Meritalk by Oliver Olsen "does Management Education Really Create Leader"?

Oliver Olson, MSM’s Director Global Education Programs, delivered an inspirational 7 minute MeriTalk during the MERITsummit in Lisbon on Thursday 18 January 2018

The MERITsummit is a two day annual forum in which HR and business school directors meet, learn and share ideas to foster future partnerships. Click here to read the MERITSummit press release. The theme of the summit was, Always-On Learning, which reflects with MSM’s “Life-long Learning” approach. Next to the 200 HR and education experts 60 international academia and corporate experts were present to share their knowledge and experiences with a broad audience.

In his MeriTalk on the topic “Does Management Education Really Create Leaders”, Oliver Olson said “It is not the job of Management Schools to create leaders.”, This thought provoking statement was intended to emphasize the importance of the role of management educators in teaching the skills, context and perspective that enables leaders to develop themselves as leaders.  “Leadership can only be defined in the context of the situation and goal”, continued Oliver, “which is not defined by the school, but by the student and their organization.”

The main emphasis of this Summit was to bring together leaders in management education and leaders from corporate learning and development departments in order to listen to each other’s needs and capabilities.  Too often management schools create products and services that the corporate training and development leaders do not want or need, so they turn to in-house training or consulting firms.  If management education is to remain relevant, they need to let the corporate counterparts know that they are listening to their needs.  However, corporate leaders also need to listen to the forward-looking research and developments of the management schools.

Besides Oliver Olson, Hermina Kooijman, Manager Enrollment and Career Services at MSM and Inka Diddens, Recruitment officer at MSM were present to showcase MSM’s full executive education portfolio. MSM’s executive education portfolio was re-launched last year with the aim of providing experienced professionals with cutting-edge knowledge and twenty-first century skills.