Learning by biographies should be part of management studies

Earlier today I felt on an old copy of Time (October 17, 2011) dedicated to Steve Jobs.

The article on page 38 by Grossman and McCracken captured my attention and inspired me this post. I don't know why, but I missed this article on that issue and I am thankful I found it now.

I was thinking yesterday that going back centuries ago, people studied the biography of the great people to study how to live, to learn by their experience. Nowadays we focus more on the concepts, on the examples, on the case studies. But, back in high school I remember that my teacher of literature and latin said to us to study the life of the authors before reading the poems.

Well, I thought, why do we study concepts and theories of management without reading biographies? We all say that every organization is made by the people, the organizations' culture is made by the people, the organizations' strategies are made by the people.

Here is why I approached to this article and I advise anyone to find a copy of the article and read it. It is a very well written business story on Steve Jobs' career and ventures.

In Italian business schools we study theories over theories and, in the last decade, we discovered the importance of case studies. Case studies in management are a great tools of learning, they give you the possibility to gain a sort of "soft experience" by acting as if you were the real actor in a certain context.

What we are missing, in my modest opinion, is to study the life of the men who pursued certain strategies, achieving outstanding goals. For example Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs went against any management rule, he didn't listen to a lot of management theories, he diversified a fully integrated company. Biographies such his, or Bill Gates and Warren Buffet should be studied in management classes along with theories and case studies.

I believe this is "History of Management" or it is what "History of Management" should be. We study Henry Ford, or Fayol and Barnard. All of them were directors who changed the world with their vision, we should update, specially in Italy, our way of study management by adding biographies to our background.

By the way, I want to end this post with following quote by the famous Stanford's speech in 2005.

"Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your hearth and intuition. They  somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."