who/what does education have a relationship with? – customer
December 4, 2006
So, continuing from the previous post, what does the signifier ‘customer’ bring to the unpacking of the consuming agency of leadership education? In what way is an actant in the drama of leadership education a customer? Consumer and customer are largely synonymous, with the addition of the latter designating the trappings of a formal transaction in the process of consumption of the goods and services that they consume: the former merely implies such a formal transaction may, or may not, take place. The goods and services that form the basis of both the process of consuming and the transacting to consume are, executivezen would say, the resources of the formal programme of leadership education. These goods and services are, variously, access to the lecturers involved in delivering the programme of education; access to the materials and resources used by the lecturer; and access to supporting agencies – personal coaches, psychometric instruments, peers within the intervention, staff tasked with managing the intervention – of that programme of education. This list goes on, but notice it does not contain the goods of learning about leadership since such a consumable is not a necessary and sufficient condition of the transactive act.
But, as troubled in prevous posts of this blog (Oct 5, 06: Sept 30, 06), what are the boundaries of a programme of education and at what point can one claim that a particular resource (as above) falls within a nominated resource library of such a programme? Using the specific goods and services of the formal transaction that are warranted via the customer relationship as defining the relationship between educational ’supplier’ and consuming agency is misleading; such a focus serves only to highlight the spectral (to use the language of Derrida) or the un-real quality of education. In that sense then, the tag of ‘customer’ as the type of agency with whom suppliers of formal leadership education have a relationship, seems less useful. To what is the consuming agent of leadership education, once she has entered into a transactive relationship (i.e. the consuming agency as customer) with the supplier of leadership education, entitled to precisely? What has her purchasing (direct or indirect) power bought her that she doesn’t already have? Answering this with ’simply access to the goods and services of a programme of leadership education’ isn’t quite fair since this aludes to the customer as inexpert and passive; neither does it acknowledge the genuine learning outcomes that may emerge as a result of this purchase. But it does highlight the relative arbitrariness of the relationship between the notion of customer and consumption, a breakage that is a consequence of a poststructural view of education.
December 6, 2006 at 10:58 pm
There is of course a tremendous difference between the customer and the consumer of executive education. As executivezen well understands, the customer, the entity that picks up the bills, is often far removed from the consumer – the individual who actually experiences the intervention. I hesitate to say consumes the intervention, because by experiencing it they become part of it and therefore if they then consume it they are to some extent cannibals.
An unpleasant thought.
Of course the issue is the disconnect between the customer and the consumer. The customer acts as a conduit between the provider and the consumer – representing each to the other. As in religion, so in execed: a gnostic relationship between consumer and provider is a far more meaningful one than any relationship which transits through a supposed representative of either party…far less a body which purports to represent and understand both parties.
Leadership is an intensely personal experience. Whether like Augar and Palmer we believe thay we are all player managers now, or like Drotter and Charan we believe in the leadership pipeline – a sort of production line for leadership skills which is seductively transactional – there is little argument that the experience is utterly unique to each individual leader. How then can one intervention, especially one sieved through the preconceptions, ambitions, hopes and fears of the customer, possibly hope to be sufficient for any one individual, let alone all who consume it?
This logic drives execed towards the coaching paradigm: one for one, in some post-modern reduction of the three musketeers concept into something neater, tidier and less demanding into which we can all gleefully buy.
But if the experience is so unique, can even one other person help the putative leader find his or her own way? Is trial and error not the only viable path to leadership, and to hell with the collateral damage?
Well, the obverse of that coin may be better that we all share some simple sense-making tools than that we all lay waste to those around us as we learn hopw to lead them…which would be a bit like wanting to be a proficient torturer and expecting your friends to allow you to practice your techniques on them.
If execed has a relationship both with the customer and the consumer, can we decide which is more important? More dangerous? More worthy of attention? I say get the customer to pay up and then move over; let the dog see the rabbit – regardless of the product, the killing fields of execed, where the truly dirty work is done, are populated by consumers, not customers.
