What might have been if .....

Ever have mad moments of thinking about what might have been? After a Twitter exchange with my friend Tom Asacker from the US this evening I got to thinking about what might have been if UK Business Schools had as their leaders for the last 30 years, people like Sir Richard Branson and the late great Dame Anita Roddick. These two cage rattling, rebellious, unconventional business icons are - I suggest - the greatest entrepreneurs by a million miles that the UK has seen in the last 50 years. One thing they have in common is the complete lack of traditional or formal management training. I for one would love to have attended the fictitious “Virgin Business School” or “The Body Shop Business School” safe in the knowledge that the person leading and pulling the strings was Branson or Roddick. Instead we persist in a traditional UK model of teaching management from a formal, institutional and stuffy perspective rooted in past times as if it were the Holy Grail …. And then we wonder why the UK is no longer a leader in ANYTHING to do with management or leadership on the world stage; whilst younger, less traditional and less stuffy academic institutions elsewhere in the world innovate and lead. As someone once said ….. “If you always do what you always did you'll always get what you always got.”