Everybody's Business Reclaiming True Management Skills in Business Higher Education

Today's business schools do not teach management. Instead, they are run for and by separate disciplines such as accounting and marketing. The end result to this strategy is not only the extreme fragmentation of knowledge, but the inability to manage complex, messy systems and problems. Business schools need to be fundamentally recast as Schools of Management or SOMs.

Everybody's Business is a succinct analysis of the factors that led to the founding of American business schools and why they are the way they are. Mitroff, Alpaslan, and O'Connor consider why current business schools do not give students the knowledge and the tools they need to deal with today's complex, messy problems and systems. They also spell out the kinds of knowledge and skills that are needed to deal with today's complex issues. This enlightening new volume is ideal for business faculty as well as MBA students looking to cultivate a tool set for dealing with our ever evolving business world.

Ian Mitroff is Senior Investigator in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, University of California - Berkeley, USA, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Public Health, St. Louis University, USA. He is Professor Emeritus of the University of Southern California, USA, where he was Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy at the Marshall School of Business. Mitroff is regarded as one of the founders of the discipline of Crisis Management. He founded and directed the USC Center for Crisis Management. Known for his thinking and writing on a wide range of business and societal issues, Mitroff is the author of 28 previous books.

Can M. Alpaslan is Associate Professor of Strategic Management at California State University, Northridge, USA. His multidisciplinary research approach focuses on the causes, consequences, and management of large scale crises. He is co-author, with Mitroff, of Swans, Swine, and Swindlers.

Ellen O'Connor is a researcher and reformer in management education, and she is a two-time recipient of the Academy of Management's Best Paper Award. As a lecturer in business schools for over 25 years, most recently at Mills College and the University of Paris, O'Connor developed curricula to span boundaries across disciplines and between theory and practice.

1. The Argument
2. Digging Deeper - Jungian Psychology
3. What Is a System? What Is a Mess?
4. The Nature of Human Nature - The Psychodynamics of Everyday Life
5. The Management of Knowledge - Systems Age Inquiry
6. Heuristics for Managing Messes
7. How We Got into the Mess and Prospects for Getting Out