December 7, 2006 at 10:32 pm
Hi Toby,
Thanks for your comment… to answer your question, the commitment is not really super-human… it is more in accepting that taking on an MBA will make it one of the most important things in your life… if one comes into a full time MBA, especially in a one year MBA like most European programs, one would be better served by prioritising right. Similarly, keeping with the traditional view that an MBA is the road to top management, one should expect to assume a more and more important role in your own life… after all, your decisions would affect too many people for you not to take them seriously. Plus, you want to move ahead in your career…
Work life balance is in a way a trade off… achieving personal career objectives, giving your family the time and attention they need and indeed should get, and living up to your expectations from yourself of your work quality and output. Unfortunately, too many times, family gets ignored… I’d say it is a decision you take and have to live with. What you decide does say a lot about your priorities… the choices you make decide the life you lead…
In my case (imho), I had reached a point where a global MBA would add to my skill sets, I was at a stage where I was best placed to absorb and benefit from the learning at a place like Cranfield. I had considered other options, I decided on an MBA for the strong foundation it would give me in terms of the theory and best practises of business management… seat of pants flying may be exciting but is also very dangerous… and I think I need to get the foundation now in order to build the future I want… If you are interested in why I chose Cranfield, ( http://rahulbhargav.blogspot.com/2006/11/background.html ) the answer is simple… it has the program best suited to my needs… and the past two months at Cranfield have reinforced my opinion about that…
How about you? Your profile says you are a networked learning executive… (a learning executive who is networked or an executive in the field of networked learning? from your blog, I think the latter) You write on the philosophy of education and management education… what is your take on application of this learning and the consequences on the one who applies?
December 8, 2006 at 9:38 am
Hi Rahul – I’m impressed by your resolve and the calculation in your decision; and I like your blog. Educationalists talk a lot about self-reflection; your blog seems to be just that. I like your point about finding the time to write a blog – it’s not easy. On that point though, what with all my talk about the student as ‘product’ or as ‘consumer/customer’, do you have an opinion about that? Would you say Cranfield has made of you a product, or are you consuming your MBA and what it gives? Or are you a worker or member?
I’d say you’ve reached a useful conclusion based on my profile: an executive (whatever one of those is) exploiting the learning that comes from networks. That could possibly be a definition not only of your present MBA experience as an MBA consumer but of how that experience defines your network post-Cranfield.
To answer your last question: application. My interest is in innovation in learning for managers, leaders and whatever these executive people are. Inovation, IMHO, involves relinquishing existing ways of thinking and doing – I’ve posted about this somewhere in my blog. Essential in that is examining assumptions and commonsense conclutions: and a good way of doing that is using philosophy to challenge these assumptions. So I apply (rather abstract) continental philosophy to my everday practice in executive education to help people challenge assumptions.
December 9, 2006 at 5:57 pm
Hi Toby,
Thank you for your kind words… and I agree that innovation involves relinquishing existing ways of thinking and doing…
Your exploration of education as a contract, or students being consumers and products of schools certainly has its merits, however, I am not very comfortable with the premise. Yes, schools – especially b-schools – select their students, who pay fees, yes, the school employs teachers to process the students by imparting knowledge and testing students on that knowledge… all true, but is education only about students paying money and getting a stamp? Here in Cranfield there is a lot of talk about the Cranfield Experience… about Cranfield being a risk free environment where one can find out more about oneself… and this itself seems contradictory to a contract or production line view of learning…
in my view, learning is more than just an applied process… it is not a sausage factory… it also involves a degree of finding more about yourself, some amount of broadening of thought processes, even new ways of thinking… and after imbibing this, applying some of them in real life situations… which again leads to questions of setting priorities, which in turn can be made easy by drawing on the personal development resulting from learning. By limiting the study of learning to the constraints of a business transaction, we may possibly be leaving out some very important aspects…
To answer your question about me being a product, a consumer, a worker or a member… I think of the Cranfield MBA not as a product, but as an addition to my skills, I do not think myself as being a consumer of the MBA… but a participant who for most of the time will be a recepient, contributing to the learning of others when I can… Similarly I can not agree with being slotted as a worker or member… maybe it is because I have not yet explored sufficiently the concept you base your question on or perhaps it is just my mind that refuses to see beyond Monday and Tuesday’s examinations…