Managing Brilliant Minds2010.01.14. // Education
Employees today are better educated than any previous generation. The MBA is nowless a mark of distinction and more a requirement for entry. Thirty years ago there were a handful of universities delivering MBA’s; now there are thousands. So not only do leaders now need to improve thinking, they need to do so with extremely knowledgeable individuals.
As well as being more educated, employees across the western world have more independence, and on the whole, more wealth. Millions of executives worldwide now enjoy the kind of wealth that only a fraction of the population had fifty year ago. You can’t just walk up to a wealthy executive in charge of a 100 million us dollar stream and start telling them what to do, just because you are “the boss”.
The increasing education and independence of employees is an important issue. Yet we have not significantly reinvented our management models since the times Henry Ford Hired a pair of hands and wished they’d left their brains behind.
