systems, markets, analyzing data, accounting, etc.
the core curriculum: 10 required courses in managing things; 3 in dealing with people.
and i can tell you that what counts as conflict resolution in these programs is probably what i learned. because what i learned was pretty much an overview of the most popular stuff out there.
basically, conflict resolution is: how to manipulate people. you are told always, always to listen. most important thing. but you listen for a reason: to find the hooks where you need to shape the other person's reality.
i remember reading this stuff and thinking, what will happen if, tomorrow, during our seminars, i point out that it's always going to be like playing tic-tac-to once each side in the game learns these principles? the game will always be scratch if both sides are trying to shape the other's reality to conform with their's. so, what's really at issue, if the conflict is between you and superordinate, is that the superordinate ultimately has the power to shape your reality the most.
and, i mean, if what you are taught is that listening is not because you really want to understand where the other person is coming from, but because you want to understand where the weaknesses and vulnerabilities are so you can hook into them and destroy them, twist them and expose them, in order to ensure that *your* reality 'wins', then this isn't really what people think of as interactive human communication -- listening, being heard and hearing the other side at all -- but ultimately about manipulating.
and if both sides know like tic-tac-to, then the whole thing is a ruse. a scam. if you engage in it, as subordinate, you are kidding yourself.