There may not be much cheery news about the economy, but the recession could bring at least one big benefit: the fall of the Anglo-American management model.

For some years now, people have criticised Western management education for being too theoretical, too abstract and not responsive enough to the reality of day-to-day business. It splits management into artificial sections — marketing, finance, HR and so forth — rather than approaching it as a single discipline. It is driven by written contracts, which encourage managers to rely on processes rather than using their judgment.

The present financial crisis simply adds more weight to these complaints. Difficult economic times encourage businesses to look very closely at their management practices to ensure that they are doing everything that they can. On top of that, many of the companies involved have, or had, plenty of managers educated in just this way, leading some observers to question why we would want to keep this sort of education, given what has happened.

Move away from the Western world and management can look very different. In some cases, businesses rely on trust between parties and the concept of individual honour rather than adherence to formal processes. In the Middle East, for example, sending an e-mail to a business contact won't get you anywhere, but a face-to-face request will be acted on promptly. Or take the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which offers credit without requiring collateral or any form of legal contract with the borrower, relying instead on person-to-person relationships. The merchant ladies of Africa take a similar approach. All the evidence suggests that default rates in these situations are far lower than on Western-style banks, which rely instead on automated credit checks.

A more extreme difference is the sort of behaviour that we see as corruption and bribery.

All of these approaches elevate the importance of the verbal, personal interchange above that of the lengthy written contract. Interestingly, business in the West does still value interpersonal exchange - the Madoff scheme, with its series of personal referrals, is unfortunate evidence of that - but we do not integrate this into the way that managers are trained.

I believe that we would do well to draw on aspects of other countries' traditions, such as the teachings of Confucius. After all, I have heard of at least one Chinese university that has a statue of Adam Smith in its grounds — they clearly want to draw on some of our traditions.

I can see a future where students continue to learn about economics and financial theory, but also learn about honour and “right [ethical]” behaviour; they are taught to see the two not as separate subjects but as different parts of one whole. In this future, management theory becomes its own discipline - perhaps formed out of the intersection of Western theories, with the thinking being developed in other parts of the world.

That's what we have started trying to do at the Open University. We have received criticism for not offering finance as a separate subject, but that is the point; management happens as a whole and it should be taught that way.

— Professor Fleck is Dean of the Open University Business School

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